We understand that it can be overwhelming for business owners and small businesses who don’t necessarily have a digital marketer on their team, or a dedicated external marketing resource, to ensure that they are consistently posting engaging and relevant content on their social media channels.
The goal for any business using social media as part of their digital marketing strategy, is to engage and attract potential new clients or customers for their business or service, and to build brand engagement and loyalty through building relationships with prospects and clients alike.
For any social media strategy to be successful you have to ensure that you’re posting regularly and that your content educates, informs, entertains and benefits the targeted reader.
So how can we make this process of building and sharing content easier for business owners? The answer is: Leveraging Content.
What does Leveraging Content Mean?
Leveraging content means that you take one piece of content and then turn it into multiple pieces to share across your various digital channels. Your goal should be to create at least 8 pieces of content from that first piece.
How do we Leverage Content?
Firstly, you need to create a piece of content. Let’s take creating a video as an example. You can easily film a great video now on your cell phone, and then share it on YouTube. This is your first piece of content.
You then take that first piece of content and recraft it into multiple pieces of content:
- The video can be posted on all your social media accounts
- Create a blog post from the video transcript (watch this 1 minute video to learn how to easily download your video transcript on YouTube)
- Email the video transcript along with a link to the video to your email subscription list as part of your “keep in touch” strategy with clients and prospects
- Use the audio from your video to create a podcast
- Summarise your video content into an infographic which is a highly visual and engaging tool to share on social media
- Create a checklist from the tips shared in your video package as a downloadable pdf ebook for your website
- Use the key points or quotes from your video to create short form posts on Twitter or your other social media channels
Here’s a great example of leveraging video content from Viveka von Rosen at Vengreso. Viveka created a video on the best video conferencing tools, which is very timely in our current COVID-19 situation! There are a lot of us trying to continue business operations as normal by utilizing video conferencing tools, so this piece of content is very relevant for her target market (Vengreso provides digital training and consulting for sales professionals).
This video was then posted as a blog on the Vengreso website and was also shared on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Another great example of leveraging content is from the Women’s Travel Network. Each month they send out a detailed newsletter to their subscription list. They then use the content from the newsletter to create posts on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.
How Newsjacking Can Help
Newjacking is the process of adding your thoughts and insights to breaking stories or pop-culture trends to increase awareness of your brand and services. So essentially, you’re leveraging someone else’s content, or a situation that’s unfolding.
Newsjacking was a term that was popularized by David Meerman Scott’s book “Newsjacking” in 2011. In the chart below you can see that Meerman recommends the perfect time for Newsjacking is just after a story has broken and before the journalists have been able to fully research the topic or event and release their more in-depth articles.
Source: newsjacking.com
Practically speaking for business owners it may not be possible to be able to get in at this part of the curve due to other responsibilities of running a business, but if you can get in on that upward curve, and definitely before your competitors, you have a real opportunity of presenting yourself as a thought-leader within your industry.
Make sure to use the hashtags that are associated with the current situation or trend so that your content will potentially be seen by those people actively following that hashtag.
Here’s a great example by Bob Kyriakides from Digital Hero who jumped on the story of Zoom’s security issues to make sure that everyone was aware of it. Bob then posted the solution as soon as Zoom had fixed the issues. He did a great job of using the relevant hashtags and sharing and commenting on this industry relevant news meant he reinforced his credibility within the industry and also increased his brand exposure to potential clients.
So, the key thing to remember is that when you invest time in creating one piece of content, whether it’s a blog, a client presentation or a video, make sure you recraft that piece of content into multiple pieces. This is the easiest way to ensure that you have enough content to keep your social media calendar full, and keep your potential clients seeing relevant, engaging and entertaining information from you.
If you need help with creating a digital marketing plan that’s going to boost your brand awareness and generate revenue, please give us a call at 905-726-8399. We’d love to chat.
