Getting Real with Retail: An Agency’s Guide to Inspiring In-Store Excellence

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by MiriamEllis

No marketing agency staffer feels good when they see a retail client getting reviews like this on the web.

But we can find out why they’re happening, and if we’re going above-and-beyond in our work, we just might be able to catalyze turning things around if we’re committed to being honest with clients and have an actionable strategy for their in-store improvements.

In this post, I’ll highlight some advice from an internal letter at Tesla that I feel is highly applicable to the retail sector. I’d also like to help your agency combat the retail blues headlining the news these days with big brands downsizing, liquidating and closing up shop — I’m going to share a printable infographic with some statistics with you that are almost guaranteed to generate the client positivity so essential to making real change. And, for some further inspiration, I’d like to offer a couple of anecdotes involving an Igloo cooler, a monk, reindeer moss, and reviews.

The genuine pain of retail gone wrong: The elusive cooler, "Corporate," and the man who could hardly stand

“Hi there,” I greeted the staffer at the customer service counter of the big department store. “Where would I find a small cooler?”

“We don’t have any,” he mumbled.

“You don’t have any coolers? Like, an Igloo cooler to take on a picnic to keep things cold?”

“Maybe over there,” he waved his hand in unconcern.

And I stood there for a minute, expecting him to actually figure this out for me, maybe even guide me to the appropriate aisle, or ask a manager to assist my transaction, if necessary. But in his silence, I walked away.

“Hi there,” I tried with more specificity at the locally owned general store the next day. “Where would I find something like a small Igloo cooler to keep things cold on a picnic?”

“I don’t know,” the staffer replied.

“Oh…” I said, uncomfortably.

“It could be upstairs somewhere,” he hazarded, and left me to quest for the second floor, which appeared to be a possibly-non-code-compliant catch-all attic for random merchandise, where I applied to a second dimly illuminated employee who told me I should probably go downstairs and escalate my question to someone else.

And apparently escalation was necessary, for on the third try, a very tall man was able to lift his gaze to some coolers on a top shelf… within clear view of the checkout counter where the whole thing began.

Why do we all have experiences like this?

“Corporate tells us what to carry” is the almost defensive-sounding refrain I have now received from three employees at two different Whole Foods Markets when asking if they could special order items for me since the Amazon buyout.

Because, you know, before they were Amazon-Whole Foods, staffers would gladly offer to procure anything they didn’t have in stock. Now, if they stop carrying that Scandinavian vitamin D-3 made from the moss eaten by reindeer and I’ve got to have it because I don’t want the kind made by irradiating sheep wool, I’d have to special order an entire case of it to get my hands on a bottle. Because, you know, “Corporate.”

Why does the distance between corporate and customer make me feel like the store I’m standing in, and all of its employees, are powerless? Why am I, the customer, left feeling powerless?

So maybe my search for a cooler, my worries about access to reindeer moss, and the laughable customer service I’ve experienced don’t signal “genuine pain.” But this does:

This is genuine pain. When customer service is failing to the point that badly treated patrons are being further distressed by the sight of fellow shoppers meeting the same fate, the cause is likely built into company structure. And your marketing agency is looking at a bonafide reputation crisis that could presage things like lawsuits, impactful reputation damage, and even closure for your valuable clients.

When you encounter customer service disasters, it begs questions like:

1. Could no one in my situation access a list of current store inventory, or, barring that, seek out merchandise with me instead of risking the loss of a sale?
2. Could no one offer to let “corporate” know that I’m dissatisfied with a “customer service policy” that would require me to spend $225 to buy a whole case of vitamins? Why am I being treated like a warehouse instead of a person?
3. Could no one at the pharmacy see a man with a leg wound about to fall over, grab a folding chair for him, and keep him safe, instead of risking a lawsuit?

I think a “no” answer to all three questions proceeds from definite causes. And I think Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, had such causes in mind when he recently penned a letter to his own employees.

“It must be okay for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”

“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command.' Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a 'company rule' is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.”
- Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla

Let’s parlay this uncommon advice into retail. If it’s everyone’s job to access a free flow of information, use common sense, make the right thing happen, and change rules that don’t make sense, then:

1. Inventory is known by all store staff, and my cooler can be promptly located by any employee, rather than workers appearing helpless.
2. Employees have the power to push back and insist that, because customers still expect to be able to special order merchandise, a specific store location will maintain this service rather than disappoint consumers.
3. Pharmacists can recognize that patrons are often quite ill and can immediately place some chairs near the pharmacy counter, rather than close their eyes to suffering.

“But wait,” retailers may say. “How can I trust that an employee’s idea of ‘common sense’ is reliable?”

Let’s ask a monk for the answer.

“He took the time...”

I recently had the pleasure of listening to a talk given by a monk who was defining what it meant to be a good leader. He hearkened back to his young days, and to the man who was then the leader of his community.

“He was a busy man, but he took the time to get to know each of us one-on-one, and to be sure that we knew him. He set an example for me, and I watched him,” the monk explained.

Most monasteries function within a set of established rules, many of which are centuries old. You can think of these guidelines as a sort of policy. In certain communities, it’s perfectly acceptable that some of the members live apart as hermits most of the year, only breaking their meditative existence by checking in with the larger group on important holidays to share what they’ve been working on solo. In others, every hour has its appointed task, from prayer, to farming, to feeding people, to engaging in social activism.

The point is that everyone within a given community knows the basic guidelines, because at some point, they’ve been well-communicated. Beyond that, it is up to the individual to see whether they can happily live out their personal expression within the policy.

It’s a lot like retail can be, when done right. And it hinges on the question:

“Has culture been well-enough communicated to every employee so that he or she can act like the CEO of the company would in wide variety of circumstances?”

Or to put it another way, would Amazon owner Jeff Bezos be powerless to get me my vitamins?

The most accessible modern benchmark of good customer service — the online review — is what tells the public whether the CEO has “set the example.” Reviews tell whether time has been taken to acquaint every staffer with the business that employs them, preparing them to fit their own personal expression within the company’s vision of serving the public.

An employee who is able to recognize that an injured patron needs a seat while awaiting his prescription should be empowered to act immediately, knowing that the larger company supports treating people well. If poor training, burdensome chains of command, or failure to share brand culture are obstacles to common-sense personal initiative, the problem must be traced back to the CEO and corrected, starting from there.

And, of course, should a random staffer’s personal expression genuinely include an insurmountable disregard for other people, they can always be told it’s time to leave the monastery...

For marketing agencies, opportunity knocks

So your agency is auditing a valuable incoming client, and their negative reviews citing dirty premises, broken fixtures, food poisoning, slowness, rudeness, cluelessness, and lack of apparent concern make you say to yourself,

“Well, I was hoping we could clean up the bad data on the local business listings for this enterprise, but unless they clean up their customer service at 150 of their worst-rated locations, how much ROI are we really going to be able to deliver? What’s going on at these places?”

Let’s make no bones about this: Your honesty at this critical juncture could mean the difference between survival and closure for the brand.

You need to bring it home to the most senior level person you can reach in the organization that no amount of honest marketing can cover up poor customer service in the era of online reviews. If the brand has fallen to the level of the pharmacy I’ve cited, structural change is an absolute necessity. You can ask the tough questions, ask for an explanation of the bad reviews.

