Today’s consumer is ravenous about research. Regardless what they are in the mood to buy, they’ll spend some length of time checking the product or service online, and asking their friends and family what is preferable, item A or Item B. What they wish to purchase is being evaluated more so than in the history of commerce.  The internet has created the opportunity to put before consumers no end of content for purposes of engagement, information, education, and directly asking for the purchase. Does yours have a chance at being found?

However, the content conundrum gives things a completely dysfunctional dilemma. Marketers must be constantly creating and curating content in the hopes of getting in front of eyeballs.   There are so many ways of media distribution, which ones to choose? Will it be social media, newspaper, television, podcasts, radio, blogs, direct mail.  They all have their place, importance, but having so many distribution outlets, small business owners are stymied by it all.

Content Context is King

It used to be said that content is king, but the ever-hungry tastes of the consumer, along with the getting wiser marketers have found that context within the content is truly the master.  But how to create sufficient content?  How much is sufficient?  How’s a marketer to keep up?

Getting Over the Drought

What many small business owners and would-be marketers fail to recognize is that one marketing asset can be repurposed, redressed, altered or transmitted another way that there can be no content drought.  They place themselves under so much pressure to produce it creates ineffective messages that fall on blind eyes, deaf ears. 

One of the ways to expand your content bank is to create one piece of content as a long form blog post. Within that blog post you can break up the topic into sub-topics like a pillar page and cluster pages that help support it.  That way the same blog can be a starter piece that can yield numerous other pieces. 

Another way to increase your content is to transcribe videos you’ve made, say, from webinars you’ve hosted.  Through that transcription you can edit it so as to turn it into another version in print.  Further still, you can take the audio portion of that same video and create a podcast or simply an audio version.  With people looking for quality material to listen to during drive time, it’s an instant way to get your message across.

How about becoming a published author?  Take several sections of that webinar and create an eBook out of it, supplementing with some fresh, new content. 

One more idea worth considering in the publishing realm is to gather 12-20 blog articles you’ve written on a particular topic, or even a broad topic range and create a formal book from it all.

Or, you can take a specific sub-point you’re making in the book and creating a blog post just on that one point.  There are dozens of ways you can create engaging content for your audience without having to come up with a new idea every time you want to educate, inform, or entertain your target audience.

Another way I have learned about it to curate specific pieces of content from high visibility influencers and weave it into your copy.  As long as you provide specific citation as to where it came from, the original author, and the original date of publishing, the influencer gets another spread of his or her message to widen their audience, and you get to become a little bit of an influencer by proxy.  You’ll be looked on as a person who is obviously well read, knowledgeable of the depth and spread of the industry, and it gives you more content to share without having to come up with it.

Say you’ve given a presentation.  Why not take the slide deck and create a video training out of it, or vice versa?  Chances are you’ve utilized images, graphs, or other visual media within the presentation, so it’s easy to repurpose the content you’ve created once.

Having sufficient when so many are strapped for time when demand is at its highest, only to get higher is the conundrum.  Utilizing just a few of these ideas can make all the difference in the world.  The only thing you’ll need are some helping hands (try outsourcing) to pull it all together.