Create Once, Publish Everywhere

The idea behind COPE is to take every piece of content you produce and share it in on multiple platforms and in different formats.

Why? Because we all have our preferences for what kind of content we consume and where we get it from. By repurposing and promoting your content across various channels in alternative formats, more people have the opportunity to see your content with little extra effort on your part.

The Three Types of Media to Use

To get the most out of your content, you’ll want to share it across three types of media:

 – Owned Media. These are the platforms you control, like your website, blog, email, social media pages, webinars, events and podcasts. Since you own the space, you decide when and how to share your content. Plus, as long as the information stays relevant, you can keep reposting it multiple times to reach new people.

 – Earned Media. This is exposure by third parties that you don’t pay for, such as media mentions, social shares, guest articles, and speaking opportunities. By promoting your content, the third party is giving you more credibility and sharing your expertise with its audience.

 – Paid Media. This includes any marketing you pay for, like social media ads, sponsored content and paid event placements. While it requires additional money, it helps ensure your content gets in front of the right people.

Repurpose, Don’t Reinvent

To really make COPE work, start thinking of ways to repurpose your content. You can:

– Turn a long article into a series of short posts or vice versa

– Pull out key quotes or tips for social media

– Design an infographic or chart summarizing written content

– Convert a live presentation into an article or webinar

– Create a video version of a blog post

– Adapt the content for different audiences (e.g., beginners vs. advanced, those in different industries, etc.)

– Add updates and re-share content that’s still relevant

Yes, it takes a little extra effort to tweak things. But it’s much easier than coming up with something brand new every time. And, each new version provides another opportunity to share your expertise through all the different marketing channels mentioned.

Repetition is Good

Don’t worry about people noticing that you are sharing the same information. Studies show that people need to see or hear a message multiple times before it sticks. Plus, people are busy. They miss things. They scroll past. They delete emails. They forget.

Repetition helps reinforce your message and reach more people where they are and how they prefer to learn.

COPE saves time, increases exposure and keeps you top of mind with your audience. So, always ask yourself whether you’ve gotten the most out of the content you’ve already created.

If you need help with creating and marketing your content, contact us for a free consultation.

To receive our COPE Checklist, email info@rdtcontentmarketing.com.

Let’s say your piece of content is a 500-word blog post. You can:

1. Shorten it. Create multiple social media posts from your post that you can share over weeks, months or even years, so long as the information stays valid. Just pull out interesting excerpts for each one.

2. Lengthen it. Expand your blog post to turn it into an article, white paper, book or eBook, webinar/seminar or podcast. This is easiest to do if you have several blog posts on a related topic that you can combine into a longer piece.

3. Change the format. Record your post to create one or more video clips or a podcast. You can also turn it into an infographic.

4. Rewrite it for a different audience. If it was written for fellow professionals, revise it to appeal to consumers, business owners or referral sources (or vice versa). You can also tailor it to different industries or types of clients. For example, discuss how a new law might affect manufacturers, technology companies, or retail businesses or adapt it for different geographic regions. Most of the content could be the same but just highlight relevant differences.

5. Update it. If there have been changes since you wrote your blog post, revise it and republish it. Even if the updates aren’t significant, it shows that you are staying abreast of new developments.

6. Tailor it to different marketing channels. You can share content from your blog post on social media; in an email newsletter, client alert or press release; to pitch to a journalist, publication or organization; as a guest blog post on a third-party website; and so on. In each case, you aren’t simply copying your blog post somewhere else. You must adapt it to the platform. For example, on social media and in email, you may be giving a teaser to encourage people to click to read the whole piece on your website; in a pitch, you are focusing on why a publication’s or organization’s audience would be interested in your content.

7. Add visuals. Studies show posts are more likely to get views and engagement if they have visuals, such as charts, photos, graphics, videos, etc.

8. Mix and repeat. These options can be combined to create numerous variations. For instance, lengthen and rewrite the blog post into a presentation that you pitch to an organization. The presentation can then be recorded and turned into a full-length webinar, multiple video clips, and transcribed and edited into an article.

Maintaining a steady stream of content to market your expertise is difficult but not impossible when you learn to repurpose everything you do. Remember to ‘create once, repurpose everywhere’ to save time and money and help you attract more business with your content.

If you need assistance with creating or promoting high-quality content, contact us for a consultation.

1. Re-promote. Take articles/blog posts you wrote 6 or more months ago that are still useful and interesting and repost them on social media or share in your email newsletter. Some people may never have seen them the first time around, or if they did, may not remember all the points you made.

2. Repurpose. For every piece of content you produce, you should always find at least 3-4 ways you can repurpose it. For example, create various versions in these formats: short, long, expert-level, beginner-level, consumer-oriented, technical, written, presentation, video, infographics, charts, etc. Now you’ve got content for months.

