Content creation is costly. Whether you hire a freelance content writer or have an in-house team that manages your content marketing strategy and creates the content assets, you need either money or human capital resources—and sometimes both—to develop, create and publish content.
However, creating high-quality content is also one of the most effective ways to generate new leads for your business, build trust with your audience and increase sales. The Content Marketing Institute says that 72% of marketers claimed their content increased the number of leads generated for their business. Equal numbers said that it has increased audience engagement. Fortunately, one piece of content can go a long way when you know how to re-slant and reuse it in various forms. Sure, you’ll still have the expense of creating each individual asset, but with a portion of the work already done, you’ll save time and money.
Types of content you can use for lead generation and conversions
There are as many types of content that marketers rely on as there are types of web users out there. There are a few types of content that brands use for recognition, lead generation and sales. Sharing the right content at the right time can help guide prospects through your sales funnel and convert them into customers.
Choosing the right content requires experimentation and testing. It’s important to realize that people respond to different types of content in different ways. Some people prefer a video, while an infographic resonates with others. Some people still prefer the good old written word as a way to quickly gather information and learn new things.
Some campaigns lend themselves to long-form content, such as a 16,000-word e-book or a 3,000-word case study or white paper. Other times, you can convey your message in a short blog post of 300 to 700 words.
Some examples of content you can incorporate into your campaigns include:
- Blog posts.
- White papers.
- E-books.
- Case studies.
- Infographics.
- Webinars.
- Videos.
- Social media posts.
- Podcasts.
- Quizzes.
How to create a content strategy
A content marketing strategy ensures that each piece of content you create serves a purpose. Good content can help your company increase your rankings on the search engines, drive leads to your website and increase sales. Memorable content can help people recognize your brand.
When you’re devising your strategy, you’ll want to determine what you want to accomplish with each specific campaign. Then you can look at the types of content that have performed well to achieve those objectives in the past.
Determine the pain points you’ll want your content to address or the problems you’ll want it to help solve for your readers. Establish the audience—or personas—for your content.
Do some research and decide what keywords you should use to make sure the right audience finds your content.
Finally, begin creating content that fits the marketing strategy for this specific campaign. You can start with a single piece of content and then build out from there to create a comprehensive campaign. Because you’ll already have done the research around pain points, personas and keywords, once you’ve created the first piece of content it’s easy to branch out and re-slant it.
Evergreen blog posts can be re-shared on social media at any time.
Repurpose your best content
When you’re devising your content strategy, you can start with short-form content such as a series of blog posts, or longer-form content like a white paper or a webinar. Maybe you already have some excellent pieces written that have been performing well. You can reduce your content budget and save time by refreshing these pieces and then re-slanting newer content around them.
Once the first pieces are complete to your satisfaction, optimized for search engines and laid out in an aesthetically pleasing way, you can task your team of content writers with repurposing it.
You can convert a series of blog posts into a white paper or e-book. Or you can go the other direction and break a white paper out into a blog post series. Webinars, podcasts and videos can be transcribed and converted into both long- and short-form content.
You can create a captivating blog post with statistics into a compelling infographic. And all of your content should become short social media pieces that you can use to drive traffic to the full article, blog post, webinar, video or… you get the picture.
Reuse your content
Another way to reduce your marketing spend on content creation is to reuse old content. Evergreen blog posts can be re-shared on social media at any time. It’s a good idea to change the lead paragraph, update a few statistics and change the date so that readers don’t worry they might be reading older content that may not be as relevant today. “Evergreen” means that the content can stand the test of time, but so much has changed since the pandemic that any content written prior to 2020 could probably use a quick update.
Live webinars should always be recorded so that they can be shared on demand. BrightTalk, a platform for B2B webinars and virtual events, reports that 47% of webinar views occur on demand 10 days after the live event.
Continually revise your content strategy
As with any part of your business—from accounting to product development—content strategy is an ever-evolving endeavor. Take time monthly to analyze your best content and find new ways to repurpose and reuse it. Revamp content that isn’t performing well to meet the standards of your best campaigns. Soon, you’ll watch your sales grow and you’ll begin viewing content as a crucial revenue driver instead of an expense.
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