Time is a precious commodity for a small business owner. You’ll therefore be forgiven for not spending as much time as you like on marketing activities such as content generation. In saying that, in this content driven world, you can’t let the ball drop. We’ve put together a few tips to help you make the most of the content you’ve taken the time to create and curate and make it go a little further.

Share, share, share.
So you’ve got a great client newsletter. But all that effort putting together your great newsletter can be lost if no one sees it. Share your great content as broadly as you can, across all platforms.

You can start by emailing it out, then share across all of your social media accounts. Why not make a post for each? Oftentimes your business social media page won’t reach all your friends (they may not even like your page yet), that’s why it can be a good idea to share all the news from your business to your personal page as well. Then you can send it directly to your close friends (and all your colleagues) asking them to share it as well.

Key figures and insights can even be highlighted using your Facebook, Instagram and Snapshot story feature.  Taking a screenshot of your article, adding stickers or underlining and highlighting key elements of the article can assist reaching a wider audience and leading your network to your pages.

Widen your reach
The best way to widen your reach is to grow your email list and increase your social media followers. Make sure you’ve got all your friends and family following as a first step and ask you colleagues to do the same.

Work to cross-pollinate your followers, inviting your email database to follow you and add a subscribe to your newsletter on your website and social pages. Incentivise people by explaining what value they will receive by joining your network and ensure you follow through with quality, relevant content.

Business pages only have limited organic reach on individual posts. Widen it by using targeted ads and paid boosts. Social Media advertising is cheap, easy to use, and granular in its targeting detail. This means you can make sure your posts are seen by the right people. Every platform will have its own advertising tool, and help pages to get you started.

The algorithm works in mysterious ways so it helps to know what actions trigger extended reach: encouraging conversation through posts, staying topical, and tagging other businesses or experts are all good habits to get into.

Hashtag themes and tag names
Making use of hashtags and tagging relevant people and companies is one of the best ways of freely extending the reach of your content. If an article mentions a particular industry body or service, tag them. If an expert comes up – tag them too. They might even comment on your content or share it themselves.

By making use of relevant hashtags, you ensure your content comes up in search functions outside your own networks. Having a pre-set list of hashtags saved to your notes can help.

Repurpose
It takes a lot of time and resources to create and curate quality content, so once the base assets are finalised you want to repurpose them for as many different formats and media as is reasonable. 

You may have prepared slideshow material for a seminar. The images, copy and graphs therein can then be repurposed as a short PDF take-home, or a suite of social media posts.

Similarly, if you’ve had a great team photo taken, you can put it in your Facebook banner and your newsletter footer.

All this doesn’t need to be difficult. The practicalities of repurposing are easier than ever with a plethora of online tools.

When it comes to video content, you can cut it into smaller clips, transcribe the text into an article, or choose your favourite quotes and set them against an image. You can also repurpose article copy into smaller pieces; in a technique we like to call micro-biting.

Create micro-bites
Micro-biting is a great way to draw attention to salient points in your articles and to make your content go further. It can be as simple as copying and pasting particularly pertinent sections and sharing them to your socials in quote format. You could potentially get four or five micro-bites out of the one article. This way your content goes further and you can create interesting discussions out of finer details in your pieces.

You can even create a listicle out of an articles’ key points, crunching them down into a dot point list that people can easily look at and action.

Revisit old content
The world of finance goes in swings and roundabouts and you don’t need to create new content every time history repeats itself. If you’ve got a classic article on the miracles of compound interest or value in diversification, share them again. Your clients could probably use a reminder.

And if a particular article or post has performed particularly well, make a note of it. You can always re-share it in the not too distant further to give it some extra mileage.

Content marketing isn’t easy. But if you fully leverage and repurpose your output, you can do more with less. If you have any questions, or would like assistance repurposing your content, please give us a call.