Winston and I had a great time speaking and working with about 25 B2B companies recently, where we gave them the lowdown on how to use their websites to get found early in the sales process, generate more leads, and reach an international audience. There was an incredible level of audience participation in the workshop part of the day, and someone asked me how they could reuse older content to enhance their lead generation efforts.
Content creation is a huge time commitment for small marketing teams. Marketers in one-person "teams" are strapped for time as it is, and consistently creating new, relevant, well-developed content is an insurmountable challenge.
That said, I wanted to offer up a few ways that your company can re-use older content to continue to build your B2B lead generation efforts. Try these.
1. Maintain a social media calendar and repost
The life of a social media post is incredibly short - just an hour or two in some cases, a few days in others. One way we get more mileage out of content we’ve already written or curated is to find a new way to refer to the article and post it again. You can even keep a social media calendar so you don’t post the same content more than once in a week.
Many blog posts, for example, have 3-5 main points. You can repost links to a blog post several times. The first time, you may simply state the title of the post. Then, weeks later, you can repost the same message with one of the key points of the article.
2. Put content into a new format
Did you write a potential customer a detailed email or assemble several resources for them as they researched your product or service? Remove the names and edit the email for your blog, and you’ve got a new blog post for your website.
You may also give presentations to trade groups, and you can take the Powerpoint deck, place it on Slideshare and write a recap for your blog.
3. Email newsletters
Just because you post a blog post on your website doesn’t mean that all of your visitors or even your email list saw the post. You might want to send out a blog recap monthly, or even include a popular past blog post in your email marketing campaign.
4. Link blog posts on your “product” or “service” pages
Pages on your website that talk about your products or services might not be as relevant to early-stage buyers as you might think. Including links to blog posts or other resources that pertain to the product or service page they’re on will help engage them and get them back on track when it comes to their research. It can also help them further engage with your company and see you as an industry leader.
5. Content curation
You’re probably keeping up with the events, trends and happenings in your industry. During your reading, you might want to bookmark articles (or post to Evernote) and organize them into topics. Once you’ve organized them into topics, you can write a paragraph summarizing each link, an introduction, and you have an industry bulletin you can post to your blog, email to subscribers, and post to social media.
We understand the challenge of creating new content for your B2B company. If you’d like some help thinking through how you might supplement your efforts with help from an expert, or just would like a more strategic take on how your company uses content to generate awareness and leads, please let me know.
