Wherever you might stand on the whole idea of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” content marketers can take this well-known eco-mantra and adapt it to create a killer content generation process. All we have to do is adapt it a little to wind up with:
Reframe – Repurpose – Reduce
Here’s how each of these works in the world of content marketing.
Reframe
This term isn’t as commonly heard as the two others, but it’s valuable enough to get the lead-off position. For content marketers, reframing is a way to adapt content created for one audience so that it speaks to another audience. Remember, the content you create has to have value for the audience. It must be tailored to their needs.
So the article you’ve just written with great ideas for mid-level accounting teams can be adapted to address the concerns of finance executives higher up the org chart–comptrollers and CFOs, perhaps.
You’re still addressing the same basic set of business issues, but you’re doing so in ways that correspond to the different concerns that keep two different groups up at night. This is a great way to make use of the same basic research to create multiple pieces of content, whether text, video, or graphic.
Repurpose
You might think that what we just described above is repurposing, a much more commonly used content marketing term. But we view repurposing to mean taking a piece of content and adapting it to different media.
As with reframing, the goal is to adapt content to maximize effectiveness. But here, we’re focused on multiple channels rather than multiple audience segments.
For example, you probably put a lot of work into the slide decks you create for a presentation, and if you only use that presentation deck once, that’s a tough ROI hill to climb. Slideshare offers a way to distribute slide decks (and other materials) online giving you another outlet for your content and a way to expand the return you might realize on the effort invested.
But … the visuals you’ve use to accompany your spoken presentation aren’t likely to pack the same punch without you there to bring them to life. A great in-person presentation can fall flat on Slideshare. So it makes sense to adjust the deck – adding more detail to individual slides, or adding more slides – to better serve its purposes in this different setting.
Reduce
Finally, we come to Reduce, everyone’s favorite part of the equation: Reducing your workload.
Reducing the effort required to create the content you need to fill your channels gives you more time to create high quality content. And it’s the quality of your content–not the quantity of it–that will have the greatest impact on your marketing’s success.
These aren’t just (ahem) throw-away ideas we’re borrowing from the green gang. Give this Three R approach a try and you will have a great foundation for improving your content marketing’s effectiveness with content tailored to each segment of your audience and custom fit for each channel you’re using – all while reducing the amount of effort each piece of content takes to develop.
I think these environmentalist folks may be on to something.
