Rinse and repeat: repackaging content marketing

Generating B2B content marketing ideas is cited as a marketer’s biggest challenge. And it is understandable. Yes, it needs to be relevant to the target market, but to understand this fully you need to drill down and discover exactly what this requirement actually entails.

You could create the best blog post in the world, on a site designed by a premium web agency, filled with fancy JavaScript and CSS. It could be written by the latest big-name writer from the New York Times or the Guardian. It may feature specially produced photography from Annie Leibovitz.

And it could still fail.

Because the idea is everything. And for a good content marketing idea to bring in custom it needs to fit the audiences’ needs, and be relevant in terms of geography, role, sector, product and service.

No wonder it’s such a challenge.

The solution

One way around this is to repackage your existing content. Or at least items that have done well. So list out those features or posts, look at what they have in common, that can provide the foundation for new ideas.

Most publications engage in this sort of practice, so there is nothing new about it. In fact, there is a certain amount of skill in taking an existing idea and fashioning something new. In newspaper terms, it is called moving the story on. Successful content can often be taken and repackaged into a collection of longer items or even an ebook.

So how would one move the story on? It is often a simple case of combining existing material with new developments in the area. Combining it with another story or even taking the opposite view if it is a comment piece.

Tapas

It’s the opinion of FirstWord that content marketing can almost be treated as a type of tapas, where different pieces of content can be used collectively depending on individual needs.

A good example of this is Dell’s Nurture campaign, which consisted of hundreds of pieces of content. These were then used to create larger collections of articles based on a particular target consumer’s requirement. It allowed for thousands of different combinations.

Conclusion

The point is that the generation of ideas, although difficult, can often be achieved by formula. Originality is good, but it is more important that the result should be something the customer wants to read. In short, it is ok to reuse old ideas, provided you make sure it’s sent to the right people at the right time and about the right thing.

Rinse and repeat: repackaging content marketing is part of Content24, the blog for London content marketing agency FirstWord.