When I speak to business owners about online marketing, one question that comes up frequently is “How often do I need to come up with content?”  This question seems like a data-driven question, but it usually belies fear.  Business owners want to serve customers, and the vision that they will instead have to sit around thinking of things to say all the time can be a major stopping point.  But…do you really have to come up with original, brand new things to say all the time?  Can you repeat and reuse marketing content?

GASP!  Won’t my audience get bored?  Won’t everyone have already seen it?  Aren’t they sick of that content already?

Honestly, no one thinks about your business as much as you do.  You may have spent hours on that blog, photo, graphic, comic, limerick, video, or whatever else you created.  And the average person might have glanced at it for 5 seconds, closed it, and purged the short-term memory of it long ago. (We are constantly fighting to get into the long-term memory of our audience members.  If you want to know more about how the brain processes marketing messages, read here).

To reuse marketing content might feel redundant, but it isn’t for someone who saw it once for 5 seconds.  If you’ve got great content, use it and stretch it.

If you've got great content, use it and stretch it. #marketing #business #entrepreneur #smb Share on X

Let’s say you uploaded a video of yours to YouTube and shared it to Twitter, Facebook, a blog on your website, and a newsletter.  Aren’t people sick of seeing the same thing five times?  Well, here’s what probably happened:

  • They didn’t know you posted it to YouTube unless they subscribe to your channel.
  • The tweet lost traction after about 20 minutes and has been pushed down by fresher content.
  • The Facebook post got organically shown to about 3% of the people who have liked your page.
  • No one knew to go straight to the web site to find it in the blog unless you shared the blog somewhere else.
  • Your newsletter was opened by an average of 20% of your subscribers.

The people who follow you casually MIGHT have seen your content once.  In fact, sharing the same content to multiple places gives you a fighting chance for a larger percentage of your audience to have seen it at all.  The people who are diehard fans might have seen it in more than one place…but they are diehard fans.

Have you ever noticed how you react to content that goes viral on social media?  The first few times you see it come up, it might seem interesting and you may or may not click through.  The more it pops up in your feed, the more likely you become to finally check it out.  Not to mention the fact that since all of these people are sharing it, it starts to seem more relevant and worthwhile to check out.  When you see that something has gone viral, do you complain, “This AGAIN?!?!”

If you do a lot of content marketing or online marketing, this is a strategy you can – and probably should – consider.  If you reuse marketing content, you give great material a chance to be seen.  You draw people’s attention to it in multiple places, multiple ways so they can take note of it.  If you space out the instances of sharing it to the same platform, you are probably attracting the newest, keenest people in your audience each time.  And with the best material, you can use it intentionally to be cornerstone content (read here for more information about that so you can figure out how to make your best content a magnet for your website).

If you reuse #marketing content, you give great material a chance to be seen. #business #smb Share on X

You also have the option to take the content you’ve already got and repackage it.  What if you pulled some great quotes from a blog and tweeted them?  Took your best photos and turned them into an album?  Read your advice in the form of a puppet show?  The same content can look different, and so it is different.

That said, I do know people who have gone overboard.  People who had queued up about 20 articles/blogs/posts and shared the same things every couple weeks for a year straight.  That kind of ratio doesn’t make sense.  But, re-using sometimes?  Not only is there a place for that, it is logical to do it if you really want people to see what you have created.

So, before you worry about how much time you are going to have to spend creating content, try to develop a consistent plan to smartly stretch out your material and reuse marketing content you create.

 

Do you want more ideas how to get the most out of your online marketing?  Not sure how to make blogs, newsletters, and social media work for you?  Get all the information you need to get started with a solid plan right here!