Resource restrictions? Reduce, reuse and recycle

Doing content marketing well in-house isn’t easy.

Not only does it take significant expertise and planning to develop a strategy, but the execution requires a huge investment of time, expertise and effort. Then you need to assess progress, adjust your strategy and start the whole process all over again. You could be forgiven for looking at this as a bit of a tall order.

But don’t be disheartened! The trick is to work smarter, not harder. There are many tricks and productivity hacks that can minimise the effort your in-house team needs to put in, and also deliver bigger rewards. Efficiency is the name of the game.

With that in mind, here are some of the practices you can put in place today, taking inspiration from the three Rs of sustainability.

Image credit: iStock/oatawa

Reduce

You don’t have to produce more content than your competitors to get ahead. There are many facets to the debate over quality vs quantity in content marketing, but it’s safe to say you won’t achieve much by churning out large amounts of poor content.

It may take time, effort and – above all – creativity to come up with ideas for amazing pieces of content, but the results will be worth it. If you’re facing resourcing issues, think about how you can reduce the amount of content you’re producing but make it outstanding. One great infographic, for instance, could deliver much more traffic and engagement than you would gain from 20 mediocre blog posts.

Reuse

Have you ever spent time crafting an email answering questions from a new client and thought to yourself: “Everyone asks this question… I must have written hundreds of emails saying the same thing”?

If the answer is yes, think about how you can turn this information into an asset on your website and link to it so your customers have the answers they need at their fingertips. As well as saving you time, it will give your audience what they require at the exact moment they’re looking for it.

Every day, members of staff create all sorts of content, from emails to training materials. The smartest companies are the ones that reuse these assets to strengthen their marketing efforts.

Recycle

A lot of the content you produce can be repurposed to maximise its marketing value – and content recycling takes less effort than creating something from scratch. For example, it’s relatively quick and easy to create a blog post from a video interview you’ve already conducted.

This also widens your potential audience, as some people may prefer watching a video to reading an article. Others – maybe those with limited internet bandwidth – are likely to prefer reading content than trying to stream video.

And it’s not just users who like content presented in various formats; Google does too.

Trying out different content types can make a big difference to your search engine rankings, so it’s worth experimenting to see which methods deliver the best results for you.

To find out more about how you can improve your SEO and make your content marketing more efficient, talk to Axonn today.

Contact us