You Aren’t Using Your Content As Much As You Should: Here’s How (And Why) To Change That

Jon Bacon is the VP of Marketing for SureCall, a U.S.-based cell phone signal booster manufacturer, selling in North & South America. 

Does it sometimes feel like effectively communicating with your audiences is harder than ever?

It actually should be easier than it is: The digital age has given us a virtually limitless supply of tools and channels with which to reach people, and more are introduced every day. But that cornucopia of opportunity has also led to audiences with splintered attention and challenges with consumer privacy that earlier generations of marketers never had to consider.

As marketers, this reality has given us years of practice in adapting and finding new approaches. But the landscape never stops changing.

One of the most recent new Grand Canyon-sized holes in that landscape appeared when Apple updated its Apple iOS to make it more difficult for companies to use retargeting ads. That move means the company dollar may no longer go as far as it did before on once-essential channels. Many mobile advertising companies reportedly saw an increase in spend on Android shortly after this change went into effect, but it may not be long before — in the name of privacy — that approach changes as well. 

Marketing leadership and teams have to be smarter than ever about how we deploy advertising. Fortunately, there is a tried-and-true tool that also happens to be something most of us already embrace: content.

Finding new ways to leverage the content we are already creating is one important path toward continuing to reach our audiences.

Getting More Out Of Your Content

Content is the backbone of your marketing efforts. Even as once-reliable channels and outlets for your messaging disappear or transform, the benefits of compelling content will always remain. The challenge for marketing leaders and their teams has become getting the most out of that content with the tools and options available to them.

Repurposing is what all of the cool kids are doing these days. Instead of a one-and-done approach, smart teams are finding new ways to share and leverage every single piece of content.

For example, you can use a single video on your YouTube channel to generate dozens of pieces of content across all of your owned channels. Spin off short videos your team can share in Tweets, through Instagram or via TikTok. Share some of those in newsletters — both corporate and customer-facing — and on your Facebook page. Rewrite the text of the video and share that as a thought-leadership article on LinkedIn or Medium.

When you produce a whitepaper, take the same approach. Break out multiple compelling sections and post them to your blog and Medium page. Share talking points on Twitter and excerpts on LinkedIn. Use the information from the whitepaper to create new materials for teams across the company, including sales and customer support.

You may be a content repurposer, anyway, and think you are already doing this. My advice is that you can always find new ways to share your content. Dropping a couple of links on social channels is not always enough, and it doesn’t allow you to extract all of the benefits from the hard work you and your team do on a daily basis.

And just what are those benefits? I’ve found that energetically redeploying your content in this fashion offers many, including:

1. Reaching Your Existing Customers In Different Ways

It shouldn’t surprise any marketer at this point that you’re probably not going to find your entire audience on one or two major channels anymore. Reaching people who have smartphones, laptops and televisions that all access the boundless internet means casting a wider net than ever before.

As the rules governing some of our major marketplaces of ideas change — as they did when iOS disallowed retargeting — we can shift tactics to instead find people across a broader variety of engaging channels. By reaching across many different platforms in this way, you can help ensure your existing customers see your messages wherever they may browse.

2. Stretching Your Marketing Dollar

Rather than creating a new piece of content for each of those platforms, find new ways to use the content you’ve already created to take some pressure off your budget. This not only allows you to continue to reach your audiences but also allows you to spread your marketing dollars out in new ways.

Building your new content with this approach will also help you repurpose it natively without spending more time (and more of your budget) on brainstorming new ideas. For example, my team may create a video with seven different tech items to bring on your next road trip, which we can then easily separate into smaller snippets for additional short videos. Build re-shareable content from the ground up.

3. Discovering New Audiences

Over the course of your work to find new ways to use your content and reach your existing customers, you will also find people who haven’t previously encountered your brand. This is especially true as you utilize multiple new channels for your content when you might have previously focused on a couple of bigger ones.

There are a lot of different ways to share the same pieces of content, and what attracts the interest of one person may not grab another’s. By repurposing content, you can further stretch your marketing team creatively and help them develop new muscles that uncover audiences you never knew before.

Dealing with the constant shifts in digital spaces can be frustrating, but it helps to remember that the intentions behind these shifts are often good. Many of the recent changes stem from the fact that companies now have incentives to show you, the end user, that they are considering your privacy.

Finding new homes for the great content you are already creating is one steady approach you can use to reach new audiences in the midst of this madness. Repurposing content can also help you stay budget-friendly while you find new and existing customers across a broad range of channels.

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