3. Use a scheduling tool. It’s very time-consuming to consistently share content on social media especially if you have multiple accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms. Social media management tools like Hootsuite, Buffer and CoSchedule let you schedule your posts in advance from 1 place, keep track of your activity, and get basic analytics.

4. Delegate when possible. You should always be making the highest and best use of your time. That means don’t waste time doing tasks that could be better handled by someone else. Remember your time is money.

Happy Labor Day!

For more ideas, see:

No Time for Content Marketing? 7 Tips For Successfully Repurposing Your Content—Part 1 and Part 2

1. Mid-year checkup. We’re 6 months into the year. What have you done to market your business? What has worked and what hasn’t? Are you on track to meet your goals for the year? What should you be doing differently? If you did not set goals at the start of the year, set them now.

2. Work on your contact database. Leverage staff and interns or hire students to help create or clean up your database. If you don’t have a database, now is the time to build one, especially for email

3. Attend summer networking events. During the summer, many groups go on hiatus, but not all of them. Those that have events often schedule more casual networking which may bring out different people than ordinarily attend the regular networking events.

4. Update your website and social media profiles. Verify your credentials and activities are up to date including memberships, new positions, writing and speaking, publicity, awards, etc. Also, go to the My Network tab on LinkedIn and check out suggestions of people you could connect to and add a personal note if you send them an invitation. You can also email them to further build the connection.

5. Create evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date quickly. Develop blog posts, articles, video or other content that you can use months or even years from now, so you have material you can promote when you don’t have time to create something new.

6. Get into the habit of marketing. If it seems like you are always too busy to market, start with a small commitment of time every week. It doesn’t matter how much time you set aside but pick a set amount and keep to it even if it’s 15 minutes. Then gradually add more time as you get comfortable with your efforts. Little things add up.

For more help, read our related post – It’s July. Do You Know How Your Marketing Is Doing?

1. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes. A good blog post discusses what your reader cares about, not what you want to talk about. So first identify who you want to read your blog post (your ideal client or referral source), then start making a list of the following:

What are their top 10 questions? What do they ask you when you have a conversation? Each question could be its own blog post or group them as appropriate.

What are the significant challenges in their personal or business lives or in their industry? If you don’t know the answer, ask them or do research. Even if you cannot help them with all their issues, writing about their concerns shows you understand their needs.

When and why do they call you? You want to write about those trigger points. For example, let’s say the trigger is that they are being sued or threatened with suit. You can write about how to avoid liability, common liability traps, mitigating and aggravating factors in liability, when they need to seek outside help and how to handle issues that may come up in litigation.

You want to go through this exercise with each audience you want to attract. The answers to these questions will vary depending on whether you are targeting existing clients, different categories of prospects or referral sources. For each audience, you have a whole new set of potential blog topics. Even if some of the information is repetitive across groups, you can still write individual posts for each group.

2. Consider multiple ways to present the information. The same basic information can be delivered many ways by changing the angle, style or format of the piece. For example, you can provide advice on how to handle an issue, but one time write it as “Essential Tips to Help …,” and another time focus on “How to Avoid These Top Traps” or “What Not to Do.”

When it comes to the format, there are many options. Lists, how-tos, case studies, charts/infographics, audio and video all represent different ways you can cover your topic and they can all qualify as “blog posts.” One of the benefits of blogging is that it is in your control and you can discuss any topic you want in any way you want.

3. Repurpose other content. Maybe you did a presentation for a client or an organization. Your notes, outlines, handouts and slides can be fodder for blog posts. The same is true of articles, client memos/letters, recordings and other content created for a different purpose. Out-of-date content can be brought up-to-date. Material written for one audience, can be rewritten for new audiences.

In addition, you can repurpose other people’s content. For example, write a post analyzing or commenting on an article you read or a presentation you attended. You can also curate content – that is, compile a list of useful articles, books, and other resources on a topic and share it with others in the form of a blog post. For example, write a post on the top 5 articles on the new tax law. You want to add your own commentary and explain why you think these resources are useful. Don’t copy the articles; just provide the pertinent information (title, author, publication) and links to the pieces you mentioned along with your analysis.

4. Look at current events and trends. It’s great to discuss new developments and how those events or trends may impact your target audience. Sometimes there is an added bonus because you can take advantage of media and public interest in a news story to get extra exposure for your business (aka “newsjacking”). However, that may only give you a short-term boost in visibility. When possible, provide deeper and ongoing analysis of events so you can really showcase your expertise and have a longer shelf-life for your content.

You can set up automatic Google alerts, monitor hashtags and trends on social media, or sign up for a news aggregator service to stay on top of what people are writing and talking about. Remember you should pay attention to the events and trends that your audience cares about, which may be very niche content.

