When planning and creating content, are you taking a “one-and-done” approach with gathering and producing items?
I previously talked about creating the right content to meet your goals. Building off that, consider how to maximize the information you have into multiple pieces of content.
Creating more than one content piece out of your information enables you to maximize your time spent on content while using information smarter. Achieve this by being strategic up front about what information to gather and how it will be used.
Reasons to take this approach include:
- Making your contact go farther
- Using content in different ways to reach different audiences or create different results or actions
- Being able to use information that might not have been right for the original way it was planned
Examples: Creating Multiple Pieces of Content
To illustrate how this can work, a few ways I’ve incorporated this process include:
Same topic, two different audiences
I wrote two different articles that were aimed at two distinct audiences about the same topic. To maximize the output for my time, I found a few people that I could interview for both articles, and ask them a few shared questions and some questions specific to each article and audience.
That meant one interview per source, who supplied quotes and information for two different articles. From there, I could use some of the same paragraphs and sentences between both articles, swapping quotes and details as needed.
Interview inspired another content piece
While soliciting information for a visual display that was very photo heavy, a source provided really long background information. While very compelling, it was way more information than I could ever include with the photo display.
Using the information as a background and starting point, I reached out to the person about being a guest on a podcast. I used his original information as the outline and structure of the podcast. We could really go into the topic and both talk about it from a knowledgeable place, expanding and going deep into the conversation.
Recorded conversation becomes material
A recorded and published piece of content (for example, a webinar presentation, video or podcast) can be a source of quotes and background material about a topic for an article, downloadable sheet or infographic.
A webinar, for example, often sets up and provides an outline for other content well. It’s often presented in a logical way to teach and build upon, making it a natural for how-to content or key takeaways.
How to Plan For Multiple Content Pieces
Don’t limit yourself to one asset per idea. Within a topic, consider addressing multiple angles or answering various questions. (There’s actually a name for this: the hub and spoke model of marketing.)
When deciding content, think about the reason for each piece. To help determine that, consider:
- Audience
- Goals
- Actions
- Next steps
- Where it will live
- How it will look
This will help you know what information to gather and what the end product will look like.
For example, I concepted this post and the other post I mentioned at the top, creating the right content to meet your goals, at the same time. I wrote outlines and started working on both at the same time. They compliment one another, but since they are two separate ideas, I kept them as two posts.
If a topic or information is important enough to your audience and resonates with them, it’s probably worth having another similar piece, whether it’s the information in a different format, a companion piece that looked deeper or at another aspect, etc.
Once you’ve created two-plus pieces of similar or complimentary content (congrats!), make sure you link them to one another.
The more you create multiple pieces of content at once or from the same material, the easier it gets to think about it on the front end — how it can be done, what different content from the same information looks like and what you need to collect to create it.
A bonus to this approach is that you can use more of what you collect in different ways, saving you time and effort, while maximizing your return on investment!
