Successful content marketing is rooted in providing value to your online audience. They literally won’t return unless you’re providing actionable assets and ideas—at first with every communication, and then on a regular cadence as your relationship solidifies.
Providing all of that value on a consistent basis takes a lot of work (yes, even with AI) and investment that many companies shy away from, but it’s the only way to build a loyal customer base that actually promotes your brand on their own. The good news is, you don’t necessarily need to create new content to do it.
You know intuitively that you can’t simply re-post the same exact content in the same exact format without turning off some of your audience—it just needs to be tweaked in some way. Time and effort is still required, but it’s less, and you’re wringing more value out of the content your team worked so hard to produce in the first place.
So let’s use a sustainability approach—“zero-waste”—and look at how we might maximize a single piece of content.
Creating 90+ Assets from 1 Whitepaper
For this example, we’re going to use our own free whitepaper on SEO. Here’s how we’re maximizing its visibility in our digital marketing strategy:
- The whitepaper has its own landing page, and viewers can be directed there from a variety of places
- Elements of the white paper are summarized as the focus of multiple blog posts
- Those blog posts can be shared via social media
- The whitepaper can be offered in an e-newsletter
- The blog post and whitepaper get hyperlinked within future blog posts.
That’s already four uses for a single document—but it’s just the beginning!
The whitepaper text can be adapted for video. You could write this adaptation yourself and record it with just a smartphone or go full-blown studio production with Informatics.
Need help writing the script? Input the original text to ChatGPT or Google Gemini with a prompt like: “Summarize this content for a 5-minute video explainer script.” With any AI use, the results need to be checked for accuracy, but this can provide a great head start on turning your text into a video.
These videos could be cross-posted on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. Just remember to make sure you’re taking into account the demographic strengths and weaknesses of each platform. Does the video fit there?
Now we’re up to 11 uses of the whitepaper, and that number is about to explode.
Your whitepaper is likely already broken into easily digestible sections. You could make a 30-60 second video summarizing each particular section. If you had 10 sections and posted one short video per week, that’s 2.5 months of video posts. Multiplied across the different video-sharing platforms, we’re now at 61 uses of a single whitepaper.
Some audiences are interested in audio content, and we have something for them, too. A high-quality YouTube video can quickly be converted to an audio file and included in your company’s podcast.
If you had a podcast that covered the entire world of digital marketing, your 10 videos-turned-audio could constitute an “SEO Minute” recurring feature. That brings us up to 71 pieces of content originating from a single whitepaper.
In all likelihood your whitepaper features a mix of relevant statistics, bulleted action plans, and quotes from industry leaders. What if each one of those valuable nuggets of information was broken out into its own graphic?
If each section had two such valuable pieces, then you already have 20 graphics to be made and shared, and over 90 total pieces of shareable content from a single whitepaper.
The Possibilities Are Endless
This is one way to carve up a large piece of valuable content, but you could also consider creating an animated explainer video, hosting a webcast with industry thought leaders to discuss the topic, or finding an industry colleague who will host a guest blog where you summarize the topic.
Repurposing older content not only helps you save time and potential headaches, but it's a great way to help drive new audiences to content that has performed well in the past. It's a win-win strategy for everyone.
Need help greening up your content marketing strategy? Contact the experts at Informatics! We'd love to help you meet your digital goals.
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