Every marketer knows that there’s no such thing as too much good content. One of the jobs of a marketing team is to reliably and consistently churn out content that is relevant, insightful, entertaining, and informative—the kind of content that makes people a fan of your brand.
As you probably know, that isn’t always easy.
But there are ways to make it just a little bit easier. One way is to take one great piece of content and multiply it into smaller, equally great pieces of content. In essence, you do the work once and take credit for it as many times as possible.
What’s more is that it’s actually simpler than you might think.
Here’s how to turn one piece of content into 15.
Start With a Piece of Pillar Content
If you’re going to turn one piece of content into 15, you need to make sure that the one has enough to mine out of it. This is what is sometimes referred to as pillar content.
Churches have a distinct advantage in this department. If you livestream your Sunday morning services, you create pillar content once every seven days. For other organizations, your pieces of pillar content may come more infrequently, but can take the form of a keynote speech that a member of your senior leadership gave at a conference, a video webinar, or a podcast interview.
This piece of longer content can be posted by itself, whether to YouTube or through your podcast feed. But more importantly, it will serve as the basis for all your other pieces of content.
When posting pillar content, be sure to title it according to SEO best practices, selecting keywords that will attract the audience you are looking for and pop up in relevant searches.
Transcribe It Into One or More Blog Posts
Depending on the length of the pillar piece of content, it may have enough information within it to be transcribed into one to three blog posts.
If your team turns it into a singular blog post, the concepts of the sermon, keynote, webinar presentation, or podcast can be summarized and condensed into a blog post that has 1,000 words or less.
On the other hand, you may choose to turn the pillar content into multiple blog posts, structuring each post around a subtopic that was explored within the original presentation. This may require you to expand upon some key points within that subtopic that were overlooked or only briefly mentioned in the presentation, but the structure for your blog series is already there.
Depending on how in-depth the pillar piece of content is, you may not have to do much work in creating a series of blog posts from it that can be released on your website over the course of a few weeks.
With your pillar piece of content and blog(s), you now have between two and five pieces of content.
Find and Clip 2-3 Shorter Pieces of Video Content
Once you have posted your longer video to YouTube, you should then go back and watch it again to find shorter clips within the presentation that could become pieces of content all on their own. Within a 30 minute presentation, you should be able to find between two and three segments that are about one minute in length that could be turned into an engaging piece of content for Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin.
If the pillar content is audio only, you can clip the raw audio, add music underneath it and create a social media video with an audio wavelength graphic. However, the better option is to make sure that, even when you are recording an audio podcast, you capture it in video format to repurpose across multiple channels. While a graphic will work, human faces will work even more effectively at capturing attention and garnering engagement.
To maximize the effectiveness of video posts, always be sure to provide captions, as most people do not scroll through their phone with the volume on.
With your pillar content, blog(s), and shorter video clips, you should now have between four and seven content pieces.
Find 2-3 Quotes That Can Be Turned Into Social Media Graphics
After harvesting your pillar content for shorter videos, you can then harvest it for other statements, concepts, or quotes that can then be turned into social media graphics. Within a 30 minute piece of content, you should be able to find two or three.
These quote graphics don’t need to be an exact quote of something that was said in the presentation, though they could be. They should just be pithy enough to look compelling on a well-branded text graphic for Instagram, Facebook, or Linkedin. You may even create a set of social media slides that summarize the key points or sub-points discussed in the pillar content.
Important to remember on these types of posts is that the caption is vital. Oftentimes, when a social media manager phones the caption in, an otherwise insightful post gets far less engagement than it should. The caption could be a longer quote from the original piece of content, or just a couple paragraphs that give context to the pithy statement on the graphic.
With your pillar content, blog(s), shorter video clips, and quote graphics, you should now have between six and 10 pieces of content.
Find 5 Statements Worth Tweeting
After you’ve done all this, you should comb through your piece of pillar content one more time for statements or concepts that could be turned into a series of short tweets. You should be able to find (or gain inspiration for) at least five.
If you have already transcribed the piece of pillar content into one or more blog posts, this step of the process may even be as simple as copying statements from the blog posts and pasting them into the social media scheduling app of your choice.
Additionally, if one of the tweets you post gains a significant amount of engagement, you can repurpose it yet again by taking a screenshot of it and reposting it to Instagram, Facebook, or Linkedin, along with a caption that provides a little more context.
With your pillar content, blog(s), shorter video clips, quote graphics, and tweets, you should now have between 11 and 15 pieces of content. You may even have more if you are able to repurpose one or more of the tweets.
This May Feel Repetitive to You, but It Won’t to Your Audience.
After combing through your piece of pillar content this extensively, you may begin to feel as though your content is becoming repetitive. However, your audience probably won’t feel the same way. What you experience as redundancy, they will experience as clarity of message.
Not every member of your audience will see or interact with every piece of content you derived from your pillar content. After all, the media these pieces of content employ is diverse.
Further, even if members of your audience do see or interact with more than one of these content pieces, it will simply reinforce the message that you want them to remember. In the words of Donald Miller, “Good marketing is an exercise in memorization.”
