There is one feature active on many, if not most cell phones all the time, even when the phone is off.
It's not a video game or a social media app.
It's not the flashlight or texts from your partner.
It's the mute button.
87% of people screen calls. (Sorry, Johnny from sales. It's not personal.)
If that statistic sets your heart racing, take a deep breath and bear with me.
Mute is actually not the villain to your superhero or a 10-car pile up on a Friday afternoon.
Mute is actually your friend. Think of it as the buddy who brings you a beer without you having asked for it.
People mute because they want to control when and how they receive information. They want it to be self-serve and on-demand. You still have control over how people buy to an extent, though. And the benefit of being on mute is that you can schedule and automate a lot of your communications because most consumers don’t communicate live these days, unless they have an urgent problem.
That means that when they do want to talk to someone, they are already considering buying and they have the tools and information they need to do that.
Also known as inbound, the strategy of having sales coming to you instead of you having to go to them skips the need to manually open and close a sale. Inbound can dramatically lower the cost per acquisition (CPA) and do so with better results, too. It’s sustainability and growth all in one.
Your CPA is the amount of money required to turn a prospective purchase into a real one, whether someone is already aware of their pain points or your product or not aware at all. The lower your CPA is, the higher your profit margin can go, provided a lower CPA translates into sustainable and growing sales.
One of the ways you can lower your CPA while increasing sustainability and growth is to repurpose your content based on sound strategy and analysis.
Repurposing content involves taking one piece of content and turning it into other, usually smaller pieces of content.
SEMrush surveyed marketers in 2023 and 42% of them said that repurposing and updating their content led to success with their marketing. That means your content marketing strategy becomes less and less risky the more you optimize it.
Instead of just reducing the risks of marketing spend, why not also increase its value?
You can capitalize on content by using it to offset sales, customer service and even product development costs.
The point of repurposing is to not just create more content automatically, but to also use the content for other functions in your business development:
- User experience content can be generated from sales content.
- Product documentation can be repurposed to create marketing content.
- Content made for the awareness stage of the customer’s buyer journey can be repurposed as content for the consideration stage.
- The interaction in said content can be analyzed to better understand your market, their pain points and goals. It can then also be used to figure out which content is popular by looking at your traffic. Then you can figure out what other content to create.
Here are some examples:
- A podcast episode for the consideration stage can be transcribed and turned into a tutorial you can put on YouTube via AI for the awareness stage or turned into an email newsletter.
- A webinar transcription in the awareness stage can become a blog post to be delivered by a sales person in the decision making stage used to close a sale.
Both of these examples cover two stages of the buyer journey and serve two or more departments. All with one piece of content.
And the beauty of repurposing for different parts of the buyer journey is that it can easily increase the chances of you getting referrals. That person who watched your webinar and learned a lot? They may post it on Facebook or forward it to a friend via email.
That post you put on LinkedIn showing your audience how to do something? Someone in your niche can comment on it. And then that comment can show up in the feed of someone in their network who has pain points your product can solve.
The referral power or strategic content distribution is incredible and it doesn’t carry with it the costs of traditional referral marketing: paying for advertorials, hiring a publicist, etc.
So how do you repurpose content effectively? And what kind of resources do you need to make that happen?
It's a combination of insights, tools and super helpful content, which your market craves.
If you use a knowledge base as a hub for your content, you can have key performance indicators all in one place and use them to quickly redistribute content for different stages and departments.
For example, if you have set a KPI to evaluate how many touchpoints someone takes to get from asking a question in your chatbot to buying through your checkout, you can look at all the things that happened in that process and use that to determine what content helped move the needle.
In the traditional sales approach, your prospect listens to your cold call, then asks you to email them a proposal, then they open it, read your statement of work and then click through to the sign up button.
Then you call them again the next month to start it all over again.
Sounds expensive, doesn't it? It is.
These days most prospects want and expect most of the customer buyer journey to be self-serve and on-demand.
And that doesn't just go for one stage of the buying process – it goes for all stages: awareness, consideration and decision making.
In the awareness stage the customer is just learning about your product or about your company in general and doesn't have pre-existing credibility or references from their network to make buying decisions.
It tends to be a very costly way to get sales because traditionally it involves cold calling multiple times and also tends to involve multiple people in an organization to move someone down a funnel.
It also tends to involve a lot of uncertainty especially if you don't have much data on previous purchases or research on your competition another challenge is that there tends to be a long period between someone becoming aware of a product and buying it and this can make it more expensive because you need to keep following up with the customer in different ways to get keep their attention or increase it.
Fortunately, a lot of it can be sped up and done with much lower costs if those leads are inbound instead of outbound and when the outbound process is largely automated.
You can repurpose both inbound and outbound, but inbound tends to be more hands-off and can provide better business intelligence because people who are coming to you already know what they’re trying to do or what they want to do.
What pain points would you like to solve by repurposing your content? Meet with one of our content strategists.