5. Keep a running list or folder for ideas. When an idea for a blog post comes to me, I will add it to a list that I keep for that purpose. If the inspiration was an article I read, I will add the link to my list as well, so I can go back to the piece when it’s time for me to start writing.

The key to successful blogging is planning. Don’t add stress to your life by struggling to come up with a topic on the fly. Regularly brainstorm topics and consider these tips to help you develop ideas for months at a time.

For more tips to improve your blogging, read Is Anyone Reading Your Content? How to Make Sure They Do.

If you need help with your blogging, contact us for a consultation.

1. Revisit your marketing efforts year-to-date. What have you done to market your business this year? What has worked and what hasn’t? Are you on track to meet your goals for the year? If you did not set goals, set them now. You should have a written marketing plan documenting what you want to achieve and how you will get there.

2. Set up one-on-one meetings. Summer is a good time to check in with your contacts. Follow up is an essential part of business development. Go out to lunch or coffee. Find out what is going on with your contacts but be prepared. What do you want to accomplish with this meeting? If you are hoping to get some business leads, information or introductions, think ahead of time about how you can help them with their business. It’s better to give than to receive when you are trying to build relationships.

3. Work on your contact database. Too many businesses have incomplete information on their contacts and house them in multiple databases (e.g., Outlook, billing system, email platform, etc.). That makes it much harder to keep information up-to-date and to leverage it to improve marketing. During the summer have someone work on cleaning up your data – checking that information is up-to-date in all places, looking up missing information, reviewing bounces, segmenting contacts, etc. If you don’t have a list of contacts that you can use for email marketing, now is the time to create one. Email is an important and very cost-effective way to stay in touch with your contacts. Leverage staff if they have the time to do this work or use interns or students who can work on an hourly basis at a lower cost than staff.

4. Create evergreen content that you can use for your marketing in busy months. Evergreen content is content that doesn’t go out of date quickly. Develop blog posts, articles, video or other content that you can use months or even years from now, so you have material you can promote when you don’t have time to create something new.

5. Leverage content you already have. While you are creating content to carry you through the busy times of year, you don’t want to worry about also writing new stuff to market during the summer. Look at what you already have. There is probably information that you can repurpose relatively easily. Also keep in mind that for social media and email purposes, you can repromote evergreen content you wrote previously. Take a blog post or article you wrote a while ago and share it again. Some people may not have seen it the first time or they may not remember it well.

6. Attend summer networking events. During the summer, many groups go on hiatus, but not all of them. Those that have events often schedule more casual networking which can offer the opportunity to network in a relaxed environment. These summer parties may bring out different people than ordinarily attend the regular networking events, so you also meet new people.

7. Do some reading. No one intuitively knows how to successfully build a business. Pick 1 or 2 marketing or business-related books or check out relevant magazines, newsletters or blogs to give you motivation and inspiration to grow your business.

Get started today with these tips to improve your marketing.

Interested in more advice? Contact us for a free 30-minute consultation.

It’s hard to find time to market your firm. Writing and speaking are wonderful tools to showcase your expertise and help you build your credibility, but they are time-consuming. So you want to get the maximum value out of everything you do. Repurposing your content is the key to success. For every piece of content you create ask yourself – What else can I do with this? How could it be repackaged? In our last post, we covered the first 4 tips. Here are 3 more ideas to ensure you save time and money marketing yourself.

5. Convert written formats to spoken and spoken to written. Informally record yourself speaking about a topic you’ve written about. Then turn it into webinars or short video/audio clips. Or develop it into a seminar that you can present to a group of people. On the other hand, if you’ve spoken on a topic but don’t have it in written form, get it recorded, then transcribe the recordings to turn into articles and blog posts.

6. Change the tone. Content that was written for a particular audience can be revised for a new audience by changing the tone. For example, professionals typically communicate differently to other professionals than they do to their clients. You want to have a more conversational tone with clients. You also want to use the same terminology that your audience uses so you may need to change or explain things when you are speaking to a different group.

7. Simplify or enhance. This is related to tip #6. If you have content that was written for a peer and is very technical, you should simplify it if you want to direct it to an audience that lacks that level of expertise or isn’t interested in those issues. Similarly you may want to take a basic overview of a topic and provide a more sophisticated or in-depth treatment to match your audience. Even among potential clients, different groups have different levels of understanding – for example, CFO vs general counsel vs HR manager. You should also think about a simplified version as a way to help you draw people in. It’s the teaser and those who are more interested in the topic, can be directed to the enhanced version.

Creating content that showcases your expertise and successfully attracts clients is hard work. Hopefully these tips will help you to repurpose all of your content and get the most value out of your investment of time and money.

Do you need help with your own content marketing? Contact us for a free consultation.

