Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes courtesy of Anne Murphy, Managing Editor at Kapost, creators of content marketing software. She oversees the production, distribution and analysis of content that empowers modern marketers to implement content marketing strategies in their organizations.
This year, research reported that creating enough content was the number one challenge for B2B content marketers.
Let that sink in. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 64% of B2B marketers, in fact, have too much demand and not enough supply.
It's easy to see why. It can be overwhelming to keep up with the quantity of content required to fuel the ever-growing number of distribution channels used to reach target buyers, from blogs to social media to marketing automation and beyond, not to mention content for sales enablement and account management...
But it doesn't have to be so much of a struggle.
Instead of spending your time brainstorming and producing one-off pieces of content with no connection to your business objectives other than filling a spot on the editorial calendar, what if you focused on creating extensive, thorough content assets on topics that interest your target buyers and speak to your brand's expertise? What if each of these content assets could then be broken into many derivative assets, with no additional brainstorming or start-from-scratch content creation required to fill that pesky editorial calendar?
Well, your stress levels would probably go down and your content output would probably go up.
We call it the "Content Pillar Approach."
A content pillar is a substantive and informative work on a specific topic or theme that can be broken into many derivative pieces of content to cover multiple channels. When you think "content pillar," think eBook, report, guide, long video, or any significant (meaning large and thorough) content asset.
For example, let's take an eBook. What goes into the creation of an eBook? Well, you have to conduct interviews with thought leaders and influencers to get their feedback on the topics you're writing about. You'll probably want to create a cool graphic, so you'll have to gather relevant stats and data. Then there's the text that needs to be written.
Already, that's a lot of hours logged for a single piece of content.
But what if you planned to have a videographer show up when you interviewed those influencers? You could create a series of videos to share on YouTube and embed in blog posts or emails. You can also pitch that graphic for syndication, and share it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to drive more traffic to your communities. With all the research you've done, you can create a presentation for SlideShare, then use that deck for a webinar. Then, that webinar recording can be turned into further videos, which can also be embedded in blog posts and shared across social channels. You can also take each section of text and turn it into multiple blog posts.
By using this approach, you can produce at least 269 pieces of content from a single eBook. Seriously. Take a look for yourself:
See! Not so hard after all.
This is just one example of how better planning can lead to an effective content marketing strategy. For more, check out the eBook titled The Blueprint of a Modern Marketing Campaign. It covers how to plan your marketing initiatives on a quarterly and monthly basis, fill the content needs of multiple departments in your organization, get the most out of every asset, organize all your efforts into a cohesive strategy, and a whole lot more marketing goodness.
In the meantime, try this: Take a good, hard look at a large piece of content you've already created. How many assets can you create from that single piece? Try to beat 269. (You can do it.)