Content makes the world of marketing go round. It doesn’t matter what your overall marketing strategy looks like – content is the fuel. You can’t go anywhere without it. The biggest problem is that content can be expensive to create. We operate in a business world where thousands of pieces of content are created every second. Trying to maintain can seem like a hopelessly costly exercise.
The key to successful digital marketing in the age of saturated online channels is extracting maximum value from your content. If the traditional approach is built on “single use” content, you need to restructure and choose a multi-use approach that allows you to use the same content over and over. One way to do this is to build a “decoupled” content strategy.
What is a detached content strategy?
The best way to understand the decoupled approach to content creation is through analogy. Similarly, you start with a core topic related to your brand and audience. This theme is represented as a tree. Then when you want to get more value out of the tree, you cut it into big logs. These records represent subtopics of more important topics. These logs can then be subdivided and subdivided into smaller niches. (And this process of debris the original topic into smaller/different pieces of micro-content can continue to take place.)
Detached content must not be confused with content re-publish or duplication. The mission is not to reuse the same content too much to extract more value from original content by finding new uses, applications, angles and related topics. Not only will this approach help you maximize your ROI, but it will also create a web of highly correlated and highly consistent content that will make both search engines and readers happy.
What you need for a detached content strategy
To start creating discrete content, you’ll need a few things:
- Keyword research. This process always starts with keyword research. First, you need to do detailed SEO research to clearly identify keywords that resonate specifically with your target audience. This gives you actual theme selection and content creation. (You can think of keyword research like developing a blueprint. Just as you can’t build a house without a plan, you can’t deploy a discrete content strategy without word research. lock up.)
- General topic. Armed with the right keywords, you can begin the process of choosing a broad topic. A general theme is a very basic, overarching topic that addresses a specific target audience.
- Content writer. You will need a team of people to actually create the content. While you can do this yourself, you should ideally hire someone to write content on your behalf. This allows you to focus on the big picture strategy.
- Consistency. A decoupled content strategy requires consistency. Yes, there are ways to automate and streamline, but you have to make sure you’re organizing your content consistently (and that the content is closely correlated).
A good detached content strategy takes time to develop. So in addition to everything mentioned above, you will also need patience and resilience. See what’s working and don’t be afraid to repeat. And remember one thing: You can always Break up a piece of content into more pieces.
How to plan and execute a detached content strategy
Now that we’re clear about discrete content and some of the different resources you need to succeed, let’s get down to the facts. how to by looking at an illustration of how this can happen. (Note: This is not a complete breakdown. These are just some of the ideas you can use. Feel free to add, subtract or modify to fit your own strategic needs.)
Usually, a detached content strategy starts with a pillar blog post. This is a comprehensive, exhaustive resource on an important topic relevant to your target audience. For example, a financial advisor might write an important blog post about “How to Sell Your Home”. This post will be several thousand words long and include various subheadings that dive into the specific elements of selling a home.
The most important thing to remember with a pillar post is that you don’t want to get too deep into the topic. You definitely want to achieve a micro-goal – meaning you’re writing for a very specific audience – but not with the subject. Of course, you can always zoom in on the blog post and with the crumbs it creates, but zooming out is much harder.
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Turn Blog Posts into Podcast Series
Once you have your pillar piece of content in place, the breaking process begins. One option is to turn the blog post into a a series of podcast episodes. Each episode can touch one of the sub-titles.
If these were the subheadings from the blog post, they would look like this:
- How to prepare for a sale > Volume 1
- How to find a real estate agent> Episode 2
- How to declare and divide your assets > Volume 3
- How to value your property > Volume 4
- How to choose the right offer> Episode 5
- How to Negotiate with Repair Requests > Episode 6
- How to prepare for the closing day> Episode 7
- How to Move Out > Episode 8
Depending on the length of your mainstay content, you may have to consolidate some sections from the original post to create enough content for a 20 to 30 minute episode, but at least you’ll have a solid outline. about what you want to cover.
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Turn Podcasts into YouTube Videos
This is a really easy way to multiply your content by shredding. Just take the audio from each podcast and turn it into a YouTube video with graphical overlays and archival video footage. (Or, if you think ahead, you can take a video of you recording the podcast – la “Joe Rogan” style.)
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Turn YouTube videos into social clips
Cut your 20-minute YouTube video into four or five different three-minute clips and social media recordings. These create really engaging content that can be shared and distributed very quickly.
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Turn each Podcast into long social media posts
Take each podcast episode you’ve recorded and turn them into their own lengthy social posts. Of course, some of this will include the information that was hashed in the original pillar post, but that’s okay. As long as you don’t copy the content word for word, it’s perfectly fine to have duplicates.
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Turn long-form social posts into Tweets
Your long-form social posts can then be turned into dozens or more individual short-form tweets. Find the best quotes, most shocking quotes, and most powerful stats from these posts, and schedule an automated series of posts to post in a matter of weeks. (You can automate this process by using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer.)
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Turn Content into Email Campaigns
Finally, take your best content and turn it into a series of emails on your list. You can even set up an autoresponder sequence that trickles down to everyone with a specific call to action.
Using the example from this article, a real estate agent could send out a series of 10 emails in 30 days with a call to action for a free listing valuation.
Take your content strategy to the next level with a detached content strategy
There doesn’t necessarily have to be one proper way to implement a detached content strategy. However, like everything related to marketing, there is a lot of room for creativity.
Inference
Use the parts of this article that work for you and adjust the rest to match your vision for your content. Just remember the core goal of this whole approach: maximize content.
The goal is to get the most out of your content. And you do that by turning every piece of content you create into at least another piece of content. If you do this effectively, you will succeed.
Image credit: by Kampus Production; Bark; Thank you!