Content marketing is a proven way to attract and retain clients, but it’s also time-consuming. Fortunately, there are tactics that can help you make the most of every piece of content you create. You can repurpose and repackage your information in myriad ways in order to get more value from it. And best of all, not only will these methods save you time (and money), but they will help you expand your reach and better promote your firm.

The first step is to gather all the content you already have – old presentations, articles, newsletters, blog posts, internal and client memos, research, etc. Then use the tips below to help you revise your existing content to create new material. And going forward, remember to do the same thing with each new piece you create. You should always be thinking – What else can I do with this material? Here are 4 tips to get your started:

1. Slice and dice. Break up your content so that it is easier to read and also more engaging when it’s distributed via social media and email. For example, a longer article can be turned into several blog posts. Edit an audio or video recording into a series of short clips. Take the written portion of a presentation (ex. PowerPoint) and post (in whole or part) on your website as well as share it via social media channels such as LinkedIn and SlideShare.

2. Expand and combine. It is a lot faster to create short pieces of content. But eventually, you should look at merging them into a more in-depth piece. Several related blog posts can be turned into an article, white paper, eBook or presentation giving you a whole new marketing opportunity.

3. Update and revise. Is your older content still current? How much updating does it need? Is the information still helpful to an audience you want to attract? Previously published content can be updated with new developments, citations to more recent sources, case studies, examples, and other commentary to create something new and compelling without having to start from scratch.

4. Create visuals. Develop charts, graphs, images, infographics and video. You can add these components to written content to add impact to the text. However, they can also be used alone to attract interest on your website, social media and emails. A great visual can tell a story in a more engaging way than text and it’s also a way to entice people to want to read more. One study found that articles containing relevant images got 94% more total views than articles without them.

In our next post, we’ll cover 3 more tips to help you get more value out of your content.

Do you need help with your own content marketing? Contact us for a free consultation.

1. Pay attention to design.

Not everyone has a budget for a sophisticated design, but even small changes can make a difference in readability. Lots of dense text will discourage reading. Adding white space, using bullets, changing fonts and including subheadings can help. You can also box off and highlight statistics, interesting quotes and takeaways from the text. You want to make sure readers can quickly scan it if they are in a hurry. It’s especially good to add visual elements to break up the text like charts, graphs, infographics, and photos. Studies show that 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual. Remember to think about design in each format that someone will read the newsletter. Firms often create a PDF version of the newsletter for mailing or downloading as well as versions for email and web.

2. Distribute it through multiple channels.

There are lots of options here including regular mail, email, website, blog and social media channels. I know some people don’t want to print and mail copies anymore, but firms still have clients who like print and printed materials may get noticed over emails. Remember to get individual members of the firm involved in helping to distribute the content through their own networks. If you went to the trouble of creating the newsletter, you should be making sure your audience sees it. Different people have different format preferences. As with advertising, it also helps for people to see the same content a few times before they pay attention to it.

3. Include calls-to-action tailored to the distribution channel.

Entice your readers with some additional action. If you’re distributing the content via social media, you want to push readers to sign up for your newsletter so you get their contact information. If you emailed them, encourage them to download a whitepaper or sign up for an event or webinar. The idea is to continue to interact with your audience and build the relationship.

4. Test headlines and subject lines.

It’s hard to get attention when everyone is being bombarded with content. You only have a few seconds to get a reader’s attention. Make headlines and subject lines interesting and keep track of what types of language get better results.

5. Slice it up.

The newsletter can be pushed out in whole, but then repurposed and promoted as individual “chunks” of information for different social media channels. Articles can be shortened or rewritten for a blog or LinkedIn post. Even those charts and infographics can be separately marketed.

6. Reuse and repackage it.

Periodically you should go through your old content to look for opportunities to get extra use out of it. If you have good relevant content, find ways to update and promote it again. You can also pull together a bunch of related articles that were previously published. Revise them where needed with new developments, takeaways, lessons learned, etc. and repackage it as a multi-part series, a whitepaper or ebook. Looking at the content this way also may give you ideas for additional articles you could write in future months to help fill in gaps. It also may be helpful in identifying topics for webinars and live events. Those articles can then be distributed to attendees as supplementary materials.

7. Enhance it.  

It’s beneficial for design reasons to add visual elements like charts and infographics, but even more importantly it’s great for content purposes. It grabs attention quickly and gives the reader some useful content at a glance. A great visual also entices people to read the text that explains the picture. Some other ways to enhance the content include adding in checklists, FAQs, case studies, interviews, surveys and video segments. You can also curate content that your audience would be interested in – that is, give them suggestions for other great resources (beside you) they would find helpful on the topic.

Your client newsletter can be an excellent vehicle for content marketing. Start with great content and then make the most of it.