Stop Yo-Yo Dieting With Your Content Creation
How many times have you invested a ton of time and money into publishing one white paper, just to let it dwindle deep in your website a few months later, so then you publish another to spike your results back up, just to let the same thing happen?
It’s like a yo-yo diet. You start a strict program, see good results, fall off the program, lose all the ground you gained, and have to do the work all over again. But if you maintain consistent nutrition and exercise habits over time, you’ll be starting from a better position when you want to reach new goals.
Most companies spend 90% of their resources on creating new content, and only 10% on promoting that content. But the truth is that if you don’t promote heavily, you’re missing the majority of the views (or listens) that you could have.
Don’t assume that just because you’re tired of your topic, everyone else is too.
In my experience working with clients, they tire of their own ideas far, far sooner than their audience does. They sometimes tire of their ideas before the audience has even bought into them in the first place! That’s a huge missed opportunity.
Say you’re launching a new offering: change management consulting. Part of your launch strategy is to publish a white paper with your research and thinking on change management.
You interview and hire a freelancer, they draft the white paper, there’s some back and forth with feedback, they edit it, they submit the final draft. You publish it on your website and a few people in your company promote it on LinkedIn. Maybe you send a short email campaign to your list, directing them to the download page.
Getting a 5-10 page white paper written costs you around $6000-$8000 in contractor fees. That’s a bargain compared to having a salaried staff member who writes your thought leadership, but it’s still an investment.
The investment is easily worth it when you think about the value of the consulting services the white paper will help you sell. But it can become an even better deal when you put just a little extra strategy around promoting the white paper.
Let’s break it down.
There’s a spike in page views and downloads when you first publish and promote the white paper. Maybe there’s another spike when you launch your new consulting service and send the paper around to current clients and prospects.
But then it all falls off as people get distracted and busy, and change management is no longer the shiny new thing—it just becomes one of your roster of offerings.
Here’s the thing, though. Whatever percentage of your prospects converted when you launched the new offering is nowhere near the potential for conversion you could have over time—if you just keep talking about it.
Your content is amazing. But nothing is amazing enough to convert on the first try.
It takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before a purchase will take place. And in a crowded marketplace, that number is likely higher. If you promote your white paper on LinkedIn once and send an email, your prospects only see your content once or twice—if at all.
You’re beholden to the LinkedIn algorithm as to whether your followers even see your post, and a whole number of factors determine whether they opened your email.
So you’ve made a hefty investment in creating this piece of content. Only a few of your prospects saw it at all, and those who did saw it once or twice.
That’s a huge missed opportunity for conversion—or even advancing your prospects from unaware to aware to interested.
And now that the first flurry of engagement with your content has fallen off, you assume the market is bored with it and decide it’s time to create something else.
Hold up! Put down the marker and back away from the whiteboard. You don’t need a new white paper.
What I’d recommend doing instead is creating a long-term promotion strategy at the same time you create a launch strategy. The idea is to maintain a steady number of visits to your content over time, instead of spikes and drops.
Don’t make it complex. If it’s complex, you won’t stick to it. Think of it like a diet and exercise plan.
Here are four ways to promote your content consistently:
Repurpose it!
Do something new with the content once a month. After you launch, cut your white paper up into blog posts. Promote each blog on all your channels until you run out of them. Then put it into a slide deck and promote that on all your channels. Then record yourself talking through the slide deck as a webinar and promote that. Then use the blog posts as the basis of an engagement/educational email campaign. And so on.
Make sure to link back to the original white paper in all the pieces of repurposed content.
Schedule it in your content calendar (and cross out the new content you thought you had to create on those days).
Do you need a repurposing strategy, and someone who can execute on it, too? Contact me here.
2. Give the original white paper a bump every month or so.
You don’t want your LinkedIn posts to be repetitive or only email your list about one topic, true. But trust me that they probably didn’t act on your first call to action to download the paper. Or they did and never got around to reading it.
So create a recurring calendar reminder to post it again, with a different caption and send a new, simple email to your list. Ask your current clients if they’ve read it. Just keep talking about it.
If they downloaded it and read it, I promise you they won’t be mad that you’re promoting it again. Worst case scenario, they see the email and ignore it, and you still win because now your name is top of mind. Maybe this is the time they’ll call you about working together, or forward the white paper to their friend.
On that subject…
3. Ask them to share it.
Make it easy for people to forward an email or share a post. By actually telling them to. The CTA can be as simple as “Liked this content? Forward it to someone you think could benefit from it.”
Also, think about the person who it gets forwarded to. They may not be familiar with you, and this is a prime time to capture them, since they’ve received your content from a source they trust.
Include a sentence along the lines of “Got this from a colleague? We’re a [type of company] who [what you do] for [who you do it for]. Learn more about us at [link to your website].”
4. Link to it everywhere.
Add links in your email content.
Link to it from related service pages on your website—new ones you’re creating and old ones that likely have a lot of SEO equity.
Link to it in the content of blog posts on your website.
Link to it in your email signature.
Include it in every email newsletter from now until the end of time.
Make a banner or popup on your website with a CTA to download.
And track those links so you know what’s working best!
But we have so much research! How are we supposed to get it all out there if we’re only talking about one topic?
I hear this a lot.
You want to be first-to-market or relevant in a conversation your competitors are having. I hear you.
Here’s what I recommend:
Think about the mix of client problems that make up the bread and butter of your business, versus the more niche or trendy topics you deal with once in a while. The content you create and promote should reflect that mix.
Pace yourself with introducing new research, don’t spread yourself too thin. You can’t be known for something if you do everything.
Revive your old content first—it’s less expensive than writing something new, and it’s probably still relevant. If you wrote about turnover five years ago, who cares? Just freshen it up. Turnover is still one of the top problems businesses struggle with.
Then work on creating new long-form content while you execute on your consistent promotion strategy of the old stuff.
And as a final note: content creation should always be in response to your customers’ needs—not in reaction to what your competitors are doing.
Do you have some content you want to create, revive, repurpose, or promote? Send me an email at jane@janeesmith.com.