Raise your hand if you wish you could dedicate more time or money toward your marketing campaigns. OK, all of our hands should be up. In an ideal world, we would all have an uncapped marketing budget and 50 hours in a day to manage and execute on that budget.
The reality is, there is never enough time or money to do everything we want to do.
You have to make the most of your marketing spend to execute on the most effective strategy that fits your capabilities and maps to your goals.
With that in mind, here are some content marketing hacks to help you stretch your content marketing dollar.
Blog posts
This is an easy one that will involve taking a quick look at your Google Analytics data. Look at the articles driving the most traffic to your site. For each of the top five articles, ask yourself:
- How old is this?
- Why is it doing so well?
- Is there something in this post that we could spin off into a related piece of content?
If you have a blog post that is older than 2015 but is still bringing in new users, update it with new statistics or information. Updating existing content is a great (and quick) way to have what could end up feeling like a brand new blog post. Another bonus is that this content will be even more relevant for a user’s search – no one relies on statistics from 2014 anymore. For inspiration, check out HubSpot, which does a great job with updating its existing content with relevant statistics.
Another way to stretch every dollar is to repurpose blog content into an eBook or downloadable asset. Conversely, a downloadable asset like an eBook, white paper or even webinar could be broken down into a series of blog posts.
Graphics
When integrating infographics into my client’s strategies, I always ask our wonderful Design team to create them in a way that allows us to “snip” the data points and use each as an individual social image. If you include six data points in an infographic, you instantly have six new social images for sharing.
A single custom graphic can also be used in many different ways – a blog post, an email campaign, an organic social strategy and even a paid ad strategy. Plus, if this image includes a relevant data point, it can be used in various collateral for months or even years to come.
Take one of our recent infographics, for example. We used it in a lot of different ways:
And on social media.
Social media
Let’s be honest – it’s easy to stretch your content marketing dollar on social. I’m a big fan of sharing content multiple times, especially on Twitter where the lifecycle of a Tweet is so short. This also gives you a chance to test different copy, imagery, posting times, hashtags, etc.
When it comes to choosing what to share, don’t be afraid to consider older content. Evergreen pieces can be shared indefinitely, and they should be. After all, you worked hard on creating those pieces. Why not flaunt them?
As for the paid ads portion of your social strategy, it’s incredibly inexpensive to promote posts on Facebook. If you’re looking for hard conversions, however, this wouldn’t be the route I would suggest. Promoting posts on Facebook is great for encouraging conversation and clicks through to your blog articles. Try promoting a post with a specific audience for $20 and see what results you get. You might be surprised just how much that $20 spend is worth.
Video marketing
Whenever I propose on-location videos for my clients, I suggest that we shoot a LOT of interviews in the day or two that our video team is on site. This reduces travel expenses because we won’t have to visit two separate times to create separate videos. Shooting multiple interviews guarantees that we’ll have enough footage to create a variety of different videos.
Additionally, animated videos can be used dozens of ways, such as in social ad campaigns, email campaigns, blog posts and landing pages. When you carefully plan an animation, you can ensure it speaks to both top- and middle-of-the-funnel users. You can also use animated videos as how-to guides and product demos to give middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel users who are comparing options an easy, visual way to understand your value propositions. Again, these can be used relatively indefinitely.
Get more from one campaign
If you’re starting a new campaign, a hub-and-spoke approach can be a great way to get more out of your content. Create one strong eBook or white paper and use it as the cornerstone of your marketing campaign. From there, you’ll have plenty of material to work with, such as:
- Graphics for sharing on social and in email.
- A targeted email campaign.
- Content to base multiple blog posts around.
- A downloadable asset for lead gen efforts.
Any and all of these tips will help you develop and execute a valuable content marketing strategy without burning through your budget. But it’s also important to back your content and strategy up with expertise. Nothing is more expensive than content marketing that doesn’t work.
