It’s that time of the year again … the Content Marketing Institute has released its annual B2B Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – North America report. Last year, the biggest B2B content marketing challenge was producing engaging content. However, this year, 64% of respondents say they are having trouble keeping the content machine well oiled, which makes “producing enough content” the top B2B content marketing challenge of 2013.
To address this issue, I wanted to write a blog post on how you can create the most high-quality content in the shortest possible amount of time. To do this, you will need to repurpose your existing content and share it across different channels. Since most customers won’t visit your website every day, repurposing your content is an excellent way to connect with more customers in the places where they hang out.
This post is going to focus on how to get the most from your articles, as website articles are one of the most popular content marketing tactics used by B2B companies (83%), second only to social media (87%). Here are five way s to get the most content marketing mileage from your B2B blog posts or website articles:
1. Turn your blog posts and articles into SlideShare presentations.
One of the things I learned at Content Marketing World 2012 is that B2B marketers need to be active on SlideShare. This is because SlideShare attracts a business audience looking for business content, and content posted to the site can get more views than the same content uploaded to YouTube or your website.
Try turning your articles and blog posts into presentations and publishing them on SlideShare. To make your articles slide-friendly, replace lengthy sentences with bullets and short, compelling points. You can even place an opt-in form in your SlideShare presentations to generate more leads.
2. Convert articles into videos.
In addition to slide presentations, you can also create video presentations based on your articles. Simply follow the advice above to turn your articles into presentations. Then, videotape yourself walking viewers through the presentation. From there, you can post the videos to sites such as YouTube, SlideShare and your own website. Adding video to your marketing mix allows you to connect with a wider audience, as many people will prefer to watch a short video rather than read a lengthy article.
3. Record a podcast that covers the same topic as your latest blog post.
An article can make a quick and easy podcast. While reading your articles aloud can help make your writing more conversational, you should avoid a word-for-word reading when you record a podcast. Unless you’re Morgan Freeman, you ’ll most likely come across as stiff and boring. However, you can have someone interview you about the topic covered in your article. An interview can spark a lively conversation that will engage your audience.
4. Use your articles as the foundation for a white paper, ebook or report.
Long, research-heavy documents, such as white papers, can be daunting to develop. However, if you know your white paper topic in advance, you can create a series of blog posts based around it. Then, when you start the white paper, you’ll already have a solid foundation to build upon. You can also turn a group of related articles into a report or ebook without too much effort.
5. Compile recent articles in your newsletter.
Take the stress out of publishing your newsletter by sharing your recent articles. If you frequently add posts to your blog, your newsletter can function as a digest, where you include the beginning of each article with a link to the full post.
If you don’t want subscribers to have to click to finish reading an article, you can run a full-length feature in your newsletter. However, in this case, I’d recommend sending the article to your subscribers first and waiting a short period of time before you publish it for the general public on your blog. As subscribers, the people on your list should receive some exclusive content.
In addition to repurposing articles across multiple channels, you can also partner with others who influence your target audience and agree to share each other’s content. It’s a win-win for everyone – you will both increase your exposure and build a partnership that can lead to future business opportunities.
These are just a few of the ways you can repurpose articles across different platforms. What about you? How do you like to get the most mileage from your articles? Feel free to share your ideas below.