How Manufacturers Can Repurpose and Scale Marketing Content | Episode 114

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Trying to figure out how you can repurpose and scale your marketing content? I’ve got some great tips to share with you in IndustrialSage Episode 114.

Danny:

Are you trying to figure out how you can repurpose your content, and make it scale, and that’s just a really hard challenge? Well you know what, that’s a really big challenge for everybody. I’ve got some great tips, that I’m going to share with you on today’s episode on how to do that as you set up your plans for 2020.

So, today we’re going to talk about how to really scale your content. To be able to repurpose it. This can be specific to video. or other things… I will talk a lot about video because, well, we are kind of all about video. Unless, if you’re listening to this on a podcast, if you didn’t know this, we shoot this in a studio. It’s on video. Come to industrialsage.com, you can see all this.

We’re big, big, big fans [of video]. Why? Because you can repurpose it. So, why do we want to repurpose content? What’s the big deal about that?

Well, the reality of it is, is that the need for creating content has quadrupled or 10x’ed, in the last several years. As we move into 2020, it is incredibly clear that, that is an area that we really need to move into again. That’s the number one thing that I hear from companies all the time. saying, “We need to create a lot more content.”

Well, what is content? We can define it in a million different ways. Well, maybe it’s sales enablement content, blog articles, or white papers, or eBooks, or podcasts, or videos, or product videos, or webinars, or a whole host of other things. That is really designed to be able to help to educate your prospect. Or your customer, if you’re trying to sell them into more things. Well, why do we want to do that? Well, because if you’ve listened in on the show we’ve talked about this a lot: the buying cycle shift, the way that people buy, the way we go to market for things has completely changed. Completely changed. Thanks to a thing called the internet, right?

Can you imagine, I was listening to a podcast, I was listening to a, who was it? It was Gary V. If you don’t know Gary Vaynerchuck, take a look, take a listen. He’s got tons of content, he’s the content king. I was listening to his podcast earlier today actually, and one of the things that was interesting is, he was talking about how he sort of discovered the internet. It was early or mid 90’s, he was in college, and that the first time he got exposed to it, they had the whole dial-up thing, and he was really explaining it. He said it just was like, “Wow, this is amazing, like this is going to be the future.”

You know, it’s crazy to think just for two seconds, you know how much business, how much the world has completely evolved, thanks to this little thing called the internet. You know it wasn’t that long ago… I remember ’95…okay, so I’m not super young, I’m not super old, right in the middle, and 95, I don’t know how old I was, I was probably 10, 11, 12, somewhere in there. I’m bad with math today. You know, that wasn’t that long ago. That was really not that long ago. It’s completely revolutionized how we do everything. So, if you’re a millennial there, and you weren’t even born there, or whatever, I mean it was a totally different ball game. Just imagine your life…not as your life right now. Things were way slower, you didn’t know any better. The internet just completely, in my life, has completely revolutionized and flipped everyday life on how we do it.

Well, the same goes for, obviously, for buying. It’s continuously changing. Think about Amazon, for example. Amazon has completely revolutionized everything. The internet has revolutionized a bit, Amazon as part of that, but even the last five years, or just think about how we’ve got the holidays coming up, and you’re going to go buy gifts, hopefully. Are you going to go to a store, or are you going to do it online? That is completely, that is a conversation that we did not have 10 years ago. It was, “Oh, well yeah we… you have to go somewhere…” Maybe you can buy a few things online, but it wasn’t as prolific as it is now.

So, we are all now predisposed to pulling out our phone, and being able to buy something and maybe in two days have it. So, we have information at our fingertips, we want what we want, when we want it, how we want it, on what device we want it. This is why we need lots of content, because it’s the informational age that’s on demand. Your buyers, your prospects, your customers, are accustomed to buying online. They want information to the challenges that they are seeking out right now. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a consultative sale that is going to take years, and a multi-million dollar deal, and it’s going to take a lot of Influencers, and a lot of consulting and discovery. It doesn’t matter. Or if it’s a product that somebody can go buy, you know it’s an MRO product, or something you’re buying, online or what have you. When people have a challenge, or a need, or a problem, they’re going to go look for it online.

Ergo, why you need content. People are self-educating ourselves around that challenge that we have that you, hopefully, can solve for them. If you don’t have content online to educate, and to be there, to really facilitate that sale, or at least the beginning piece of that sale, then guess what? They’re going to move on. They want that information, and we want it like that, we want it now.

So, the need for content is huge. So, long gone are the days of…I mean it still happens, but bringing around samples, you know the big boxes in the back of the car? Putting them around, doing the whole dog and pony for three or four hours.

