I agree with Jonathan Block. Organizations do not suffer from lack of content- they just don’t realize that they can use, and reuse, the same content in different ways and across many marketing channels.
Jonathan gives a great example – those whitepapers that we marketers must write and at times it seems that no one really wants to read, are chock full of useful information. In fact, a whitepaper can be used in bits and pieces for months, as material for tweets, emails and blog posts. The average whitepaper is so rich in content that each paragraph can spawn lots of shorter-style content.
It’s not that whitepapers, or longer, detailed, richer-type content, are unnecessary. These do have their place, certainly in later phases of the buying cycle when prospects are ready to dig deeper into your product or service.
But in the initial phases of the buying cycle, most prospects will be very interested in receiving short, concise messages about your product and will not be terribly into reading ten pages of technical information. Remember – they are just skimming at this stage, looking for an overview. Giving them what they want is easy, if you remember that you already have it – you just need to re-wrap the content and present it a little differently, tailoring it to the specific channel you’re using (email, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn) and to the specific prospect.
Sure, if you have more than a handful of customers or prospects, this is easier said than done – it won’t be easy to manage the distribution of content across many channels to many prospect if you want to stay personal with each of them. This is where marketing automation and sales enablement tools become useful, enabling you to automate your lead nurturing efforts to the point where you can take each prospect from initial engagement to a decision, giving them personal attention and helpful information along the way.
