Squeeze Every Drop of Value from Your Marketing Content

How can I get the most out of my content? How do I get more out of it by really running it dry? How does that work?

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You know, it's really interesting because in my career, video's always been a personal passion for me. I love making video content and I've probably made thousands and thousands and thousands of videos, whether they're podcasts or commercials or teasers or instructional videos, you know, all sorts of things. And what I've noticed over the course of, you know, call it 20, 25 years of working in the marketing field and creating this kind of content,

is that as much as I would love it if all of those thousands of videos got lots and lots and lots of views, the reality is there's a few of them that seem to get the most attention. Some of those are overview videos, some of those are ones we did a particularly good job of marketing via a campaign or an email series or what have you.

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Let's be honest, as marketers, we love to create content. We love to come up with new ideas. The whole idea of like, well, what if we made this is awesome. Well, what if we did that? It's really cool. We want to try and explore and examine and create as much as we can. And every time we create a new idea, we publish it, and someone comes to us and says, hey, that's really cool, I love that.

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You know what if you did something like that and you think well maybe I can and you got there you want to create it but the reality is in most cases. Not only are you wasting valuable resources to just create all the time but a lot of times it almost creates a noise. That your end user, your consumer, your business customer, whatever whoever your audience happens to be it creates a noise that's hard for them to digest.

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So when we talk about wearing out your content, spend your resources to create that great piece of content. Maybe it is an amazing ad. Maybe it's a great, call it 60 second video. Maybe it is a really compelling infographic. Whatever that thing is, whatever you've created, and put it everywhere. And there are ways, if you're smart as a marketer, to really customize that for each of the different channels or audiences you're putting it to.

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So for example, let's say that you created a small 60 second video, and that's gonna go on your YouTube channel as one of your main videos. And you're gonna put that on as your channel's primary video. Well then you're also gonna create posts using that video to promote that video. And maybe you'll take that same video file and you'll shorten it and crop it a bit and turn it into a YouTube short and promote it that way.

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And then you take that same video file, because you got a YouTube short out of it, you say, well, I'm gonna take it and tweak that slightly, maybe edit a little bit of it, and put it on TikTok. And then I take that and I also wanna put that in my Instagram channel as an Instagram story. And then I'm gonna take the full video in its wide-screen format, and I'm gonna put it as an Instagram post. And that Instagram post is also gonna be the same as my Facebook post. And maybe you wanna make a shorter version to publish next week to say, hey, if you've seen this, check out the whole video on our YouTube page and link back to your YouTube page. Whatever the case may be, you don't necessarily have to create new video content for every single one of those platforms. Even though you're putting it in, call it five, six, seven, 10, 20 different places, maybe it's on the homepage of your website and it's also on your LinkedIn. There's lots of places to put this content. But instead of trying to create new content for each of these platforms,

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Take that existing content and wear it out. Put it everywhere. And what that does is it creates consistency across your message. Now when someone sees it on LinkedIn, for example, and then they see it again in their YouTube shorts, and then they see it again in their Instagram story, soon they start thinking, boy, this content's everywhere. I'm seeing it wherever I go. This must be big, this must be important. And after the third or fourth time viewing it, instead of skipping past it, they start to watch it, they start to ingest it, they start to look at it, they start to be interested in it. And that's when sharing occurs, that's when clicking occurs, that's when whatever your call to action is starts really taking an impact because now you've gotten it into their mind several times. And there's lots of great examples in the market of people who've taken their same content, tweaked it slightly, but they didn't have to redo or recreate the content. It was simply just an edit or an adjustment to fit the media that they were putting it in.

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How many times do you want your target audience to see your content before you stop promoting it?

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It's such a hard number to say because it really depends on the type of audience you're doing.

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There's some markets where you know, some of your listeners might be thinking that they're really serving a very niche audience and A type of audience that maybe doesn't consume media as easily I know I face that industry when we first started doing the digital content we were creating half the people weren't on Facebook or Instagram at all like they were security technicians who've been doing this for 20 years and they were crotchety old installers who

who were used to just turning screwdrivers, and half of them had flip phones. Fast forward five years, everyone's got all the social media out there, and they're working hard to try and implement, and get involved in, and join the Facebook groups, and follow the Instagram channels, and the YouTube channels that you create, and things like that.

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So, I would seriously look at your audience, and see what kind of expectation. You're going out there to the masses, the whole world to see your content is a big ask, and you're probably gonna have to spend some marketing dollars for ad revenue to create some ad action.

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To create some ads that will draw your people into your content, as opposed to if you've got a very niche market, a very closed audience, that you can target within your email campaigns, your Facebook groups or your individual channels where those people tend to live.

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I wish I could give you an exact number, but it really varies. In my experience, it takes about three to four touches for someone to actually take an action. So whether those touches are through social or through an email campaign, again, if your audience is only on email, it might take three or four emails for them to want to click on that and actually do it. And you might have to tweak those emails every single time in order to get them to finally say, okay, now I'm ready to click and view.

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But three to four touches seems to be about the magic number to get someone to want to engage with your content.

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How do you know you fully run your content dry and then it's time to start crafting that next piece of content?

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You mentioned the word data earlier and I think that one's so powerful. We have been given so many amazing tools. Almost every social platform, almost every email platform now has analytics built into it and you can look and see how many views your video is getting on YouTube, what kind of traction it is, where they drop off. The YouTube analytics are incredible. Facebook analytics are great if you're using that.

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Instagram has analytics. I mean almost every platform has a form of analytics that you as a marketing leader can look at and see is my content still making an impact? Am I still getting the views I want? If I repost it, what's the reaction? And you can gauge that over time.

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If I take one particular piece of content, let's say I've got an image that I put on a particular platform and you see that the first time you got so many impressions, the second time you know, what are your impressions? Do they go up? Do they go down? You know, the third time you post it, again, a very similar image, you know, what did you get? You can see that information. Using that data, you can make the decision on when my content is running dry.

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There are some people that continue to run their content for years. I think we've all seen content that was created two, three, four years ago, and yet still is out there and still being used and still being proliferated because it's still effective.

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And I think a key to that is not only having good quality content, but it's also having a strong call to action. That strong call to action will allow you to make your content live because it gets people to click on it. If your call to action is buy now or learn more or get the free brochure or get contacted today, whatever that call to action is, you gotta have a strong call to action that allows the user to say, okay, I've seen your content, now what? Now what do I do? I wanna do something now in reaction because I had an emotional response. I want to act on that emotional response and I need to know what to do.

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So your calls to action need to be clear, they need to be concise, they need to be consistent, and you need to also vary them from post to post. If it's the same one every single time, it's like, oh yeah, it's that same, you know, I watched that video and the action was to learn more. Well, next time you watch the video and the call to action is, you know, get a call back. And then the third time, the call to action is join our newsletter or join our group or things like that. So the call to action can vary and you can even again use the data to see which of my calls to action got the most traction, got me the most impact out of this and that will be another way that you can see whether or not your content has been as dried up and just ends up as pulp or if there's still some juice to squeeze out of it.