“But I’m just a digital marketer,” you may think. “I’m not in charge of whatever happens offline.”

Think again.

Headlines in retail land are horrid right now:

• The mall crisis is secretly morphing into a full-on Armageddon - Business Insider
• America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning - Bloomberg
• Retail Wreck? Over 1,000 Stores Close in a Single Week - NBC
• 8 Companies Amazon is Killing - Investopedia
• These major retailers have closed more than 5,000 stores in 2017 - Clark.com

If you were a retail brand C-suite and were swallowing these predictions of doom with your daily breakfast, wouldn’t you be looking for inspiration from anyone with genuine insight? And if a marketing agency should make it their business to confront the truth while also being the bearer of some better news, wouldn’t you be ready to listen?

What is the truth? That poor reviews are symptoms smart doctors can use for diagnosis of structural problems.
What is the better news? The retail scenario is not nearly as dire as it may seem.

Why let hierarchy and traditional roles hold your agency back? Tesla wouldn’t. Why not roll up your sleeves and step into in-store? Organize and then translate the narrative negative reviews are telling about structural problems for the brand which have resulted in dangerously bad customer service. And then, be prepared to counter corporate inertia born of fear with some eye-opening statistics.

Print and share some good retail tidings

Print your own copy of this infographic to share with clients.

At Moz, we’re working with enterprises to get their basic location data into shape so that they are ready to win their share of the predicted $1.4 trillion in mobile-influenced local sales by 2021, and your agency can use these same numbers to combat indecision and apathy for your retail clients. Look at that second statistic again: 90% of purchases are still happening in physical stores. At Moz, we ask our customers if their data is ready for this. Your agency can ask its clients if their reputations are ready for this, if their employees have what they need to earn the brand’s piece of that 90% action. Great online data + great in-store service = table stakes for retail success.

While I won’t play down the unease that major brand retail closures is understandably causing, I hope I’ve given you the tools to fight the “retail disaster” narrative. 85% more mobile users are searching for things like “Where do I buy that reindeer moss vitamin D3?” than they were just 3 years ago. So long as retail staff is ready to deliver, I see no “apocalypse” here.

Investing time

So, your agency has put in the time to identify a reputation problem severe enough that it appears to be founded in structural deficiencies or policies. Perhaps you’ve used some ORM software to do review sentiment analysis to discover which of your client’s locations are hurting worst, or perhaps you’ve done an initial audit manually. You've communicated the bad news to the most senior-level person you can reach at the company, and you've also shared the statistics that make change seem very worthwhile, begging for a new commitment to in-store excellence. What happens next?

While there are going to be nuances specific to every brand, my bet is that the steps will look like this for most businesses:

1. C-suites need to invest time in creating a policy which a) abundantly communicates company culture, b) expresses trust in employee initiative, and c) dispenses with needless “chain of command” steps, while d) ensuring that every public facing staffer receives full and ongoing training. A recent study says 62% of new retail hires receive less than 10 hours of training. I’d call even these worrisome numbers optimistic. I worked at 5 retail jobs in my early youth. I’d estimate that I received no more than 1 hour of training at any of them.
2. Because a chain of command can’t realistically be completely dispensed with in a large organization, store managers must then be allowed the time to communicate the culture, encourage employees to use common sense, define what “common sense” does and doesn’t look like to the company, and, finally, offer essential training.
3. Employees at every level must be given the time to observe how happy or unhappy customers appear to be at their location, and they must be taught that their observations are of inestimable value to the brand. If an employee suggests a solution to a common consumer complaint, this should be recognized and rewarded.
4. Finally, customers must be given the time to air their grievances at the time of service, in-person, with accessible, responsive staff. The word “corporate” need never come into most of these conversations unless a major claim is involved. Given that it may cost as much as 7x more to replace an unhappy customer than to keep an existing one happy, employees should be empowered to do business graciously and resolve complaints, in most cases, without escalation.

Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said that “time is money.” While the adage rings true in business, reviews have taught me the flip side — that a lack of time equals less money. Every negative review that cites helpless employees and poor service sounds to my marketing ears like a pocketful of silver dollars rolling down a drain.

The monk says good leaders make the time to communicate culture one-on-one.

Tesla says rules should change if they’re ridiculous.

Chairs should be offered to sick people… where common sense is applied.

Reviews can read like this:

And digital marketers have never known a time quite like this to have the ear of retail, maybe stepping beyond traditional boundaries into the fray of the real world. Maybe making a fundamental difference.

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How Do You Set Smart SEO Goals for Your Team/Agency/Project? - Whiteboard Friday

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by randfish

Are you sure that your current SEO goals are the best fit for your organization? It's incredibly important that they tie into both your company goals and your marketing goals, as well as provide specific, measurable metrics you can work to improve. In this edition of Whiteboard Friday, Rand outlines how to set the right SEO goals for your team and shares two examples of how different businesses might go about doing just that.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about SEO goals, how to set smart ones, how to measure your progress against them, how to amplify those goals to the rest of your organization so that people really buy in to SEO.

This is a big challenge. So many folks that I've talked to in the field have basically said, "I'm not sure exactly how to set goals for our SEO team that are the right ones." I think that there's a particularly pernicious problem once Google took away the keyword-level data for SEO referrals.

So, from paid search, you can see this click was on this keyword and sent traffic to this page and then here's how it performed after that. In organic search, you can no longer do that. You haven't been able to do it for a few years now. Because of that removal, proving the return on investment for SEO has been really challenging. We'll talk in a future Whiteboard Friday about proving ROI. But let's focus here on how you get some smart SEO goals that are actually measurable, trackable, and pertain intelligently to the goals of the business, the organization.

Where to start:

So the first thing, the first problem that I see is that a lot of folks start here, which seems like a reasonable idea, but is actually a terrible idea. Don't start with your SEO goals. When your SEO team gets together or when you get together with your consultants, your agency, don't start with what the SEO goals should be.

• Start with the company goals. This is what our company is trying to accomplish this quarter or this year or this month.
• Marketing goals. Go from there to here's how marketing is going to contribute to those company goals. So if the company has a goal of increasing sales, marketing's job is what? Is marketing's job improving the conversion funnel? Is it getting more traffic to the top of the funnel? Is it bringing back more traffic that's already been to the site but needs to be re-earned? Those marketing goals should be tied directly to the company goals so that anyone and everyone in the organization can clearly see, "Here's why marketing is doing what they're doing."
• SEO goals. Next, here's how SEO contributes to those marketing goals. So if the goal is around, as we mentioned, growing traffic to the top of the funnel, for example, SEO could be very broad in their targeting. If it's bringing people back, you've got to get much more narrow in your keyword targeting.
• Specific metrics to measure and improve. From those SEO goals, you can get the outcome of specific metrics to measure and improve.

Measurable goal metrics

So that list is kind of right here. It's not very long. There are not that many things in the SEO world that we can truly measure directly. So measurable goal metrics might be things like...

1. Rankings. Which we can measure in three ways. We can measure them globally, nationally, or locally. You can choose to set those up.

