Take a Swiss Army Knife Approach to Your Content

It takes a village to create content. It's an extensive process, from strategizing and creating to designing and distributing. And for smaller marketing teams–that workload can be a real uphill battle, especially if you’re trying to be consistent. 

For smaller marcom teams, content is a fundamental part of marketing—reaching prospective buyers, educating them, and enticing them to purchase. That means it’s non-negotiable if you want to see real revenue growth. 

Don’t worry; we have a solution. We often hear people on smaller marketing teams referred to as Swiss Army Knives–performing many job responsibilities and wearing many hats. Considering that, I’m confident this solution will resonate with you.

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Enter: The Swiss Army Knife

You might ask, ‘What does a tool developed for soldiers in the late 1800s have to do with me and my marketing? I’ve never even been in battle.” Don’t stress. This isn’t one of those ‘comparing the workplace to warfare’ scenarios (did someone say mission critical?).

Applying a Swiss Army Knife approach to your content can help it go the extra mile–meaning content creation doesn’t have to feel like a battle between your team and the rest of their workloads ever again.

The truth is, content creation should be fun, and if you do it right, it can lead to customers coming directly to you when they’re ready to buy instead of your sales team having to constantly chase cold leads.

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Make your marketing go further with less

Okay, I’ll stop beating around the bush. The Swiss Army Knife symbolizes adaptability, versatility, and usefulness–all things your content (and marketing strategy as a whole) should be. There is a greater investment if you have many tools that all accomplish different things. 

Instead of treating each piece of your content as one tool that accomplishes one specific thing on one specific channel, turn each piece of content into a Swiss Army Knife–a tool that can accomplish many goals in many places to save your team time in their workloads. 

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What’s Content Repurposing & Why Should You Should Do It

Content repurposing is the practice of reusing all or some aspects of existing content in order to expand that content’s reach across channels. There are many benefits to repurposing your content, including:

• Maximizing the Value that Content is Already Creating: If you have a really great piece of content, you want more people to see it. Distributing it in different formats across channels allows greater reach, visibility, and engagement. 
• Saving Time and Resources: Don’t force your team to spin their wheels on how to find time to create completely different content for each channel. Your team should be focusing on quality over quantity. Instead of figuring out how to create completely new and different content on all channels, your team can work on other initiatives or get started on that next great piece of content (don’t worry, you can repurpose that, too).
• Overcoming the Evolution of Content Consumption: Everyone consumes content in different ways and places. That’s the importance of a multi-channel strategy. Repurposing your content across channels allows you to reach prospective customers wherever they want to spend their time-consuming information. 

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Here’s an Example

You just finished hosting a big webinar with two of your company’s top thought leaders, who are typically hard to pin down to get good content or sound bites from. After all that work put into scheduling a time to host it, promoting it, and dealing with the stresses of ensuring the live feed is working correctly, why just put the webinar on your website and move on afterward? Why would you limit the reach and use of that great knowledge? 

Here’s what you can do with that webinar content after it’s all said and done:

• Produce a Blog: You can use the webinar content to develop a blog for people who like to consume the written word. Then you can post those blogs on social media and in your email newsletter.
• Multiple Video Clips: Take that webinar and cut it into smaller clips. Then, you can post those clips on social media. This is great for those who didn’t watch the webinar and for those whose attention span is better suited for shorter videos (like me). 
• Single Image Graphics: Pull some of those noteworthy quotes into graphics and post those on your social media pages.
• Create an Infographic: You might even be able to create a nice infographic using any statistics discussed in the webinar. 
• Long-Form Content: You can compile insights from the webinar into a more in-depth resource like an ebook, whitepaper, or guide. 
• Email Newsletter: Highlight the key takeaways from the webinar in your email newsletter to subscribers. 
• Email Drip Campaign: You can use the webinar content in emails that will be delivered to prospective customers you’re currently nurturing in any email drip campaigns. 
• Slide Deck Download: Offer the slide deck as a downloadable resource to those who didn’t attend the webinar. 

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Now, for example, that one webinar might take the form of (3) blog posts and (3) associated social posts, (12) video social posts, (6) graphics with quotes, (1) Ebook, (1) Email Newsletter Topic, (1) drip campaign resource, (1) gated slide deck, and maybe you could even run some ads. All from one original piece of content–talk about a return on investment! 

The Swiss Army Knife Approach is all about doing more (but being effective) with less. You’ll still need to develop a content strategy and create different formats, but now your team won’t feel like their hair is on fire trying to push out enough content to keep up with your competition.

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