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Develop a Content Strategy Built on Repurposing and You’ll Spend Less Time and Get More Results
It was a really, really good week for one of our clients.
We took 5 old, dusty topical articles that were lying dormant on their website, packaged them into an eBook to use as an offer for lead generation, wrote and published supportive SEO optimized blog posts, promoted it with every single digital asset on hand from LinkedIn to email, and consulted on additional content tactics to generate follow up sales opportunities.
Two weeks into the effort, those blog posts have been viewed hundreds of times, we’ve seen nearly 100 visits to the offer’s landing page, and about 3 dozen eyeballs became leads after they filled out and submitted a form ... a conversion rate of 38% or so.
Because everything is digital, this lead gen effort is going to work 24/7/365 and it’s not unreasonable to expect that over time, we’ll see over a hundred leads enter the sales funnel.
That’s a pretty good week for a professional service firm marketing effort... and it all started with a big bang idea and a whole lot of content repurposing.
And the Secret to Content Marketing is...
... squeeze every last drop of value out of your content with repurposing tactics.
In accounting, consulting and other professional services firms, one of the HUGEST speed bumps slowing firms down from being effective in digital marketing is the lack of content that partners and other subject matter experts are willing to contribute. Let’s face it, regardless of how much data is being generated about the effectiveness of content marketing, the vast majority of partners are not stepping up to the plate to publish their thought leadership.
So, maybe what CPA firm marketing departments need to do – as well as those of other professional services firms –is to find ways to take what they can get and then leverage what they got into as many different forms of content as possible.
A Content Strategist’s Big Bang Theory
There’s an article in the February 2015 issue of Chief Content Officer (which, BTW, is a hard copy magazine ....hmmm!) written by Amy Higgins called “A Content Strategist’s Big Bang Theory”. She writes about how a big idea can spawn a significant number of content assets, and quite cleverly uses astronomy as a reference point to deliver a key message: a single point of content can create an explosion of infinite ways to reuse and repurpose a single idea big idea of story.
Here’s a brief overview of the “heavenly bodies” in Amy’s article and an illustration of how this can apply to marketing your accounting, consulting or other professional firm:
The Big Bang Starts with Strategy, Not Tactics
A key take away from Higgins’ article is that there’s a linear relationship from galaxy to satellites, all built upon nesting content ... kind of like those Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls.
What I see in most professional service firms’ content marketing efforts is way too much emphasis on tactics, with virtually no relationship to strategy. That why, for example, you see ungated content being published on websites with no associated “moons” or “satellites”.
Even if the objective for the firm was branding, and not lead generation, one off tactical efforts might only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to leveraging the time, effort and resources it took to publish that particular piece of thought leadership.
Think about this: if you can show a partner that you can help define the big idea (solar system), produce the major content asset (the sun), and then take care of the rest of the heavenly bodies with little or no input from them, you might just get the buy in you need to bring your firm into the type of digital marketing that will deliver competitive advantages – not to mention more visibility, leads and new business!
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