2. Organic search visits. So this would be just the raw traffic that is sent from organic search.

3. You can also separate that into branded search versus non-branded search. But it's much more challenging than it is with paid, because we don't have the keyword data. Thus, we have to use an implied or inferred model, where essentially we say, "These pages are likely to be receiving branded search traffic, versus these pages that are likely to be receiving non-branded search traffic."

A good example is the homepage of most brands is most likely to get primarily branded search traffic, whereas resource pages, blog pages, content marketing style pages, those are mostly going to get unbranded. So you can weight those appropriately as you see fit.

Tracking your rankings is crucially important, because that way you can see which pages show up for branded queries versus which pages show up for unbranded queries, and then you can build pretty darn good models of branded search versus non-branded search visits based on which landing pages are going to get traffic.

4. SERP ownership. So ideas around your reputation in the search results. So this is essentially looking at the page of search results that comes up for a given query and what results are in there. There might be things you don't like and don't want and things you really do want, and the success and failure can be measured directly through the rankings in the SERP.

5. Search volume. So for folks who are trying to improve their brand's affinity and reputation on the web and trying to grow the quantity of branded search, which is a good metric, you can look at that through things like Google Trends or through a Google AdWords campaign or through something like Moz's Keyword Explorer.

6. Links and link metrics. So you could look at the growth or shrinkage of links over time. You can measure that through things like the number of linking root domains, the total number of links. Authority or spam metrics and how those are distributed.

7. Referral traffic. And last, but not least, most SEO campaigns, especially those that focus on links or improving rankings, are going to also send referral traffic from the links that are built. So you can watch referral traffic and what those referrers are and whether they came from pages where you built links with SEO intent.

So taking all of these metrics, these should be applied to the SEO goals that you choose that match up with your marketing and company goals. I wanted to try and illustrate this, not just explain it, but illustrate it through two examples that are very different in what they're measuring.

Example one

So, first off, Taft Boots, they've been advertising like crazy to me on Instagram. Apparently, I must need new boots.

• Grow online sales. Let's say that their big company goal for 2018 is "grow online sales to core U.S. customers, so the demographics and psychographics they're already reaching, by 30%."
• Increase top of funnel website traffic by 50%. So marketing says, "All right, you know what? There's a bunch of ways to do that, but we think that our best opportunity to do that is to grow top of funnel, because we can see how top of funnel turns into sales over time, and we're going to target a number of 50% growth." This is awesome. This can turn into very measurable, actionable SEO goals.
• Grow organic search visits 70%. We can say, "Okay, we know that search is going to contribute an outsized quantity of this 50% growth. So what we want to do is take search traffic up by 70%. How are we going to do that? We have four different plans.
  • A. We're going to increase our blog content, quality and quantity.
  • B. We're going to create new product pages that are more detailed, that are better optimized, that target good searches.
  • C. We're going to create a new resources section with some big content pieces.
  • D. We're going to improve our link profile and Domain Authority."

Now, you might say, "Wait a minute. Rand, this is a pretty common SEO methodology here." Yes, but many times this is not directly tied to the marketing goals, which is not directly tied to the business goals. If you want to have success as an SEO, you want to convince people to keep investing in you, you want to keep having that job or that consulting gig, you've got to connect these up.

From these, we can then say, "Okay, for each one, how do we measure it?" Well...

• A. Quantity of content and search visits/piece. Blog content can be measured through the quantity of content we produce, the search visits that each of those pieces produce, and what the distribution and averages are.
• B. Rankings and organic traffic. Is a great way to measure product pages and whether we're hitting our goals there.
• C. Link growth, rankings, and traffic. That's a great way to measure the new resources section.
• D. Linking root domains plus the DA distribution and maybe Spam Score distribution. That's a great way to measure whether we're improving our link profile.

All of these, this big-picture goal is going to be measured by the contribution of search visits to essentially non-homepage and non-branded pages that contribute to the conversion funnel. So we have a methodology to create a smart goal and system here.

Example two

Another example, totally different, but let's try it out because I think that many folks have trouble connecting non-e-commerce pages, non-product stuff. So we're going to use Book-It Theatre. They're a theater group here in the Seattle area. They use the area beneath Seattle Center House as their space. They basically will take popular books and literature and convert them into plays. They'll adapt them into screenplays and then put on performances. It's quite good. We've been to a few shows, Geraldine and I have, and we really like them.

So their goal — I'm making this up, I don't actually know if this is their goal — but let's say they want to...

• Attract theater goers from outside the Seattle area. So they're looking to hit tourists and critics, people who are not just locals, because they want to expand their brand.
• Reach audiences in 4 key geographies — LA, Portland, Vancouver, Minneapolis. So they decide, "You know what? Marketing can contribute to this in four key geographies, and that's where we're going to focus a bunch of efforts — PR efforts, outreach efforts, offline media, and SEO. The four key geographies are Los Angeles, Portland, Vancouver, and Minneapolis. We think these are good theater-going towns where we can attract the right audiences."

So what are we going to do as SEOs? Well, as SEOs, we better figure out what's going to match up to this.

• Drive traffic from these regions to Book-It Theatre's pages and to reviews of our show. So it's not just content on our site. We want to drive people to other critics and press that's reviewed us.
  • A. So we're going to create some geo landing pages, maybe some special offers for people from each of these cities.
  • B. We're going to identify third-party reviews and hopefully get critics who will write reviews, and we're going to ID those and try and drive traffic to them.
  • C. We're going to do the same with blog posts and informal critics.
  • D. We're going to build some content pages around the books that we're adapting, hoping to drive traffic, that's interested in those books, from all over the United States to our pages and hopefully to our show.

So there are ways to measure each of these.

• A. Localized rankings in Moz Pro or a bunch of other rank tracking tools. You can set up geo-specific localized rankings. "I want to track rankings in Vancouver, British Columbia. I want to track rankings from Los Angeles, California." Those might look different than the ones you see here in Seattle, Washington.
• B. We can do localized rankings and visits from referrals for the third-party reviews. We won't be able to track the visits that those pages receive, but if they mention Book-It Theatre and link to us, we can see, oh yes, look, the Minneapolis Journal wrote about us and they linked to us, and we can see what the reviews are from there.
• C. We can do localized rankings and visits from referrals for the third-party blog posts.
• D. Local and national ranking, organic visits. For these Book-It content pages, of course, we can track our local and national rankings and the organic visits.

Each of these, and as a whole, the contribution of search visits from non-Seattle regions, so we can remove Seattle or Washington State in our analytics and we can see: How much traffic did we get from there? Was it more than last year? What's it contributing to the ticket sales conversion funnel?

You can see how, if you build these smart goals and you measure them correctly and you align them with what the company and the marketing team is trying to do, you can build something really special. You can get great involvement from the rest of your teams, and you can show the value of SEO even to people who might not believe in it already.

All right, everyone. Look forward to your thoughts and feedback in the comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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7 Reasons Why Nobody is Reading Your Content and How to Grab Their Attention

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Content, content, content.

It seems like content is the only thing anyone can talk about these days.

You’ve probably read post after post about how “content is king” at least a dozen times.

However, despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to see what the content hype is all about.

You write blog posts.

You create videos.

You participate in social media.

And yet, crickets.

You’re creating content, but it’s not getting you very far.

Unfortunately, creating content isn’t enough to really market your business.

If no one is engaging with what you’re producing, you’re simply wasting time, energy, and resources to clutter an already overcrowded web.

But this doesn’t mean content marketing is ineffective.

In fact, 20% of business owners believe content marketing will have the largest impact on their business in 2018.

If you’re not getting results from the content you’re creating, it typically means you’re doing something wrong.

But with a projected 16% growth rate between 2017 and 2021, content marketing isn’t something you can just hope will pass by.

If you want to market your business successfully, you need to find your errors, shape up your content, and start getting conversions.

To help you improve your content marketing strategy, here are seven of the biggest mistakes you might be making – and what you can do to turn your results around.

1. You have no strategy

Are you posting whatever you want, whenever you want?

A lot of marketers do this.

In fact, only 37% of B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy.

This means the majority of marketers aren’t thinking strategically about the content they’re creating.

This makes it easy for your audience to ignore whatever you’re sharing.

A content marketing strategy helps you identify what you’d like to accomplish with your content, as well as how you’re going to use your content to achieve your larger business goals.

In other words, it forces you to put intention behind your content.

Moz describes content marketing strategy as the overlap between content marketing and content strategy.

At this intersection, you’re able to use the content you’ve created to bring your business plans to life.

If you’re operating without a content marketing strategy, this disconnect makes it difficult for your target audience to know what you want them to do.

However, when you create a plan, you’re putting a purpose behind your content.

Creating a content marketing plan doesn’t need to be difficult.

In fact, Content Marketing Institute outlines how you can create an effective plan in just one page by outlining your objectives, goals, metrics, and strategy.

Once this is done, you’re ready to move on to an editorial calendar.

Your editorial calendar should work hand-in-hand with the content marketing strategy you’ve created.

Here’s an example of an editorial calendar template from HubSpot.

This calendar breaks down exactly when you’re going to publish your blog post, as well as the title name, content details, and keywords you’re going to target.

It also shares which personas you’re trying to reach and what you’re going to offer them.

This kind of well thought out planning means each piece of content you upload fits within the content marketing plan you’ve established.

There are dozens of ways you can create an editorial calendar.

Quickbooks chooses to house their editorial calendar in Airtable – allowing one editor to manage over 4,000 pieces of content.

Others, like Buffer, turn to Trello.

Personally, I like Asana.

But the tool isn’t the point. The best tool is ultimately the one you can get everybody to use consistently.

2. You’re not publishing enough

When it comes to uploading content, quality beats quantity any day.

However, if you’re just posting once a month, you’re going to struggle to grab any real attention.

Consistency is key to building trust and credibility both with your audience and with search engines.

The idea is simple.

When you create more blogs, you’ll drive more traffic to your website.

With more traffic, you can prove to Google that you have content people want to read.

Once they understand you’re sharing valuable information, they’ll give your content a boost on their results pages – bringing in even more traffic and attention.

However, it’s easier said than done.

If you’re stuffing your website with low-quality information that your audience doesn’t care about, it doesn’t matter how frequently you post.

In fact, The Writing Cooperative found that blogging every day actually decreased their views compared to when they were posting just six times a month.

In March 2017, before their posting experiment, The Writing Cooperative was getting about 14,000 views each month.

But once they began blogging every day, views began to decrease.

The problem here is that they couldn’t continue to create high-quality content each and every day – and their readers noticed.

The key to getting attention through your content is finding the right balance between quality and quantity.

You also want to go beyond simple blog posts.

While blogging is a great way to bring traffic to your website, it doesn’t appeal to everyone.

Not everyone likes to read blog posts.

In fact, 53% of consumers said they’d like to see more videos in the future.

And with customers becoming more and more dependent on voice search and smart speakers, blogging isn’t always the most effective way to deliver content.

When you’re thinking about how often you should publish, you also want to consider what you’re publishing.

Videos can be a great way to grab attention, break down complex topics in a way that is easier for your audience to understand, or show off your products.

For example, Red Bull uses YouTube to show off the extreme sports, events, and competitions they sponsor.

With over seven million subscribers to their channel, Red Bull has one of the most popular YouTube pages out there.

Infographics are another way you can make your content more interesting for your audience, especially if you’re showing off large amounts of data or research.

In fact, over 41% of marketers said that infographics were the most engaging forms of visual content for their audience.

This ranked even higher than videos.

Infographics are insanely popular because they’re easy to skim and visual, making them ideal content for your always-busy customers and clients.

You can also expand your reach and get more attention to your content by producing podcasts.

Podcasts have been increasing in popularity over the past couple of years, with an estimated 67 million individuals listening to podcasts every month in 2017.

Repurposing written content into spoken can help you reach customers who don’t enjoy reading – expanding your audience to new individuals.

When trying to create different kinds of content, don’t be afraid to get creative.

However, you always want to think back to your target audience.

Focus on creating content that your audience will want to engage with.

3. You’re confusing content with sales pitches

Your content shouldn’t sell.

Sure, the whole purpose of marketing is to create interest in your business and drive sales.

But you can’t start out a relationship with a potential lead with a sales pitch.

Today’s customers don’t like being sold to.

That’s mainly because they don’t need to be sold to.

With the Internet at their fingertips, customers are more capable of discovering their options without ever needing to speak with a salesperson.

In fact, 60% of consumers won’t connect with a salesperson until they’ve already created a shortlist of potential purchases.

By the time they’re ready to buy, they already know more or less what they’re looking for.

This means you need to use your content to educate them – before you ever have the opportunity to connect.

Your content should be specially formatted to meet the unique needs of your buyer during every stage of their journey.

Let’s break down what that journey looks like.

First, your lead needs to become aware of your brand.

This means you need to be entertaining, engaging, or interesting enough to stand out from the piles of information already on the web.

You can do this in the form of videos, fun blog posts, educational webinars, and engaging social posts.

Take a look at this Instagram post from GoPro.

This high-quality image is attention-grabbing, causing followers to stop their scrolling and take notice.

However, it also shows off what the GoPro is capable of – increasing awareness about the brand and its products.

Next comes the consideration phase.

During consideration, your audience needs to better understand their problem, as well as their available solutions.

The content you might create for them could include product comparison videos or articles, case studies, or podcasts.

Here’s an example of a webinar from Instapage that would attract customers in the consideration phase.

During this webinar, participants learn more about how Instapage and Marketo can help lower their cost of customer acquisition, helping them determine if it’s the right solution for them.

This then brings the lead to the next stage of the buyer’s journey – the decision phase.

At this time, your lead is ready to choose which product or service is right for them.

You can encourage their decision with testimonials, product reviews, and demonstration videos.

Codeacademy uses their Stories page to share how past participants have used their skills to change their lives or careers.

These stories function the same as testimonials, allowing potential customers on the fence about purchasing to see how the decision influenced other customers’ lives.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle of SplitBase.io tells ConversionXL, “A type of social proof that works over and over again is testimonials. Whether it’s in video or written form, they’ve helped increase the conversion rate of the clients’ landing pages in every case.”

