Yesterday, I presented How to Create All of Your Marketing Content in Just Minutes per Month.  In case you missed it, I’m going to highlight one of the most important points in this blog post.

About halfway in to my presentation, I explained the 4 different ways you can use an article to improve your digital marketing efforts.  If you’re using content marketing in your business, then you know how important it is to squeeze out every last drop of value from a single article.  Scroll down to make sure you’re not missing any opportunities.

If you’re not using content marketing, then what are you waiting for?  The days of marketing online without content are over.  Google wants content.  Social media marketing requires content.  And your prospects expect high quality content on your company website.  Sure, you can stick your head in the sand and ignore content marketing, but realize that your digital marketing will suffer.

 

1. Your Blog

The first thing many people think about when they hear “content marketing,” is a blog.  So let’s start there and make sure we’re on the same page about the benefits of blogging.

Last year I explained that the best reason to blog is actually NOT for search engine optimization (SEO).  Yes, there are SEO benefits, but an even better reason to publish quality blog articles is for expert positioning.  Think about your perception of authors who publish informational books in your industry.  Authors of books have instant credibility (assuming the book is well written and accurate).

Obviously blogging is not the same as writing and publishing a book, but it does accomplish the same expert positioning.  If you’re publishing helpful articles and your competitors are not, then who do you think your prospect is more likely to contact?

 

2. Your Newsletter

An email newsletter is one of the easiest ways to follow up with your prospects and customers.  It’s easy as long as you’re already creating content because you’ll simply re-purpose the same exact article that you just published on your blog.  That’s pretty easy right? One article just gave you SEO benefits, expert positioning, and a reason to follow up with your prospects and customers.

Since many of the people who read your email newsletter would not have visited your blog, you’re giving your marketing a big boost with nominal additional effort.

 

3. Social Media

Social media marketing requires lots of content and that’s a big hurdle for most businesses.  But remember, we already created an article for the blog! That means we can again re-purpose this same article by posting on your company’s social media profiles.  For example, this article will be sent to our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn company pages, as well as relevant LinkedIn groups.

In this example, we don’t post the entire article, we post a link with a small blurb to get people to engage with the content.  The benefits are obviously more exposure, engagement with prospects who use social media, as well as expert positioning.

Remember, we’re still talking about the same blog article, so the only additional work is to write a few sentences and post on your social media profiles.

 

4. Another (Relevant) Blog

OK, the last content marketing tactic is guest blogging. Unfortunately, this is the one tactic where you’ll need a 100% unique article.  That means you can not simply re-purpose the same article that you posted on your blog, sent as an email newsletter, and posted to social media.  To use guest blogging, you’ll need one more unique article.

There’s a lot of confusion about whether or not guest blogging is dead.  That’s because Google’s head of webspam, Matt Cutts, went on the record to say that links from guest blog articles may not help your SEO anymore.  Even if Google has the ability to sniff out every guest post (a tall order unless the articles are clearly labeled as “guest contributor”), there are still many additional benefits outside of SEO.

For example, by posting an article on another blog, you instantly get more exposure to prospects who may never have seen your business otherwise.  Plus, you’ll get additional traffic to your website when prospects click on a link in the article.

I hope this article gave you some ideas for how to give your digital marketing a boost with content.  If it all sounds familiar and you’re not sure why, it’s because this is the same strategy we use to market our own content.  If you haven’t already, then sign up for our Main Street Marketing Tips newsletter to see this all in action.