Originally published April 24, 2020 , updated on September 6, 2024
It’s a fact of our modern lives that there isn’t enough time to do the things that we want to do. If you’re a business owner, the temptation is to work more in your business as opposed to on your business. This is because doing the work yourself is more ‘comfortable’ than teaching other people how to do it, and trusting them to do it well. You know how to do the work and are practiced in it. Being the boss is a new kettle of fish and it’s going to take time for you to learn how to manage your workflows, including content. Also, you should succeed in marketing it correctly while, at the same time, getting the work done.
You Can’t Neglect Your Marketing
One thing that is fatal to the success of any business is thinking that you can neglect your marketing. This is because if people see that your business is no longer saying anything, they’ll assume that the company has gone under. Lauran Donovan had this to say about the importance of social media:
“Facebook Advertising offers an array of features to target precise groups of people—including your competitors’ customers. It’s possible to target ads toward people who search for specific keywords or who visit specific websites (such as your competitors’ sites). Your competition may be trying to poach your audience through targeted messaging.”
If you’re the owner of a business that is just getting going, chances are excellent that you are wearing multiple hats. For example, employee, finance, HR and CEO. The thought of adding another one – CMO – may make you feel like you’re going to spiral out of control.
Before you decide that you’re going to pack up because you can’t cope any longer, consider these two things:
1. Strategic Marketing Attempts
Effectively marketing your business doesn’t mean that you need to be pushing out three articles a day and twice as many social media posts on your chosen platforms. If you’re a one-man-(or woman)-show, it’s impossible to generate this amount of new content daily.
This means that you need to be strategic about the content that you generate. Plus, you need to be truthful – to yourself – about the time that you have to dedicate to marketing. For example, if you can only realistically spend one hour a week on getting your company’s messaging out there, make the most of this hour that you can.
One type of handy tool that can assist you with maintaining your social media presence is social media automation tools. Hootsuite and Buffer are two of the popular ones on the internet. If we were to take the example in the previous paragraph of only being able to spend an hour per week on marketing, use that hour to set up posts for the next week. You can use Hootsuite and that will go off when you schedule them. In this way, you’re maximising your time and getting the best possible marketing ROI.
2. Use of Quality Content
Google penalises you if it sees that you have poor quality content on your website. By ‘poor quality’ we’re referring to content that is full of grammatical errors and typos and is copied – word for word – from another website.
This means that the content you generate for your website and other online platforms need to be original. It should be well-thought-out, and meticulously checked. This type of content takes time to create – time that you, as an entrepreneur, probably don’t have.
The solution to this may not necessarily be that you have to forgo sleep to be able to write these articles. The answer to having fresh content on your site – while still maintaining quality – is content repurposing.
What is Content Repurposing?
Hubspot offers the following, very useful, example to illustrate what content repurposing is:
“When you repurpose a piece of content … you’re doing one of two things (or both): changing the format of the content, and/or changing the target audience for the content. Examples of changing the format include turning a series of blog posts into an ebook. Or, taking important content from a webinar and placing it in an easy-to-consume infographic. Examples of changing the content for the audience might include starting with an ebook originally intended for, say, SMBs, and restructuring/rewording it to apply to a new business type.”
Repurposing a piece of content is not just about publishing a piece of content on a different platform. Besides, It’s neither adding more content into that particular piece.
It’s about taking that piece of content and transforming it for a different audience and/or into a different format.
For example, if you have a blog post that is doing exceptionally well, you could:
- Create a PowerPoint presentation from it and upload this onto Slideshare. Celebrated digital marketer, Neil Patel, says that over 80% of Slideshare’s 70 million visitors who come to the site monthly are directed from targeted search. This means that using this platform offers an excellent opportunity to raise brand awareness.
- From this same blog post, you could extract information to make an infographic and submit this to Instagram and Pinterest.
- You could also write a video script from the blog post. Then, turn it into a video and put it onto YouTube. This social media platform is well-known as the second-largest ‘search engine’ next to Google. So having a presence here is vital for your business to be found online.
- You could rip the audio from your video and create a podcast which you could also submit to YouTube. Instead of uploading a video, you’ll choose a background image for your audio and upload it.
There are a lot more ways in which you can repurpose the content on your site. This takes the pressure off you and ensures that your marketing remains up to date while not eating into your time unnecessarily.
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