A lot of time and resources goes into creating valuable content — whether it’s for SEO purposes, to support your brand value, or to generate leads. Regardless as to purpose, the content itself can dramatically impact its shelf life.
As an example, your industry can affect the shelf-life of content. In IT, products and solutions are rapidly evolving, and content created a few months ago may need to be refreshed in order to be relevant. In other industries such as financial services and healthcare, assets may have a longer shelf-life.
However evergreen an asset may or may not be, it can almost always be revisited to create a net new asset with some clever repurposing.
Common assets you have in your library:
- Solution Briefs
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Marketing Campaign Videos
- eBooks
- Blogs
The Island of Forgotten Creative
- Why is some creative lost forever?
- Internal creative teams are often tasked with the double duty of developing high-profile, brand-forward content, while also working with sales teams to produce collateral for sales enablement. While brand work has a long shelf life, sometimes for months or years, sales assets were created for a limited flight and may be forgotten once that initial use is over and also may be tough to track down.
- Where to look for your creative gold mine?
- If your company is diligent about publishing its content, you’re ahead of the pack. Your own website will usually have a searchable archive of relevant whitepapers, webinars and case studies.
- Most companies have internal shared drives like Box or Google Drive, but some companies also have Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems like Brandfolder or Bynder. You may find through a simple search an archive of valuable content that could be repurposed or freshened up for reuse.
- If you have an internal creative team, they can be a great resource access assets that cannot be found elsewhere.
Repurpose, Reuse, Recycle
- Why repurpose?
- Studies repeatedly have shown it takes a person several times to see or hear your message before they will remember you.
- As consumption of content increases, attention spans have decreased. The shelf life of your subject matter may be longer than you think. Have you ever read something one time and became an expert? No, of course not. Revisiting valuable and relevant content is a great practice to remain top of mind with your prospects.
- More often than not, content initially is used in a limited fashion, reaching a small percentage of your total audience.
- Even when content does reach the audience, experiencing it again in a slightly different way actually helps the consumer retain the information.
- Content that was originally intended for a large, general audience, can be refined and personalized for more targeted campaigns.
- Use the LEAP method for repurposing newly-discovered content:
- Leverage: Since its original publication, what has changed? It may simply require a new headline or a few new value statements. In any case, leveraging previously created content will save you a ton of time.
- Expand: How was the content originally distributed? If, for example, it was a webinar that was only shared on LinkedIn a few times, then you could find an expanded audience running a new campaign through content syndication, social channels, and nurture email outreach.
- Adapt: Can the asset be used in new and different ways to drive a lead? For example, take a blog post and adapt into a “perspective” downloadable PDF to use with a lead-generation campaign.
- Personalize: Personalizing content has proven to increase response rate. Consider developing a high-response direct mail and or email campaign driving to personalized microsites presenting the repurposed assets as personally delivered to the specific recipient.
If you have a challenge repurposing existing creative assets because either your internal creative team is too busy, or you simply don’t have one, working with an agency like 3marketeers would add value:
- Partnership takes the burden off your team. Our creative and marketing teams are tightly integrated, making creative execution frictionless. We can do the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to.
- Benefit from our experience. We have a depth and breadth of skills in all areas including design, web development, video production, as well as CMS and marketing automation platforms, and CRM integration. So, no matter what type of assets you are looking to repurpose, we can help create and integrate them into your ABM program.