I remember, this frustrates me as a millennial, like I can’t tell you: if you are in the window space, or any home services, you sell into that space, you’ve got dealers in there, they need to completely do away with this. This is really frustrating as a millennial. You go to try buy windows or doors for your house, and hopefully it’s changed, the last time I bought windows and doors for my house was…I want to say it was three years ago, but it was probably more like eight or nine. To be honest, we bought our house and we needed to get new windows, we needed to get some new doors, and we did our due diligence, wanted to bring in three people to kind of weigh prices and all that good stuff.

Man, it was the worst experience I ever had. Maybe not ever, but it was a super bad experience. Why? They came in and they had like, a three hour long pitch! “Well these are the best…” It was pretty much all the same thing, right? “Oh, these are the best windows, ever, you can do this, and now we can step on our windows and that’s… and now let me ask you about, you know…” It was this whole process that was just, oh my gosh. Like this is not…I just want to go online, and get my information quickly, and then we kind of go from there. Why do we got to make this so painful? Hopefully, they’ve changed that now.

Same thing now. People want their information, when they want it, how they want it. I want to be able to go online, be able to ask the questions that I want, and be able to get that information quickly, and not have to dedicate nine hours. I legit had to dedicate nine hours of my time to buy these freakin’ windows and doors. That I was like, “Really?” I have better things to do with my time, to be honest with you. Sorry, that’s pissed off Danny venting That’s a millennial.

But here’s the thing: that’s how millennials are thinking. That’s how we’re all really thinking, to be honest. I mean, do you really want to sit through that? Is that a good experience for you? No. So we need to make sure that we have a good experience for our customers. So, this is a really long explanation on why more content. Then we’re going to get to how you can repurpose it, right. So, this is why we want it. The other thing I wanted to put in is that just the way that we’re consuming content is happening at a breakneck pace. You used to be able to like put something up socially like, I don’t know once a week, or whatever, now we need to be putting up multiple pieces of content up every single day.

So Gary V, another guy, if you don’t listen to him, great stuff. I really, really like what he says. One of things that he was talking about, this is from a keynote address that he gave at AdWeek. This, I believe was a couple weeks ago. I listened to this episode the other day, and what he was talking about, granted he was talking to the B2C community, we’re B2B. But he was talking to B2C. We know B2B does follow B2C, and it’s getting even closer every single day. But, they have a huge need to take the amount of content they’re producing, and to 10x it and 50x it. Even by doing that, that’s still not going to be sufficient, like we can consume so much more. So, the need to create more content is huge.

Now, there’s a big opportunity right now. Not everyone is doing it. Actually, most people are not doing it. So the challenge is, if you understand how the social networks work, if you understand how SEO works, Search Engine Optimization, if you understand all these, the Internets, how it all works, it feeds off content. You need this, you have to. Why? You can create an engaged audience. You can create excitement and energy, and attention and awareness, by doing this. You have to feed the beast, essentially is really what it is. So, you need more content, is the bottom line. You need a lot of it. You know these companies that are like blowing up that you’ve never heard of, we’re seeing it in a lot industries.

I had another client, I can’t say who it is, we had a company that came in, they were the 800 pound gorilla in the space for years, they’re like a 95 year old company. They told us, “We’re loosing a lot of market share because these smaller companies are coming in and they’re feeding in this message into the industry that we’re slow to respond, we can’t do custom work, that the lead time is super long, like all these things, and it’s all false. This is all false!” So okay, well that’s great, but you know, that’s marketing. They’re creating a perception in the mind of their buyer, and that perception is becoming reality. You need to respond back to that. How are they doing that? How are you able to knock off a legacy company that’s been around for 95 years? Big, bad… You do it through marketing. You do it through messaging.

The way that people buy, we’re not necessarily buying off the brand because the brand is big blue IBM. That doesn’t mean anything anymore to this generation, and it’s about how can you provide value, and solve the challenge, and give me value that I have for the challenge I’m looking for today. Right, it’s really the quickest, to be able to do that. There’s a stat out of real estate, that talks about if you’re looking to sell your home, or if you’re looking for a realtor, that the first real estate agent to get back to you after you fill out a form, or you’re looking for information, has an 80 percent chance that you’re going to go with them. Why? We all are pressed for time, and you have a challenge, you’re trying to figure this out, and that person answers your questions and calls you back and starts developing a relationship…it’s not rocket science.

The same thing is happening here. So you need to provide that, you need to able to stay on people’s radars. How do you do that? You do that with content.

Okay, so now that I laid out this huge framework, and I’m talking on my high horse, how do you do it? How do you scale content? Specifically with video?

