Project Open Robe 12: Re-purposing and atomising your content

This is typical: you put a lot of effort into a chunky piece of marketing content — then retire it, move on and start working on the next piece. When you do that, you’re leaving a lot of content value behind and wasting a real opportunity to get more goodies for just a little more work.

Here’s an example. Our B2B Marketing Manifesto has had a great run (Neil will summarise just how great in an upcoming post) but traffic and downloads have started to settle down. Similarly, our Content Marketing Workbook went gangbusters for a while and is now a steady earner rather than start performer.

So here’s where the re-purposing comes in.

The Manifesto ends with the Six Staples of B2B Marketing (seven actually, there’s a bonus staple thrown in). So now the plan is to turn each of these into a short piece where we can drill down a bit more than we could in the Manifesto itself.

The first effort is The B2B Content Marketing Tutorial, a highly visual, interactive guide to a best-practice content marketing workflow. We did it as a Prezi to vary the media a bit (it would be great to do all seven in seven different media — if we can come up with seven). Take a look — but make sure you view it in fullscreen mode and use the play button to advance.

We hope The B2B Content Marketing Tutorial is more than an excerpt or simply a reshaping of existing content (you’d all get bored with that pretty quickly). Instead, it’s a new spin on a smaller topic within a larger piece: in this case, a guide to the HOW part of content marketing instead of the WHAT and WHY covered elsewhere.

Here are some principles of content re-purposing:

Zoom in – take a single chapter or topic from your big eBook and make it the whole subject of the next, shorter piece.

Complement – the Manifesto was strategic, so the Tutorial is tactical and practical.

Morph – change formats to keep things interesting. We’ve turned eBooks into checklists into videos into webinars into slideshows…

Connect – make an explicit connection between the pieces. Make them feel like a family. The Tutorial is in the Manifesto ‘spray paint stencil’ style. (It’s also connected to the Content Marketing Workbook, but we changed styles since doing that one).

Atomise – the Tutorial is on our site and the Prezi site, too. If it was, say, a deck, we’d put it on Slideshare, Scribd and Docstoc, too. If a video on YouTube, Vimeo and beyond.

Cross-promote – the Tutorial promotes the Manifesto and CM Workbook. And we’ll update those pieces to promote the Tutorial. Makes sense. Of course, we’ll also blog about it (like, um, now) and tweet about it and post it in LinkedIn groups and bookmark it and send it out to our e-newsletter subscribers (sign up using the form on the right)…

Open the gate – the Manifesto had a short form for data capture. The Tutorial doesn’t. We discuss that here.

Measure – this is essential on of any list of B2B principles. All links in the Tutorial are tagged for analytics and for Marketo, so we can watch our honoured audience as they poke and prod around our soft bits. (Ooh. That tickles.)

It’s early days — we only just posted the thing – but we’re getting lots of hits, some really good comments – and downloads of the Content Marketing Workbook and B2B Marketing Manifesto are spiking again. It’s like B2B Viagra.

Don’t just relegate your latest content piece to the dusty digital shelf. Give it a new spin, a quick squeeze and a zotz of energy.

More Project Open Robe, in which Velocity exposes itself to the elements:

Project Open Robe Part 1 – the one where we commit ourselves in public (Planning)

Project Open Robe Part 2 – the one where it all kicks off (Thinking)

Project Open Robe Part 3 – the one where confidence starts to rise (First results)

Project Open Robe Part 4 – the one where the trick shots start (Cross-promotion)

Project Open Robe Part 5 – the one where we share the first month’s results (Reviewing)

Project Open Robe Part 6 – the one where we toughen up (Soul Searching)

Project Open Robe Part 7 – the one where we find the world’s best marketers (Segmenting)

Project Open Robe Part 8 – the one where we show that design isn’t everything (Style v Substance)

Project Open Robe Part 9 – the one where lead nurturing proves its worth (Marketo)

Project Open Robe Part 10 – the one where the form fights back (Form v No Form)

Project Open Robe Part 11 – the one about autoDMs in Twitter

Project Open Robe Part 12 – the one about re-purposing and atomising your content

Project Open Robe Part 13 – the one with an early peek at the outcomes

Project Open Robe Part 14 – the one where it ends (before it starts again)