Would you be surprised to learn that you're wasting more content than you're generating? It goes without saying that every company needs to evaluate whether or not the money they are spending brings in profits. It's business 101. In a simple sense, it's what all this discussion on ROI is about. Does it make sense to continue spending money, if you cannot prove that it works? Since this becomes a main focus in almost all businesses, especially early on, companies also find themselves stretching how far each dollar goes. The same goes for content.

If you’re spending staff time or company resources to have content created, you may not see customers come streaming into your doors the next day. This can often lead to a "this stuff doesn't work" attitude. However, when done correctly, there should be a time when you can point to the positive and quantifiable results of your content marketing to say that it works.

It is a marketing industry standard that the more you spend on the content (in time, energy, and money), the higher the quality. Right? (Okay, I know this isn't necessarily true, but it justifies big marketing budgets) But does that higher quality translate into higher profits? And is there a way to stretch the content created across multiple platforms? The simple answer: Of course. Yet, still there are far too many companies not taking advantage of stretching the content currency as wide as possible.

Content Marketing Currency

Companies can use multiple forms of content to market their business effectively. Content is quickly becoming the leader of modern marketing for the various benefits it brings. In some cases an article is the most appropriate tool; in other cases a video or podcast is most convincing. Still in other scenarios a company can use a more connected form of communication on a blog or social media platform. All mediums are necessary if a company wants to be successful in meeting their prospect on their (the prospect’s) terms. However, make no mistake, it takes resources. It takes time. It takes energy. Therefore, I find it nuts that companies don't take their content and spread it as wide as possible. One well written piece of content can be turned into two or three or five content assets over time when done properly.

What Content Marketing Should Do

In terms of their composition, each of these content forms: social media, videos, articles or podcasts require about the same level of intensity to make them effective marketing tools. While they need to be factual on the one hand, they also imagine what the potential benefits might be, and state them as fact. These kinds of content pieces aren’t meant to be objective. They are meant to move prospects further into a marketing funnel by offering valuable insights in a way the user chooses to receive it.

Keeping Content Marketing Cost Effective: Re-purposing the Content

This means that for the most part, a savvy business owner can re-purpose their content for each medium. In other words, it wouldn’t take much to retrofit an article into the subject of a video or podcast. The same would be true of turning it into a press release or infographic for social media sharing. The basic inputs for each of these media are interchangeable. In fact, many business owners are skilled on republishing their content within the available forms. They are, at their core, article based content.

Why Whitepapers Are Treated Different

However, when a firm takes the next step to have whitepaper content created, the formulas are somewhat different. The purpose of a whitepaper is to present objective research as the foundation for problem solving and good decision making. While it does position the creator as an expert on the problems being discussed and solved within the content; its goal is not to wrestle a customer down through a sales pitch.

The research in a whitepaper is typically more sophisticated than the background for article based content. It is composed of industry reports, studies, interviews and sometimes even university based consultation. Getting the research right is more of a priority than forcing it into the professional straightjacket of a favorable conclusion.

The whitepaper’s primary sales tactic is to present the company and/or its management is experts in articulating the problems of a particular industry. When a company is successful in preserving the integrity of the research its management can position its researchers and decision makers as experts in the industry. Nevertheless, the question then becomes: how does a company leverage this research for additional revenues?

Re-purpose Whitepaper Content: Presenting In Private Webinars

An effective sales tool that a company can use is a webinar. The webinar allows for a company to present its findings to concerned professionals all over the world without the expense and constraints of an industry conference. Webinars can be a revenue stream, a prospecting tool, and a very valuable stepping stone of a sales cycle where sales interaction with a prospect is first realized. A webinar can be the perfect format to present the research in a straightforward manner, while allowing for feedback and questions at the same time.

Presenting research and discussing conclusions is likely to take longer than the average length of an internet video or podcast. It also does not lend itself well to a short and readable conclusions needed to keep an article readable. Presenting the data on a webinar when attendees expectations are to be able to focus for 45 minutes to one hour, can bridge this gap that other content forms cannot do effectively.

Additionally the registration process of a webinar allows a company to collect the contact information of interested attendees. This is an extremely powerful set of data: the contact information of prospects who are interested in the solution to the problem promoted for the webinar. Management will not have to guess at how to be effective in their marketing message to those attendees. This is the chief benefit of doing one’s own webinar presentation instead of waiting for a conference or industry seminar: control over a targeted prospect list.

Steps to Re-purposing Whitepaper Content

In order to re-purpose high quality content into a webinar for maximum benefit, here is what a company needs to do:

1. Summarize the most important points of the whitepaper’s research.
2. Identify and define each of the important points according to documented problems in the industry. This documentation can come from the news, trade journals/magazines, conference findings, social media and internet search.
3. Create presentations based on the documented industry problems as the title and or subject of the presentation. Although neither the basic content nor conclusions from the whitepaper should change, the basis for discussing it is adaptable.
4. Prioritize the industry problems according to those of interest to the widest range of industry professionals.
5. Starting with the first documented problem, create content meant to attract readers, listeners and/or viewers from different online and offline mediums. The end of each presentation should have as its conclusion a way to learn more which will be the registration link for your webinar or webinar series.
6. The preparation of the pre-webinar process should include a method for collecting contact information and a way to deliver more content on the subject.
7. The preparation of the post-webinar process should include a procedure for prospect follow up and targeted messaging based on webinar’s subject matter.
8. Promote the webinar using SEO, podcasting, video marketing, social media, public relations, trade journal articles, conference appearances, guest blogging, etc. Promote the webinar as defined by the problem, not the whitepaper, nor the actual solution.
9. Conduct the webinar in a way to indicate your understanding the depth of the problem as well as what it would mean to allow the issue to go unmitigated. Any presentation of the company’s products or services should be soft-sold.
10. Repeat the process according your prioritized list of documented problems.

Research can be a powerful marketing tool when used in concert with media that lend themselves to its presentation. Webinars should be used liberally to attract prospects into a company’s marketing funnel. Taking an active role in the content process in this way can increase the ROI of content marketing.

Is it possible that re-purposing your content would create a measurable effect?