If your customer decides to buy, they’ve finally reached the delight phase of the buyer’s journey.

Here, they’ve already purchased, but you want to use your content to encourage them to buy again.

You can do this with newsletters, training webinars, or customer satisfaction surveys.

The Hubspot Academy is an example of content that reaches customers who have entered the delight phase of the buyer’s journey.

By offering training and certifications, Hubspot stays in touch with customers while providing content that can improve their experience as a customer.

Notice how none of these content forms include a sales pitch.

Instead, during each step of the way, the focus is on the customer and helping them find the right solution to their problem.

When your audience feels like you’re helping them, they’ll be more inclined to engage with your content.

4. You don’t know your audience

When you create a piece of content, do you know who you ultimately want to engage with it?

You’re probably thinking “customers.”

Unfortunately, just trying to attract anyone with a credit card isn’t going to get you great results.

With the mass amounts of content and information on the Internet, customers can find content that speaks directly to them – no matter how niche that might be.

To get attention, you need to find your audience and create content just for them.

When you focus your content, you might be narrowing down your audience pool, but you’re making deeper connections.

This can help you see real growth from your content.

Let’s take a look at how Modernweb used a hyper-targeted content strategy to bring in 10,000 visitors in just three weeks.

They started with defining their “who.”

And they got specific.

They came to the conclusion that they would be writing for “technology executives inside of enterprise companies.”

While they had clients who owned startups and small businesses, they weren’t their ideal client. So, they weren’t an area of focus.

Next, they dove into understanding the day-to-day pain points that those individuals experience.

Finally, based on the audience and pain points they established, they created a content plan that addressed those needs.

In this case, Modernweb decided they’d focus on sharing stories from enterprise businesses who had recently switched from older to newer frameworks.

They identified their audience, understood what they were struggling with, then presented them with content that explained how similar individuals handled the same problem.

In just three weeks, their web traffic saw a major jump.

Just from getting to know their audience, they were able to bring more unique visitors to their website and keep them engaged for an average of 9 minutes.

There are a few different ways you can begin to replicate Modernweb’s results.

First, create a buyer persona.

A buyer persona walks you through who your ideal client is.

Here’s an example from ClearVoice.

It breaks down exactly who they are, what problems they experience, and what kinds of solutions they might be looking for.

You can go deeper into your buyer persona to explain things like what they do each day, what kind of education level they have, or what they might do in their spare time.

The more detailed you can get with your buyer persona, the more targeted you can make your content.

If you have a wide range of products or services, you may also want to create multiple personas.

For example, here’s another example from ClearVoice.

While both John and Sandy have similar needs, they have different goals and challenges – meaning they’ll need to be targeted differently.

This can ensure that each of your audience members is well represented.

Next, pay attention to what they’re doing on social.

Monitoring your customer’s social activity can give you insights into the problems they’re facing, the solutions they may want, and what questions they may have.

You can then use this information to refine your content and guarantee you’re creating something they care about.

Check out the questions they’re asking on traditional platforms like Facebook or Twitter, but also dive into question sites or forums like Quora and Reddit.

For example, if you’re a personal finance firm looking for content ideas, the Personal Finance Reddit page can be a goldmine.

Users are constantly jumping on to ask questions about paying off debt, how to properly invest, or get advice on what to do in credit scams.

Knowing the real-life struggles your audience is facing can help you adjust and refine your content strategy to truly fit their needs.

Both of these pages can give you a great jumping off point for creating new content.

Finally, participate in conversations with your audience.

Get involved in Twitter Chats or Facebook Groups where your audience is hanging out.

Check out how RivalIQ gets involved in a conversation with a participant during the #BufferChat.

Not only does this allow them to make a great impression, but it also gives them some insight into what potential customers may be struggling with.

As you become familiar with the conversations they’re engaging with, you can refine your messaging and topics to better suit their needs and preferences.

5. Your voice isn’t genuine

Customers want to purchase from companies they believe they can trust.

In fact, the top quality that customers look for in a brand is honesty, followed by friendliness and helpfulness.

However, if it seems like you’re just putting on a persona for sales, they’re going to be hesitant to connect.

When creating your brand voice, it needs to connect who your brand is with who your audience thinks your brand should be.

Let’s consider this graph for a second.

Snarkiness is the last thing that customers what when it comes to brands on social media.

However, when we look at brands like Wendy’s and MoonPie, their attitude gets them hundreds of thousands of engagements.

So, what’s going on here?

Both Wendy’s and MoonPie have made it their brand persona to be snarky, witty, and sarcastic on social.

It’s who they are – and that’s why it works.

They’re not pretending to have an attitude just for attention.

It’s a unique indicator of their content, allowing them to create a reputation that makes customers want to connect.

Check out this quote from Juntae Delane, Founder of Digital Branding Institute.

According to Juntae, a brand’s voice needs to go beyond simple industry jargon and bland business tones.

Instead, it needs to match with the customer’s needs and provide a human element to the brand.

You can build your brand voice off the buyer persona you’ve created.

Based on your buyer persona, get familiar with the kind of language, tone, or colloquialisms your audience may be using.

Check out how they speak on their own social media platforms.

Then, take a look at the competitors or other brands they’re engaging with.

Once you’re familiar with the way they communicate, create a storyboard for your voice.

Think of your brand as a unique individual.

Outline what your brand likes, what they don’t like, how they perceive themselves, and how they want to be perceived by others.

You’ll also want to dig deeper to consider larger ideas that might not have any direct influence on your brand.

Today’s customers are expecting brands to be more than just a business.

For example, 65% of consumers believe it’s important for brands to take a stand on social or political issues.

Take a look at the conversation created around Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham criticized Parkland school shooting survivor and gun control advocate, David Hogg, for getting rejected from four colleges.

David responded by calling out all of Ingraham’s advertisers, asking them to pull their support of the show.

Within a few days, companies like Hulu, Bayer, and Nutrish had announced they’d be pulling the ads from Ingraham’s program.

After a few weeks, the program had lost 24 advertisers.

However, not all advertisers chose to separate.

Mike Lindell, founder of the MyPillow, announced he would be leaving his advertisements on the program.

By becoming a part of important conversations and debates, brands can refine their voice and make their opinions and beliefs more well known.

While it’s impossible to prepare for every kind of hurdle or backlash your brand may experience, knowing where your brand falls in these situations can help you create consistent messaging through your content.

6. You’re not promoting

Remember when Beyonce released a surprise album without any marketing?

In three days, she sold almost 830,000 albums.

It was impressive.

However, if you’re trying to use this tactic to promote your content, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Unfortunately, you’re not Beyonce.

And that means you need to promote.

Proper content promotion is really the key to getting attention to your content.

If you’re simply posting links to your latest blog post on your Twitter account, you’re probably going to get ignored.

Take a look at this Tweet from user Vic Maine.

It’s just a link, featuring no context, hashtags, or other interesting information that might entice the reader to engage.

So, it’s not really surprising to see it hasn’t started any conversations or gotten any traction.

