Refresh, Recycle, Repurpose, Refinish, Recreate
Finally some warm temperatures, April showers, baseball season opens again, food and wine festivals, and generally speaking, the joy of spring.
In the world of business, Q1 is over. As the exhilaration of the New Year fades away, the reality of new challenges settles firmly on boardroom agendas. Just like we do with our homes and yards, April is also a good time to rejuvenate your marketing plays.
You already know the essentials of spring cleaning your B2B lead generation:
- cleanse your leads database
- refine your lead generation strategy to do more of what’s working and stop what’s not working
- focus on priming hot leads to make them sales-ready
- carefully prepare for lead progression to drive conversion
- follow the 15-60-25 rule.
What else can you do this year?
Given that content marketing is a key driver of lead generation today, below are 5 easy steps to work with what you have and gain significantly better results:
1. REFRESH: If you have been tracking and measuring the performance of your content pieces over time, you know which ones performed better than others. Give those items a fresh lease on life so your audience can gain new insights on subjects they have clearly shown interest in. And this time, strive for even greater engagement. It’s okay to go out and say “this is old, but we have looked at it with new eyes (so it’s worth taking a look!)”. It’s better to be forthright than to pretend you are giving the audience a never-seen-before piece of content. Remember that if you are placing old wine in a new bottle, the wine must taste just as good and the bottle should look even better than before!
2. RECYCLE: Just because the news is stale and the newspaper isn’t worth reading anymore doesn’t render it useless; it gets recycled. It’s the same thing with your content. An old post may have lived its life on your blog but you can make it come alive again in your next email newsletter, a printed customer bulletin, an industry journal, and so on. A presentation you made internally to your team does not have to go into the company archives. There is bound to be some information, ideas and strategic thinking of value therein for other audiences externally. Get your team to go on a digital scavenger hunt and come up with at least one internal communication piece that can be recycled for an external audience. You’ll be surprised at how much “gold” you can find!
3. REPURPOSE: There’s a whole wide world of social media out there—all of it hungry and thirsty for relevant, useful and interesting content. So what if an article was written primarily for your customer newsletter? With a little creativity, you can clothe it differently for the various social channels you use. Make sure to tailor it for specific audiences and formats recommended by each platform. Keep in mind, however, that simply promoting the same piece of social content on different channels is not repurposing. Each iteration of the same content idea must serve a specific “purpose” for a specific audience. That’s content repurposing.
4. REFINISH: It’s like refinishing your hardwood flooring—you don’t need to remove an old floor and install a new one. You can simply make the old one look as good as new by getting it refinished by a professional. You can infuse an old piece of content with new data, industry updates and a fresh perspective. Revisit the original content idea to encourage interaction and promote engagement with your audience.
5. RECREATE: You have some great building blocks with content that has brought in quality leads in the past. Instead of putting all your time and resources into creating brand new blocks, you can rebuild or recreate engaging content. As long as you remain relevant and contextual for your audience, recreated content has the potential to drive greater lead generation and conversion. While you are at it, download one of our free e-booklets including “13 B2B Lead Generation Mistakes You’ve Made. So What Can You Do Now?”
What are some of the key B2B lead generation spring cleaning tasks on hand for your organization this year? Let’s discuss this on my blog.
