You’ve heard about the power of content marketing hundreds of times.
As people take their search for health information online, quality content is an invaluable tool to educate, serve, and engage them better than your competitors. Done well, content marketing adds to your credibility as someone to trust.
The challenge?
There’s only so much time and financial resources to invest. We must make the most of every piece of content we create. Using an approach that not only finds a wide audience, but captures it.
Let’s talk about how to maximize your contents impact.
Before you create more content, what about repurposing the assets you already have?
Repurposing content helps you get the most mileage out of your campaigns. Quality content is labor intensive. If you’re willing to spend just a bit more time–a fraction of the total amount it takes to create the content–you can engage a broader audience.
You’ve already done the heavy lifting. You might as well go one step further and get the most traffic and engagement from it as you can. Repurposed content can also be distributed across multiple channels, which increases reach and finds different audiences. Finally, repurposing content gives your audience the option to consume it in whichever medium they prefer. If someone doesn’t like watching videos, for instance, they might be receptive to reading the content or listening to it as a podcast.
Just as you have to prioritize which content to create, limited time and resources force us to prioritize which content to repurpose.
Here are two guidelines to help you get started. Imagine these as adjacent circles in a Venn diagram. Focus on the overlap between the two for best results:
Ready to dust off some of your content and find a larger audience?
Each heading below focuses on a specific type of content you might already have, then offers ideas on how to repurpose it.
1. Blog Posts
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Blog posts are one of the most common forms of content. Unfortunately, a lot of healthcare marketers aren’t making good use of them. Blog readers tend to favor recency more than anything else. You might have published valuable insights a few months back, but it’s rare for people to find it because it doesn’t show up on the first page.
If you’ve been blogging awhile, you can gather articles related to a specific topic and organize them into a downloadable guide or eBook. This brings useful information back to the forefront of your audience’s mind. You could even use one of these bundles as a lead magnet to build your email list.
You can also turn every new blog into an email, which can contain either the entire post or a summary with a link back to your blog. This is a good way to stay in touch because very few email subscribers will check your website for new content regularly.
Hopefully you are also promoting every post on social media. Pick out a particularly compelling insight from the article, then share it across social media along with a link back to the full article.
2. Live Events and/or Webinars
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Speaking at conferences or other industry events are a great way to give others a “peek behind the brand” and build your credibility. Unfortunately, these live events only happen once!
What if you could increase your potential audience from whoever was in the room that day to everyone with an internet connection?
Now you can. Simply record (or get a copy of) the talk, upload it to popular video hosting websites like YouTube and Vimeo, and access a massive audience. If you give webinars, you can record and distribute them across the same platforms as well. This is definitely worthwhile with YouTube being the second-largest search engine in the world.
Watching an entire presentation webinar can seem daunting for viewers. To encourage them, cut up the footage into short clips related to specific topics. These easy to digest bites makes it much more likely your content will be viewed.
You can also repurpose audio from the event and upload it as a podcast, which is free on iTunes. This expands your reach to a new audience of commuters and people who don’t like consuming content while tied to a screen.
Finally, you can have someone transcribe the event (or just what you said) and post it to your company blog. That text is bound to be full of good information–a draw for people who like to read and scan.
3. PowerPoint Presentations
Image credit: ttreis
PowerPoints are a dime a dozen and few draw in the audience. It takes real work to come up with the graphics, content, and structure needed to create a compelling presentation.
But what happens after the big presentation ends? Those slides you worked so hard on end up gathering dust on your hard drive…never to be seen again.
Several websites let you upload and share those presentations to reach a much broader audience. The most popular option is Slideshare, which was purchased by LinkedIn. But there are many others to explore as well. These sites get a lot of traffic from people typing in specific search terms. And the social networking aspect of LinkedIn encourages people who like your slides to share them with their contacts.
It only takes a few minutes to upload slides, and the information stays up there once it’s published. So it’s definitely worth the effort.
4. Data and Statistics
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You’ve probably collected mountains of data on your customers’ behavior and the industry at large. Analytics have given us more quantifiable insights to guide our businesses than ever before. Tools like SurveyMonkey and Qualaroo make collecting survey data simple.
All that data provides invaluable feedback as you tweak your marketing strategy. Some of it can be useful for your audience as well.
Statistics offer insights about your audience they might not have known otherwise. If you conduct a survey and find that patients who receive yearly physicals had lower rates of hypertension, you could share that stat as a Tweet. These interesting factoids are perfect for people to like and share.
If you’ve collected a lot of interesting data about a specific topic, you can always have a designer format it and create an infographic. These infographics are visually compelling and present data in an easily-digestible way. There’s good reason why they tend to perform so well on social media.
5. Podcasts
Image credit: 708065
Some people prefer listening to podcasts because it gives them the ability to step away from the screen. Instead of being anchored in place like with text or video, listeners can enjoy the content while exercising, going to the store, or on their commute.
Creating podcasts requires significant effort, but quality ones establish a long-term relationship with listeners. When published consistently, they become something listeners looks forward to–a regular part of their routines.
One of the easiest ways to repurpose podcasts is to have someone transcribe them. Then you can publish it to your blog. This allows busy readers to scan through and pick out the most important bits. You can also pull out juicy chunks of transcribed content and use it to promote the podcast over social media.
Reach–and Engage–a Larger Audience
Investing in top-notch content marketing lays a foundation for credibility, a greater reach, and more engagement. To make the most of every piece of content you produce, consider repurposing it into different mediums and distributing it across multiple channels.
You’ve done all the hard work already. You might as well reach and engage as many prospects as possible.