However, you can refine your promotion strategy to include email marketing, social, forums, and influencer marketing to improve your results.

First, let’s take a look at social.

Companies have been promoting their content on social for years.

However, the way you should promote and where you should promote is always changing.

Just one shift to the network’s algorithm or design (or even a negative post from an influencer) and your entire promotion strategy might be turned upside down.

Take a look at Facebook, for example.

After changing their algorithm, many brands reported a drop in organic reach.

However, you can work around this algorithm shift by either paying to promote your content or creating content that your audience wants to engage with.

Check out this breakdown Buffer created of important signals that can influence your ranking on Facebook.

As you can see, some of the most important factors of what gets ranked depends on how users are interacting with the post.

This means you want to focus more on creating content that individuals want to engage with, rather than strictly shock-value content.

You should also make your content easy for your readers or viewers to share your content on their own.

Within blog posts, including “Click to Tweet” bars or share buttons can help encourage visitors to share the content with their friends or family – helping to improve your reach.

Content Marketing Institute frequently uses Click to Tweet bars to make it easier for their readers to share their content.

You can also use more targeted marketing approaches to help reach your audience, such as email marketing.

When you properly segment your email lists, you can share your content with individuals you already know are interested in what you’re sharing.

Take a look at the results MailChimp found for campaigns segmented by interest groups.

By sending specific content to your audience members based on their interests, you can dramatically improve your campaign results.

7. Your content isn’t properly optimized

Promoting your content is just one side of the coin.

To truly bring attention to what you produce, you want your audience to be able to find what you’re creating.

This means it needs to be properly optimized.

Each piece of content should comply with your greater SEO strategy.

This means going beyond just creating content that your audience wants to read or engage with.

Keywords should be factored into each piece of content you create.

By finding words or phrases that your audience is actually searching online, you can increase your chances of them finding you.

The Keyword Planner from AdWords is one way you can find new keyword opportunities.

You want to find keywords that are high in average monthly searches but low in competition.

Don’t simply guess at what you think your audience wants.

You also want to make sure your content is properly formatted.

Your titles and heading should be strong and capable of standing on their own.

According to CopyBlogger, 8 in 10 individuals will read a headline – but only 2 in 10 will read the rest.

This means you need to create headlines that your audience can’t resist.

The CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is one tool you can use to improve your headlines.

The tool analyzes your word balance to give you an overall score out of 100.

It also provides you with insights on length, sentiment, and even guesses which keywords it believes you’re targeting.

This can help you test the strength of your headlines before you post, saving you trouble and guaranteeing higher results.

But blog content isn’t the only thing you need to optimize.

You also want to make sure your videos, infographics, and images are optimized appropriately.

To optimize your videos on YouTube, start with an optimized title that describes the video and includes the keyword you’re trying to rank for.

This isn’t too much different than writing blog titles.

However, you also want to tag your videos appropriately and write a full description.

Your video description lets the YouTube algorithm know what your video is about.

Check out this description from a DottoTech video.

He provides a clear overview of what will be featured in the video, as well as some links to the apps he’s going to talk about.

This can help improve his connection to those pages and gives him the opportunity to further target his keywords.

Images are another area you’ll want to ensure are properly optimized.

First, make sure you’re using high-quality images that are the appropriate size for where they’re being placed.

This can help improve your page load time to keep visitors happy.

You can use a compressor tool to change the size of your image without hurting the quality.

You’ll also want to place the keyword you’re trying to target in the file name.

Because Google can’t actually see what your image is, it’s your responsibility to tell them.

Use captions, alt text, and title text to give Google a better understanding of the image you’re sharing.

Conclusion

In today’s digital age, you can’t afford to create content that is easily ignored.

However, it takes time to craft messaging that your audience will want to engage with.

Keep these seven tips in mind the next time you create content.

What tips or tricks have you found that improve your content-creation process?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

How to Repurpose Content (and Why it Matters)

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Ever heard that before? It’s excellent advice for virtually every job, task, industry, and endeavor. If you have something that works, use it.

Build off it. Adapt it. There’s no need to start from nothing

And when it comes to your content marketing, it’ll not only save you time, but it can deliver big, big results.

How so? By repurposing content you’ve already created.

“Repurposing your content opens the doors to reaching more people and breathes life back into old posts that you know are well written and highly informative.” ~Elna Cain, Professional B2B Writer

29% of top marketers repurpose their best content, while 27% listed producing enough quality content as their biggest challenge in a separate survey.

Overall, not having enough time, the quality of their content, creating that content, scaling content creation, and generating ideas were the top five most mentioned challenges facing the modern marketer.

The benefits of repurposing content? Those top five challenges are alleviated and made easier.

You could brainstorm new ideas, conduct research, draft, revise, polish, a/b test headlines and blurbs, publish, and promote a new blog post every few days…

Or you could take an existing asset that’s already a winner, repurpose it, and promote, promote, promote.

Which one sounds like the better use of your time?

What is Repurposing Content?

It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Repurposing content simply means taking an existing piece of content and using it in a new way for a new audience.

Blog series to ebook, for example. Or infographic to video.

There’s no shortage of transformations you could make. Marketers use a wide variety of channels, types, and formats for their content.

Videos, illustrations, infographics, ebooks, white papers, webinars, case studies, podcasts, charts, graphs, blog posts, quizzes, slide decks, reports, and on and on.

In fact, releasing quality content as only one type is really doing it and your audience a disservice.

Why Should Your Website Repurpose Content?

To begin with, not everyone likes blogs. Or videos. Or white papers. Or infographics.

If you spend hours, days, or weeks creating something spectacular, and you release it to the world as “just” a blog, many people will never give it a second look.

Content marketing is about getting as many eyes on it as possible.

Eyes on it means traffic, traffic means shares and interest, shares mean more eyes and greater awareness which generates still more eyes on it, which means more prospects and potential for conversion, and round and round it goes.

“Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it.” ~Content Marketing Institute

Attract and retain customers.

Let me ask you this: are you only targeting blog readers? How about only those that watch videos online? Do you only want to keep those existing customers that enjoy infographics? Of course not. You would never intentionally limit yourself, your brand, or your product that way.

But without repurposing your content, that’s essentially what you’re doing. You’re not providing for them in the ways they want and appreciate.

Repurpose your best stuff, and it reaches more of your target audience in the places and ways they want to be reached.

