Repurpose Content Assets to Grow Your Content Library

As a content marketer, I’m always thinking in terms of content that I can leverage for downstream marketing. The content often exists already, but in a single content format. It’s simply a matter of repurposing that asset.

I’ve discovered that cultivating a single content asset — in whole or in part — can yield multiple other assets for use in a variety of marketing tactics. Here’s how a content cultivation scenario might play out:

You’ve sponsored one of your opinion leaders (let’s call her Olivia) to give a conference presentation. Olivia’s presentation addresses a hot industry topic that has special relevance for your business. She has also seen fit to mention your products throughout her presentation.

Olivia’s Powerpoint is so well received at the conference that you want to do more with it. In fact, Olivia’s presentation is ripe for harvesting other content types for use in additional marketing channels and tactics.

Cultivating Content

You ask if Olivia will give her presentation as a live webinar event. This makes her content available to a wider online audience. A webinar has the added benefit of providing the opportunity for lead capture and nurturing. The live event is recorded and made available on-demand for ongoing lead generation.

But can you use the presentation
content itself as other media? It’s time to cross pollinate with other content
types.

Because Olivia’s presentation is timely, relevant and addresses customer pain points, you think in terms of sales enablement. What if you could capture the main points of Olivia’s presentation in a white paper leave-behind for your sales reps? You approach Olivia with an offer to ghost write the presentation into a white paper. She agrees. Now the sales rep has a credible marketing piece to engage customers.

Editing and reformatting the white paper yield additional content assets. A few edits make it suitable as a guest blog post under Olivia’s byline. Graphical enhancements by your creative team transform it into a visually appealing e-book.

Olivia is such a great speaker that you would like to showcase her persuasive presence. Further, you worry that not all your prospects are able to attend the hour webinar. She agrees to an interview-format podcast series on the topic of her presentation. This format is more accessible to your very busy and mobile target audience.

The podcast nicely highlights Olivia as a speaker. Her original presentation provides the basic outline and structure for an educational video series, as well. Olivia agrees to be the featured presenter for the series. You break the topic down into 2-minute segments, using the structure of her original presentation to outline and script the video.

Back to the presentation, which is loaded with relevant industry facts and graphics – each one interesting in and of itself. You turn these into a library of social posts for ongoing social outreach. The posts help to reinforce your company’s position as a thought leader in the industry. Several prove to be good evergreen content.

Propagating Your Assets

Altogether, you’ve cultivated 7 additional content assets and types from a single content asset (Olivia’s Powerpoint):

1. Webinar presentation
2. White paper
3. Guest blog post
4. Downloadable e-book
5. Podcast series
6. Video series
7. Social post library

Reaping Your Harvest

It’s time to integrate the fruits of your content cultivation effort in a programmatic way that helps build your brand and generate leads. Not only do you have great content, but you can use it to fill the sales funnel and engage your prospects throughout the buyer’s journey.

• The centerpiece of the program is the live webinar. You promote the upcoming event via e-mail blasts to your opt-in list and on social media. The live event is recorded and made available on-demand on your website.
• You conduct a follow-up e-mail drip campaign to attendees of both the live and on-demand webinars. Each blast in the series will highlight a different content asset as the call to action (Download the e-Book | Listen to the Podcast | Watch the Video).
• You set up a campaign landing page featuring this content and designed to move attendees to the next step in the buyer’s journey. The landing page contains a contact form so visitors can Request a Consultation.
• You feed these inquiries to your sales team as marketing-qualified leads. In addition, you’ve now equipped your sales team with a couple useful sales tools — the 2-minute video segments, which they can show directly to the customer/prospect on their iPad/iPhones, and the white paper leave behind.
• Meanwhile, you drive social followers to your content assets using the social posts you cultivated from Olivia’s presentation.

In the aggregate, you’ve been able to repurpose content assets to support a concentrated and sustained awareness and demand generation push. What started as a simple Powerpoint has been transformed into a dynamic set of multi-media assets to engage customers and prospects. You may use other starting points and ones of more limited scope, but the principle applies: Think in terms of propagating a single content seed into a crop of multiples.