The best content you can create as a B2B marketer is content that resonates with your buyers. It’s that simple. In the best-case scenario, of course, that means that you’d be constantly churning out the very best new content on a monthly, weekly, even daily basis. But guess what? That takes a lot of work and a lot of resources.
So here’s the secret to making the most of your B2B content marketing efforts: recycle your very best content.
Yes, that’s right. Once you know what works, don’t be afraid to use that content again and again, across various channels and platforms. As long as you do it in an authentic manner, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking something that worked once and seeing if it will work again somewhere else.
There are a few different types of content that are just waiting to be recycled. One of these are “evergreen” pieces of content that do not have any dates or times attached to them – they are just as good to read today as they were 6 months ago. Or 6 years ago.
Another type of content that’s prime for recycling are all your thought leadership pieces that can be enjoyed over and over again by customers and prospects looking for insights. Also, any sort of proprietary data or survey that people can’t find elsewhere on the Internet is also great for recycling.
Once you have something that you think will work, the next step is to think about how to slice and dice it into another format.
To make this “recycling” process as easy as possible, think about how larger pieces of content can be sliced-and-diced into smaller pieces of content. For example, take an e-book that your B2B marketing team has worked hard to assemble. Now take out a few of the key findings or juiciest tidbits and turn those into blog posts. Then, for each of those blog posts, it’s time to turn the one major takeaway from that blog article into something visual – a chart, an infographic, an image or a video.
See? You’re essentially starting with one very large piece of content (e.g. a 50-page whitepaper or a 100-page e-book) and steadily chopping it down, each time you recycle, into a smaller and smaller format.
That’s the same logic that goes into recycling in the real world. If you take 100 aluminum soda cans, there’s no way you can recycle those into another 100 aluminum soda cans (without violating the laws of physics). However, you might be able to recycle those into 50 cans. And then, assuming you recycle those 50 cans, you might be able to recycle those into 25 cans.
So that’s the key to making the most of your B2B content marketing efforts: don’t spend all your time and resources on constantly trying to create something new. Instead, find what works, and then think about clever ways to re-package that same information for your B2B audience. You’ll be surprised at what it does for your B2B lead generation process!
Image: Vector Open Stock
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.