Benefits of Repurposing Content

In addition to reaching a wider audience in the types and formats they want, the benefits of repurposing content include:

• Better chance to be seen. We spend a lot of time online: an average of 40 minutes/day on Youtube, 35 minutes on Facebook, and 15 minutes on Instagram. It adds up to 5 years and 4 months over our lives. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but it also means there’s a greater probability of someone missing that tweet about your new blog post than of seeing it. Social media moves too fast, and no one is online all the time. Want your content to be seen? You’ve got to repost and repurpose. The rule of seven tells us that the average consumer needs to see your message seven times before they buy into it…or you.
• The life expectancy of a social media post is relatively short: a typical tweet has a half-life of 24 minutes, a Facebook post reaches 75% of its maximum impressions in 2 hours and 30 minutes, and blog posts by top brands receive 50% of their comments in the first 6 hours. The takeaway? Repost, reschedule, and repurpose.
• Give your search engine optimization efforts a boost. A well written blog post will have several targeted keywords. Repurpose that content as an infographic or podcast, and you’ve increased the opportunities you have to rank for those keywords. A better rank – or multiple rankings – means a better chance to divert more of that search volume traffic to your digital doorstep. You’ve already done the keyword research, so maximize your possibility of succeeding with it.
• Save time for promotion, which is the lifeblood of content marketing. The less time you spend on brainstorming, researching, and creating content, the better. The majority of your time and effort should be spent on promoting it, not making it.
• Build your authority and reputation. The more people see your name attached to content on a particular topic or industry, the more your online reputation grows. You need to be seen as an expert. You want to be considered the go-to guy or gal. Authority is one of the six principles of persuasion as outlined by Robert Cialdini. Persuade, then convert.
• Increase your return-on-investment. Quality content takes time and money to create. Repurposing blogs, repurposing video content, and content recycling in general lets you squeeze extra value out of money you’ve already spent. Get more with no additional cost. That’s a business strategy everyone can get behind. That $500 blog post can be repurposed for next to nothing, giving you more bang for your original buck.
• Diversify your content catalog. No one wants the same thing for supper every night.
• Generate more opportunities for quality backlinks. People sharing your content creates backlinks to your site, and they’re a crucial and beneficial ranking factor.

It takes a great deal of resources – time, energy, and money – to produce a valuable, useful piece of high quality content.

Using it once is a waste. You wouldn’t buy a new laptop and log on just once, or use it just for emailing, right?

So why do that with your content? The mantra for content marketing in 2018 and beyond should be “repurpose, promote, repeat”.

4 Repurposing Content Examples For SaaS Business

By now, you should be convinced of the benefits of repurposing and are probably ready to see some content repurposing examples.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

Does it really work? What exactly can be repurposed? Let’s take a closer look.

The No New Content Challenge

Buffer is one of the major players in the content curation and scheduling game.

Many of you likely use its social media management platform in your content marketing.

The Buffer Blog consistently produces high quality and useful content on everything from social and digital marketing to productivity and the customer experience.

For one month in 2015, they wanted to see what would happen if they repurposed their existing content rather than created new stuff.

With a blog that regularly saw 600,000-700,000 monthly visitors, the stakes were high.

Instead of writing new posts, they created new email campaigns and ebooks using old blog posts, updated outdated posts, created SlideShares and videos from blog posts, and republished to Medium.

The result?

While overall traffic dipped slightly, their organic search traffic was up by over 4%, the resulting SlideShares produced nearly 200,000 views, an ebook on social media tips curated from old posts brought in 2397 signups and downloads, and an email drip campaign called “The 7 Day Social Media 101” and a 25-day video course nabbed 17817 and 18185 (in the first 6 days alone) signups, respectively.

And all with no new content for 30 days. So, does repurposing content work? (hint: yes).

Matthew Woodward

SEO and affiliate marketing professional Matthew Woodward decided to repurpose and republish a couple of blog posts on LinkedIn Pulse. With minimal tweaking, he published with a link to a new landing page for an existing lead magnet.

The experiment garnered 332 new subscribers and a conversion rate of 76.15%.

Convince & Convert

Jay Baer of Convince & Convert creates a lot of content, including 3-minute informational videos.

In order to reach a bigger audience, he and his team began repurposing that video content as blog posts on the C&C website, LinkedIn Pulse, and Medium, and as podcasts (distributed via iTunes), effectively covering the text, video, and audio crowds.

Convince & Convert has been crowned the #1 content marketing blog in the world by CMI, attracting hundreds of thousands of potential prospects for their consulting services and marketing tools.

Moz

It you want to learn about all things SEO, you need look no further than Moz.

Their blog is chock-full of posts on everything from keyword research to link-building to audits and everything in-between.

Once a week since 2007, they’ve repurposed their best blog content as an engaging and informative video series called Whiteboard Friday.

It’s legendary in the industry. Iconic. And its fans are legion.

That kind of loyalty, advocacy, and brand recognition is priceless, bringing in a steady stream of referred traffic and leads.

A mind-boggling 11% of the top SaaS companies in the world do not blog.

That’s shocking at any time, but in 2018 that’s simply insane.

A blog is the foundation of any content marketing plan.

And a blog is the content bank from which you can pull and repurpose from now until the cows come home.

Blog. Promote. Repurpose. Promote. Succeed.

How to Repurpose Content in 2018

By this point, you may be thinking “Okay, okay, I get it. Repurposing content is extremely beneficial and efficient.” And you’d be right.

But, you’re probably also thinking “How do I do it?” It’s one thing to know why, but something else entirely to know how.

It’s easier than you might be expecting.

Identify the Posts Worthy of Republishing

If you’ve got a sizeable content catalog, deciding which ones deserve your repurpose attention is step one.

Head on over to your analytics dashboard and check to see what posts have been your best performers in the past month, past year, and possibly even past 4-5 years.

Look for those posts with the highest pageviews and/or average time on page.

Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find your most shared pieces.

These are the pieces resonating most with your audience and visitors.

This is the content most likely to benefit from a little repurposing magic.

For each asset, consider how you might be able to transform it.

Blog to video, video to transcript, podcast to infographic, series to ebook, and so on.

While you’re at it, be on the lookout for content that is either a) outdated, or b) a topic on which you have greater knowledge now than you did when you wrote it.

These can be updated and expanded with little effort, allowing you to promote the new and improved version.

“Content repurposing doesn’t just mean that you reuse an old piece of content again and again. True repurposing requires that we alter it to make it fresh and appealing to a new audience.” ~Garrett Moon, CEO and Co-founder of CoSchedule

Repurposing content takes little effort, not zero effort.

What themes are still relevant? What topics are still popular?

On what subjects do you have more to say? Find content that fits in to those categories, and you’ve got yourself a winner.

Turn Old Blog Posts into Fresh and Complete Guides

This is perhaps the easiest repurposing you can do, but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s not worthwhile.

The world moves pretty fast.

Some industries move even faster.

Posts you wrote last year – or even several months ago – can already be outdated.

Sometimes the just need a few tweaks.

At other times, they might need a partial or complete rewrite. Either way, you end up with something “new” to promote on your channels.

Even better, take several blog posts that share a broad subject and combine them into one complete guide.

A post about gaining Instagram followers, using that platform for business, how to write an Instagram bio, and best practices for increasing engagement can join together to create a powerful “Complete Guide to Instagram for Business”.

The “complete” or “ultimate” or “definitive” guide-type posts will always be popular. Harness that with minimal effort.

Create White Papers and Infographics

What type of content do you think drives lead generation? You might be surprised to learn its white papers.

White papers are authoritative.

They cover a particular topic, presenting hard data and research to ultimately argue for a specific solution to a specific problem. They inform and persuade based on facts and evidence.

Done right, white papers build trust, increase your authority, and generate credibility for you and your brand.

They are research, data, chart, and graph heavy. Writing a white paper can be a time-consuming task.

But the don’t have to be. Your blog posts are full of data, graphics, and research already, right? Use that.

