So, you have a great piece of content. You and your team have worked tirelessly to create something that your target audience will love, but how do you ensure you get return on investment for all that time and effort?
Has this happened to you? There are many challenges facing content creators once their content is in market. Here are some examples that we hear a lot:
- You’ve created a beautiful video explaining your solution to your target market’s problem. You’ve shouted it from the rooftops for months now, but the message is getting tired. How can you spice it up without creating a brand-new piece of content?
- You’ve invested in a key piece of industry research/proprietary content, but need to make it more accessible and relatable in order to generate some ROI.
- You’ve a small budget for creating content and can’t afford to make all five of the infographics that you’ll need this year.
We have two words for you: Content. Stacking.
Content stacking is about taking your big piece of content and breaking it down into smaller, more digestible nuggets that you can spread across a variety of mediums. What’s great about it, is that by working through different channels you are giving people a choice about how they consume your content.
Not everyone is a visual person and not everyone is an audio person*. It’s important to give people choice!
How does it work?
Let’s go back to the example of the solutions focussed video we mentioned earlier. Let’s say it’s 6 minutes long. The first thing you could do is break it up into 3 bites of 2 minutes each, with each video focusing on a particular point of information. For example:
- Video 1 – Who are we?
- Video 2 – What can we do for you?
- Video 3 – Why should you choose us?
These videos can be utilised on your company website and, if you have one, your YouTube channel where potential users have the chance to stumble across them. If you wanted to capture the attention of more people, you could use the audio from these videos to create a mini-podcast series which can be used to direct people to your site or make them aware of your service.
You could also repurpose the content of your video as a mini-brochure, blog article or even a white paper (depending on the content!) that your customers can print, share and distribute to colleagues. You may have seen something similar with LinkedIn’s webinars via Lynda.com. Some people will just stay for the blog, and that’s fine.
- How to guides
- Lists
- Interviews with your team
- Tutorials on how to get the best use out of your product or service
- White papers
- Webinars.
Different types of executions and media will appeal to different prospects and customers, you’re still telling the one story, with a unified and coherent narrative that stresses the same features and benefits. Doesn’t that sound great?
Why is content stacking so effective?
The most powerful part about content stacking is being able to communicate your content and ideas across different media and bring them to bear on prospects at different stages of the buying cycle. As your audience trickles through your funnel, they are directed to more and more content snippets, and they could finally end up at the original campaign asset that was the seed for this forest of activity. Those engaging with the content through the journey will stand a stronger chance of becoming customers and advocates.You raise awareness of potential customers. They’ve heard your call and they want to see what you’ve got. In a short space of time, and as your customers make their through the cycle, your marketing strategy will strip this number of potential people down until you have yourself an army of service loving advocates. These are the kind souls who will go out to spread the good word about you.
More awareness means more advocates at the end of the line.
How many advocates you get is dependent on the journey you take them on through the cycle.
The net result here is that you’ve widened your net and captured the awareness of people who might never have caught your message if you were simply writing a blog or chucking videos onto YouTube. In addition, with potential customers following your message from blog, to video, to audio and anywhere in between, you have them navigating through your environment, you’re keeping them engaged with your product, your service, and your brand.
So, what’s been made of that single piece of key content you created?
You’re now reusing it across a variety of mediums by breaking it down into smaller snippets. You don’t have to worry anymore about bombarding your audience with the same message, you have a great variety now. Talk about great bang for buck on your marketing budget, this will surely help get your awesome projects approved.
For more information on content stacking or how we can help, reach out to The Walk.
* Source – https://www.adammulholland.com/why-content-stacking-is-important