It’s a challenge. You know the number one complaint that we hear at Optimum and IndustrialSage when we talk about video, “Oh, you’re going to do this, going to do this…?” I heard it the other day, actually at a conference. Somebody brought it up, and they were like, “Well, how do you justify ROI off of video content, especially when it’s super expensive and… all this stuff?” I said, “Well first of all, there’s tracking metrics that we can put in, there’s analytics, there’s data that we can go and we can see how people are consuming that.” I can tell you that a video post that’s on LinkedIn for example, is going to way out-perform over text, and image. Blanket statement, but for the most part, if you’re doing this sort of apples to apples thing, people will like the video and it’s going to perform better, and LinkedIn, for example, really, really likes it. So we can look at that.

How are we impacting, how are we creating relationships? You get down the line, you can tie all that data into marketing automations, and CRM tools, to be able to see that. But the big thing, the big beef that I have is that yeah video is, and can be very, very, very expensive. Okay. If you’re not doing it right.

Okay, how should you do it right? You’ve got to have a plan. You need to be able to repurpose content. How do we repurpose this? I’m going to give you a really darn, really good example.

IndustrialSage, every single episode that we do here, we create a lot of pieces of content off of this. What I’m recording right here, we take this and we chunk it up into a million different pieces. So, talking a little bit about Gary V, he talks about a piece of content could be a, just a one-sentence tweet. But if you take that tweet, and you put it on Twitter, and then you have something on Instagram, then you’ve got something on Facebook, then you’ve got something on LinkedIn, you’ve got something on these big… TikTok? I don’t recommend TikTok for you, but you know, TikTok…and all of these other things. Guess what? That’s six or seven pieces of content there.

Okay, we start thinking about that really quick, well that’s not too bad, how do we do that with video? Well, we shoot an episode here at IndustrialSage, and I’ve shared this with you, if you’ve listened. We shoot the episode, we take this, turn it into a podcast, so if you’re listening on the podcast right now, if you go to Industrialsage.com you’ll actually see a video. Beautiful video. We’re at a beautiful studio, and you can see all kinds of, you can see my beautiful face. Hopefully. I don’t know if I have a face for radio, I’m not going to go there.

But anyways, why are we doing it in video? Now we can take that, and we can chunk it up into a million different pieces. We take the audio, create a blog article off of it. We can take images, still images and take quotes, and put things up. We can take little video snippets, put those up on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, you name it. We can do mish and mash episodes, and we can create more content off of that. That’s what I mean, that’s how you win. That’s how you repurpose. So instead of coming in and saying, “Hey look, we’re going to do this one thought leadership video that’s like 10 minutes long or 15 minutes long, 20 minutes long, however long this episode is going to be.” Instead of saying, “Okay, that’s one piece of content that we’re going to put up and then we’re done.” Wait a minute, there’s an opportunity to be able to scale that. To really, as I like to say, get more squeal out of the pig. That is how you’re going to win. That is how you create a lot of more content. That’s how you scale it. That’s where we’re going. That’s where you need to be thinking.

You need to be thinking, “What can we be doing in 2020, or right now that we can repurpose?” Instead of saying, “Here’s one piece of content,” let’s take this one thing that we’re going to do here, and then turn it into like 20. Or 30, or 40, that’s how you’re going to win. That’s how you scale content. That’s why we love video, because we can turn into a million other things.

I’ll give you another good example. We took our survey, we saw our survey, we had a 52 page report, we took a lot of stats from that, turned it into 90 videos. We probably could have done 180. Probably could have, might’ve been able to do more than that. Okay, with 90, 90 videos off a survey. Really small videos. Then we can put them all over the place. That’s how you need to be thinking. That’s how you’re going to get your brand. You’re going to push it out there and stay on top, top of mind, and do it. So be thinking about that. That’s how we’re going to win in 2020. That’s how you’re going to be able to create more content. That’s it. That’s the playbook. It’s very simple. Now you’ve just got to do it.

So anyways, and of course, if you need help doing it, reach out! We can help you out. We might be able to help you do some things. So anyways, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Man, today was a good episode, I get kind of passionate, I get excited about this, so… Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode.

Listen, if you have a question on something you’d love for us to answer it on the show, happy to do it. You can go to industrialSage.com/Questions and we’ll answer it for you. If you are listening on iTunes or Spotify, or any of the podcasting stations, we’d love a review. If you’re not on our email list go to IndustrialSage.com/Subscribe and get on our email list so you can get all of the other content, that we’re creating.

We’ve got a whole host of other things we’re going to be coming out on the pipe very soon, that’s going to be super exciting. You’re not going to want to miss it. So, that’s all I got for you today. Thanks so much for watching today’s episode. I’ll be back next week, with another great episode of IndustrialSage.

(Looking for this episode’s blog article? Read it here!)

 

 

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