Companies invest a great deal of time, money and effort into creating their content marketing strategies. Developing ideal customer profiles, creating buyer personas, and brainstorming ideas takes time.
Why tell your brand story through only one medium? Use the ideas from your content marketing brainstorming sessions as a springboard for multiple channels.
One idea can be used in multiple ways, thus reaching your customers through different platforms and mediums and supporting your ecommerce marketing strategy. Here’s how to take one great content idea and use it five different ways.
The Right Platform Matches Brand and Content Marketing Goals
There’s a plethora of great ways to tell your brand story. Choosing the right platform and channel depends on understanding where your target audiences prefer to browse, read and socialize, and the best medium to showcase your unique brand.
A visually-based brand such as a high-end fashion or beauty brand tells its story through photography and video, while a technology company reaching CFOs may wish to use white papers, case studies and similar written materials.
The following five ideas should be weighed against brand attributes and content marketing goals.
One Idea, Five Channels
After you’ve developed your “big idea” for your content marketing story, it’s time to spin it in five different way. Take your idea and parlay it into:
1. Blog Content
Blogging gets a bad rap in some quarters, but it’s a time-tested way of developing unique search engine optimized content that search engines love while you generate new stories to share with your customers across social media. One content marketing idea doesn’t have to be shoehorned into one blog post. You can break main ideas down into shorter blog posts, list-based posts, slideshow-type posts and more.
2. Presentation Shares
Take your idea and develop it into a story of 10 slides or so. Then upload it to your favorite slide-sharing website. Slide-sharing sites reach both B2B and B2C customers. Many people subscribe to their favorite slide providers too, quoting them in other articles and presentations, which can double your reach.
3. Podcasting
Record your blog post or create new podcasts for your customers to listen to online or download later. Create your own self-hosted radio show on one of the free internet radio hosts available, and develop it into a regular broadcast.
4. Videos
YouTube is now the second most popular website and one of the largest search engine in the world. Creating your own video channel for short, professionally produced content videos can generate a whole new batch of loyal customers and educate and inform them about your products and services.
5. Flipboard
Flipboard enables companies to share content to millions of users who visit the social bookmarking site to aggregate their own customized online magazines. Set up your own magazines using your content, and aggregate other related content into shareable Flipboard magazines based around your brand strategy. It’s an inexpensive way to reach a broad pool of potential customers.
The best part of taking one idea and spinning it out into five different content channels is that each channel can then be used to share content with other channels, thus supporting and strengthening your overall marketing.
For example, a YouTube video, podcast or Flipboard can be shared in a blog post using HTML code provided by the hosting platform.
Blog posts can be saved into magazines on Flipboard, doubling your reach with one investment in a blog post. Using this strategy, one idea can be used across five different channels, with multiple configurations to use that source content in many ways.
You can learn more ideas at a content marketing conference.
One idea used in five different ways supports your brand strategy, saves time, and uses your resources wisely. As part of an ecommerce marketing strategy, these ideas can help you reach more customers and attract them to your website.
Try these ideas, test them against each other, and see which ones work the best for your brand.