Reduce, reuse, recycle - your content strategy that is!

Reduce, reuse, recycle
 
A rhyme we are all used to now and one we won’t forget.  It is also something that can be easily applied to marketing content.
 
Churning out acres of content can be time intensive, wasteful and often creatively challenging.  So how could you reduce the time you take to create content, but continue to create powerful content?
 
You need a content strategy plan that will allow you to be creative while also scalable.
 
How do I start?
 
First you need to understand your communication platforms and the audiences you are looking to reach. There are many platforms available - from mainstream media and trade press to social media, from your own corporate website and intranet platform to client newsfeeds - each platform has a different audience and with it a different style of writing.
 
Next you need to keep the communication rolling.  In order to keep ahead of the competition and remain in front of clients, colleagues and prospective customers you need to keep creating content. To keep storytelling. We need to be inundated with words.
 
But don’t keep reinventing the wheel.  Apply the eco-message of reduce, reused recycle to your content strategy and be creative when repurposing and scaling content across the different channels.
 
3-Eight’s Founder and Director Lisa Gingell discusses how a strong and solid content strategy plan is key when it comes to B2B marketing:
 
Be creative
 
Every business and every product has its own narrative. It also has its own style, a way of speaking to our audiences.  We take this narrative – the story – and the style and design creative, informative and influencing content for your audiences.
 
Know your audience as well as your narrative. What influences your audience? What do they read and follow? What problems do they have that you can solve? What are they saying?
A creative content strategy considers the platforms and the audiences – so you target your message, narrative, style to each and every audience and each individual platform.
 
Knowing what your audiences like, read and are talking about allows you to start to have a dialogue with them. Content isn’t just about ‘saying something’ its about creating a connection and connections come from speaking and listening – in essence it is creative storytelling. You need your content to be relatable and simple and ‘speak’ to your audience.
Know your marketplace and its narrative. For your company and products to fit in the market space you need to talk the same language to get the connection. You understand your marketplace and it understands you.
 
Be scalable
 
Content marketing is at the heart of digital marketing and still a valued feature for marketers – quality and content are king, but these take time.
 
The content you create needs to be re-used and re-used time and time again in a variety of forms and on a variety of platforms. Turn a press release into a blog, a blog into a white paper, a white paper into a webinar, a webinar into a powerful sales presentation. How you scale up content you are creating drives the message further and across more audiences and in more narratives for your business or products. You take one message and re-hash it a number of times to suit each and every one of your audiences be it both external and internal to your business. This is where the opportunity for businesses to recycle and repurpose content without starting from scratch each time. Also saying similar things across different platforms on multiple occasions widens your reach and boosts your SEO.
 
However, it takes on average almost four hours to write a blog never mind a full content strategy, LinkedIn article, whitepaper or social post. This is time that isn’t readily handy to many businesses, which is why many B2B businesses outsource content creation activities to those that have that a quick creative capability to turn their news or story into powerful content.
 
Guess who can help with that…
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We can.  Please email [email protected]