Many marketers work on one project at a time. They need to create an email marketing campaign or it’s Tuesday and the blog post should go up. Or, the new white paper idea needs an outline or they need to help their executive build a slide deck for the next webinar, place a bylined article, etc.
There are standard execution tactics that go with each one. What’s not so standard is stepping back from it all and asking how each and every thing you do can be combined or integrated into the whole to produce something new or different. If you actually connected your marketing projects and programs, what could be the result?
The reason this doesn’t happen as a usual matter of course is often due to a lack of time, resources, skillsets and strategy. But, it’s precisely these restraints that necessitate that we look at the big picture and how — by connecting the dots — we can amplify our audience.
I was listening to Keith Urban sing on the Country Music Awards on Sunday night and jotted down a couple of phrases from his song that spurred my thinking about this subject. [Yes, I know, I can find inspiration anywhere!]
“Just going through the motions? You’ll never touch the sky!”
It occurred to me that many marketers (for reasons stated above) are lucky just to get through the motions to check things off their to-do lists. This approach is just so dang limiting.
Instead, start thinking about how what your’re already doing can become bigger and better. With each new channel you embrace, your audience gets a little bit bigger. With each new way you create to use content, your audience has another opportunity to engage.
How can you amplify what you’re doing right now if you consider:
- Opportunities to connect one-off content to other content assets.
- How you can group content of varying formats together to create a new experience, or several.
- Additional channels to use to promote your webinar.
- How you can reuse content from a nurturing program.
- New ways to invite people to participate in or share your ideas.
- Influencer audiences that you’ve overlooked in favor of focusing on only decision makers.
- Why some content gets much better response than others.
- How to bridge a theme across industries and personas.
- Why Facebook requires different content than Twitter.
- How you can actually entice more people in your company to write blog posts.
- Spinning ideas for how you can reuse those employees’ blog posts in other content pieces.
- Creating unusual calls to action.
- Challenging yourself to try new formats for content – what have you never done?