Combine several posts on the same basic subject, and you should have enough raw material to pull it together into a high quality white paper in half the time it would take to write one from scratch.

Use a template and save even more time. In the B2B sphere, they’re an absolute must.

And then we have infographics. Popular, powerful, and persuasive, a good infographic can disseminate information like few other types can. Consider:

• We process visual data 60,000x faster than text.
• It takes us just 13 milliseconds to process an image.
• Infographics are 30x more likely to be read than a text post.
• Infographics are liked and shared 3x more than any other content type.
• 74% of surveyed content marketers use them (tied for first), and 17% list them as the best performer in their marketing mix (second only to research/original data).

We are hardwired to understand and enjoy visuals, and infographics are very popular with both marketers and consumers alike.

What’s more, creating infographics from existing content assets is quick and easy.

Services like Visually can do it for you, or tools like Infogram, Easelly, and Canva allow you to do it yourself.

The data collection and research is the “hard” part…and that’s already done and ready to use.

Turn Posts into a Webinar

Few content types are as engaging as a webinar or live stream.

They allow you to share your expertise, build credibility, and connect, communicate, and engage with your customers and leads in real-time.

The best webinars focus on one specific topic that you understand exceedingly well and can dig deep on. They have a spectacular slide deck that supports and complements the “script” you’ve written beforehand.

“There’s a lot of logistical things to think about, so even if you think you know what you want to say, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you forget once you get into presentation mode. Create a list of the questions as they come in so you can keep them organized. Lastly, relax! The attendees are there to listen and learn, not judge.” ~Chris McHale, Nurture Marketing Specialist at WordStream

Your most popular posts are prime candidates for the webinar treatment. Identify them, use them to create your slide deck and script, and promote your upcoming webinar everywhere you can.

Service providers like WebinarNinja and GoToWebcast can help with the logistics and host hundreds if not thousands of attendees.

And once your webinar is finished, don’t forget to upload your slide deck to SlideShare, and post the recorded video to your blog. That’s 3-for-1. That’s repurposing like a boss.

Create Videos

Think about how much video you consume on an average day.

A lot, right?

We love video. We seek it out. It rules the online roost:

• 55% of people watch video online every day.
• More video content is uploaded online every month than television has created in the past 30 years.
• Internet video will account for 80% of consumer internet traffic by 2019.
• 53% of consumers want to see more video content from marketers.
• Video posts have 135% greater organic reach than photo posts on Facebook.
• Brands that use video see 41% more traffic from search than brands that do not.

Repurpose your best content into a one-off or video series.

Record yourself and upload to YouTube or Skillshare.

If you’re camera shy, consider an animated video using Powtoon or GoAnimate.

A tool like VideoScribe automatically animates whatever you place on its canvas.

ScreenFlow lets you record your screen.

Whatever kind of video you want to make, a tool exists to help you get it done.

There are a lot of people who would rather watch than read, so give them what they want. Teach, inform, entertain, instruct, explain, and more.

Turn Posts into Ebooks

Taking several related posts and turning them into an ebook is a quick win.

You may need to fill it out a bit, write a few connecting paragraphs, and/or add a few more high quality visuals, but the bulk of the writing is ready to go.

Turning blog posts into ebooks is fast and easy for you, but they’re well regarded by people.

They carry more weight. They seem “better” than a blog post because they’re longer and more detailed.

They can be downloaded and carried with them wherever they go.

Darren Rowse of Problogger launched 31 Days to Build a Better Blog made up largely – though not exclusively – of repurposed blog material. The ebook remains one of his best sellers to this day.

You can share your ebook for free, use it as a lead magnet, sell it, or make it a reward in a contest or challenge. It’s entirely up to you.

An ebook gives an instant boost to your credibility and reputation.

Programs like Scrivener and Vellum allow you to save in a wide variety of formats, including Amazon Kindle, PDF, and iBooks. Maximum impact. Minimum effort.

Anyone can start a blog. But not everyone has their own series of ebooks. Stand out from the crowd.

Podcasts and Audio

Just as many people are visual learners and prefer videos and graphics, many people learn best by listening rather than reading.

Turning your best stuff into a podcast or audio file couldn’t be easier.

In fact, it may require little more than reading the post and injecting a bit of personality. That’s it.

Hate the sound of your voice? Hire someone else to do it for you. Believe it or not, Fiverr actually has a voiceover section. Who knows, you might just stumble upon the new voice of your brand.

Podcasts and audio files are fantastic because they not only reach a new audience, but much like an ebook, they carry an element of authority and sophistication.

Consumers can download them, and listen in their car, at home, on their commute, at rest, at work, or an the go.

That’s some serious reach. 44% of the American population has listened to a podcast, and 80% of them listen to all or most of it.

Services like Podomatic, PodBean, iTunes, and SoundCloud assist with everything from creation to editing, and hosting to promotion.

Increasingly popular, easily shared, and simple to do.

And Repurpose into the mix – it automatically converts your podcast to a video and shares to the most popular sites like YouTube and Facebook – and you have your bases covered.

Medium is a Good Platform for SaaS Business

Republishing your 5-star content on Medium can give you a big traffic and exposure boost.

And you’re literally just republishing content without making any changes (unless you want to, of course).

And before you start to worry about the dreaded “duplicate content penalty” from Google, don’t. It’s a myth. It doesn’t exist.

Medium boasts 60 million monthly readers, 140,000 new stories each week, and dozens of topics and categories.

Sign up, get started, and get sharing.

Think of it as half social network and half writing platform. It’s the best of both worlds.

Benjamin Hardy went from zero to 50,000 subscribers using Medium in only 16 months. How’s that sound?

Don’t Forget to Republish Older Posts

Finally, you don’t want to neglect your older posts.

Just because they’ve fallen off the radar, doesn’t mean they’re worthless. High quality, evergreen content can be reposted to tremendous effect.

We’ve already mentioned the short life span on a typical social media post.

The harsh reality is that most people won’t see it the first time around.

Share it again though, and you’ve increased the eyes on it. Share a third time, and it’s still more.

Reposting your content on a regular schedule will capture a bigger audience for it, reach people in different time zones, and generally increase your traffic.

Some studies have shown it’s possible to get 75% of the engagement of the original post. What’s not to like?

So share it. Share it again later that day, the next day, next week, next month, and two months from now. Experiment with the best times to share on different platforms. Use a scheduler like Buffer or Hootsuite to do it all for you.

You’ve already put in the effort. Don’t let it go to waste.

Conclusion

Your content is the heart of your marketing. Make it work for you by using a consistent repurpose and reschedule plan.

“Create less, promote more.” ~Salma Jafri

Everything can be repurposed into something else.

Old is new again.

The less time you spend on creating and the more time you spend on promoting, the higher the return you’ll see on content marketing.

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you need to move something from Point A to Point B.

You might need to change it up a bit – size of wheel, number of wheels, material of wheel – but it’s still fundamentally the same thing.

The same goes for your content.

Slide deck into video. Podcast into transcript. Blog series into webinar. Data into infographic. The possibilities are endless.

Have you tried repurposing your best content? What strategies and tools have you tried? Leave your comments below:

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

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