The world can be full of your words, voice, and insights without much difficulty at all. Assuming you know to blog routinely, the next step in content marketing can seem obscure, especially if you don’t know that anyone’s reading your blog in the first place. First, don’t expect any one blog post to matter; none of your posts matter until you’ve sustained a pattern of consistent and frequent content posting for some time. If you’re posting a couple of times per week, and need some next steps, here are some high value tactics for growth:
Mine your content for snippets and quotes.
You went to all that trouble to write a 1000 word blog post, solving a problem your audience cares about, or dishing out valuable insight, why not chunk it up into some quotable one-liners for your social media channels, with a link back to your post, and a couple of hashtags. If your headlines are pithy sentences, each of those are quotable. And there’s probably at least one other sentence per paragraph that would make a good zinger. Each month, make a file of these from each of the previous month’s posts, and schedule them to go out in random order via a social media posting tool like Buffer or Hootsuite.
Turn your written content into videos.
If you were to read your blog posts aloud to an audience, they’d likely fall asleep even if it’s interesting written material. When you watch a TED video, a lot of the speakers use Powerpoint or Google Presentations that summarize key points over a few slides. One a month, trim your latest blog post slightly to be your verbal script, put together a quick visual Presentation deck (you only have to create a slide template once, and it’s ready for frequent re-use), and give the presentation with your voice using a screen capture program like Camtasia or CamStudio. The resulting video will make a great addition to your Youtube channel.
Turn your videos into written content.
Maybe you’re a talker more than a writer. If you’re making face videos (you on the camera visually, talking) for Youtube, Pinterest, or Vimeo, and they’re presenting solid, audience-centered content instead of sales pitch or promotional fluff, why not transcribe each of those and turn it into a blog post. Add headlines and an illustration, and you’re set. If you have trouble writing, just do it this way each time – turn on your webcam, record a video for Youtube, and use your transcript as a blog post. It’s a content double whammy.
Turn your posts into pins.
You probably use a stock photo for each of your blog posts, or one you’ve taken with your iphone, to avoid copyright issues. An extra moment to put some text on that image with any graphic editing software, and you’ve got an interesting “quotable” for Pinterest and other social networks. You can do cartoon balloons, create your own memes, or just add a caption for a nice share-able item you can drop into your Facebook timeline. For that matter, if you’ve got a number of these, you can drop them into a Powerpoint or Google Presentation as material for one of your videos.
Curate your own content for newsletters.
It’s much easier to create a newsletter if you’re already producing content for your other marketing channels. Why go to all the trouble of writing a newsletter each month from scratch, when you’ve already produced several blog posts, a video, a few Pinterest pins, and other snippets of content. Drag and drop that stuff into newsletter format, with teasers excerpt and a “read more” link for each of the blog posts, and you’ve already got your newsletter written. You can curate a few other quality items from the web, too, by using a brief quote and a link. For frequent e-mails, any of your blog or video posts can be e-mail blasts. If your audience can only stand one every few weeks, the newsletter format makes more sense.
Create PDF guides from core content.
Sales brochures aren’t nearly as valuable as truly useful content, branded by you, with a call to action at the end. If you’re already producing this kind of content in your blog, why not make a few of those posts into PDFs that people can take away and share by e-mail? You can tweak them for polish, or even drop the content into a professionally made template. The idea is that what’s useful in one medium is potentially useful in another, and suddenly they’re coming back to you for more.
Have a strategy for audience growth.
All the content in the world doesn’t do any good without building an audience. But if you aren’t producing content, you aren’t going to build an audience that acts on content anyway – to share or engage it. Get yourself on a regular program of content creation, and build up some momentum, then turn your attention to building the audience that receives it. Buying an audience does you no good, but strategically earning connections and followers will ensure your audience has a larger percentage of amplifiers who share other people’s content socially and influencers who can utilize or mention your content, if it’s good, in ways that reach an even wider audience.
Content marketing isn’t actually hard, so don’t overthink it. The keys to launching a content marketing plan are to create content and to have a content marketing strategy of extending that content into other formats, other media, and other networks, and a digital strategy that takes into account the big picture of growing an audience that makes content marketing worthwhile. To engage a digital strategist for your company, contact us here at MadPipe.
