By Graeme Mills, Content Manager for Simplicity Lone Beacon.
In my last article, I covered what makes great content for your advisory’s marketing efforts, and why it matters. In this article, we’ll cover how to take that content and maximize its impact for marketing purposes by repackaging, reworking, refreshing, and reusing the great content you publish. The truth is that creating great content takes time and effort which, as a financial advisor—and often a business owner, you don’t always have. As such, knowing how to keep your content fresh and give it longevity and reusability as marketing collateral can be the difference between struggling to reach your marketing goals and exceeding them.
Understanding Your Marketing Channels
Whether you’re publishing content via physical mailers, email marketing campaigns, online platforms, or social media platforms, the way you repurpose your content is tied to which channels you’re using.
Your first instinct might be to craft original content for each channel based on the platform’s limitations and capabilities. If you have nothing to start with, this is the right idea. But if you’ve created content for your brand before, you might be approaching your content marketing strategy inefficiently. Instead, your very first thought should be, “What do we already have?”
You might be thinking, “Reusing content makes me look stale. If people see the same thing repeatedly, it will come across as bland and inauthentic, and I won’t get the results I want.” If this is your thought process, let me reassure you that your head is in the right place. You surely don’t want to come across as inauthentic and make your target audience feel like you’re inundating them with old information.
In fact, the other first instinct many business owners and advisors have is to stick to their old marketing materials and rerun them into eternity. We’ve all seen those commercials for local businesses on local TV channels that seem at least ten years old and never seem to stop running. Just think about your own takeaways from watching a commercial like that. It may convey that the company is not updating its products and services to meet the changing needs of its current and potential customers, and they aren’t improving its products and services to benefit the customer.
Editing and Re-Drafting Content
So, what does it take to effectively repurpose content without spending more time than refreshing? The answer is twofold. Firstly, start by getting content on one channel to others. But secondly, and importantly, you want to think about the small tweaks you can make to the content to fit the platform. This concept is best illustrated with hypothetical examples, so below are a few.
Let’s say you’ve produced a 25-minute live webinar on the key next steps in the retirement planning process for people 65 and up. You put in the legwork to share it with your prospect database and/or clientele, you ran the webinar successfully and maybe got a few prospects to take a meeting with you, and most importantly, you recorded it. But now what? Do you let that content sit? Throw it away? No!
Let’s say you wrote an article for a blog or publication on 5 ways Gen X can prepare for retirement now. Instead of just reposting that article on your blog or your email newsletter, you can give that content extra longevity by cutting those 5 points out and turning them into social posts. And if you create video or audio content, you can turn the article into talking points (even using a simple AI software can help break out the points for you!) for even more content to post on your blog, newsletters, and more… and it will seem as good as new to your audience!
Tweaking your content is an important part of reusing it for different channels, but how much you need to tweak your content is the real key. To do so, the rule to follow is this: Only do as much as you absolutely need to fit a new platform for the same content. Sometimes that might be adding a social media caption. Sometimes that might be cutting something up. Sometimes it’s turning a blog into talking points for a video. But it’s always important to think about how you can be doing only the bare minimum… You’ll be shocked still at how fresh your content will seem even with that approach.
When and Where You Can Recycle Your Content
The “when” and “where” might be the most crucial aspects of keeping your reused content fresh. To understand why this is the case, think about what it means for content to be “fresh” in this context. The truth is that freshness in marketing content is defined purely in the eyes of the beholder. In other words, freshness is defined by your viewer; “Has your viewer seen this before, and does he or she remember seeing it?”
In reality, unless you’re hitting your audience over the head with entirely reused emails, videos, shows, blogs, etc., your audience really doesn’t notice or care if they receive the same ideas and sentiments multiple times! According to Marcus Roth, Director of Data Automation, Email, and Content at Simplicity Lone Beacon, A Simplicity Company, “You’d be overdoing it if you send the same or highly similar email on the fifth or sixth, resend… but surely not the third.” To further this point, it’s crucial to understand that presenting familiar content to your audience in a new way is often better than all new content because it gets them to nod their head in recognition! In addition, repetition will help your viewers understand and digest information better.
What’s more is that most of your target audience, whether prospects or clients, don’t even see the content you share. Roth’s email metrics also reveal that a stellar open rate is 45%, meaning 55% never even read what’s in the email! So, with that in mind, you can understand that even if you’ve reshared content one or two times, the viewer on the other end might be seeing it for the very first time!
The truth is that air-tight content marketing strategies repurpose content all the time. Seriously! But it seems fresh to you, the viewer, because enough time has passed, and content initially shared on one platform gets tweaked to fit another.
Why Refreshing and Recycling Content Works
Refreshing and recycling content works because it’s double. And it’s doable because instead of demanding you put more work in to make something fantastic, it demands that you do less! You don’t need me to tell you that a strategy that isn’t executable is simply not a good strategy, no matter how smart it seems or how great the outcome would be if feasible. So, keep in mind that your content repurposing strategy is exactly that the whole idea behind the content repurposing strategy is to be executable. Once you put the work in to create that excellent piece of original content, you don’t have to do much to repurpose it while still generating results.
However, there are questions touched upon that can’t be answered with general advice. As a financial advisor, you’re familiar with that concept: there are specifics about one’s financial life, history, obligations, risk tolerance, and more that complicate the generic advice and broad rules of thumb. In the same way, knowing when your content becomes stale and knowing what you can and should do to repurpose your content is something specific to your business and brand. And the answers won’t just present themselves to you even if you’re aware of the general best practices. A marketing expert in your corner can help you develop and implement a content production and repurposing plan that works with your brand, the channels you use, and the content you already have or may need to develop.
About the Author: Graeme comes to Simplicity Lone Beacon from the health-tech industry where he produced digital content ranging from profile pieces to research articles to multimedia blogs and videos. Prior, he produced marketing content and videos for brands including a documentary for a Boston-based environmental non-profit, and has published work in Altcoin Magazine, Fenway News, and other publications. He brings this experience—along with an academic background in economics—to Simplicity Lone Beacon’s content marketing initiatives for financial advisors.
