How to Maximise your Marketing Budget through Effective Content Reuse

As marketing budgets tighten and there is a need for marketing campaigns to deliver even higher returns on investment, John Bancroft looks at ways to maximise your marketing budget.

We know that the following ideas will enable you to do just that and help you to stretch your marketing budgets further.

Component approach to developing content

Maybe I have been involved in the IT industry for too long, but the basic idea of content reuse has come about through my experience gained in this sector. When IT programmers are writing code they will naturally identify portions of code that can be reused, as well as develop specific code ideal for reuse.

In essence, this is the basic idea I believe you need to introduce to the content creation elements of your marketing programmes to maximise your marketing budgets.

For example, when you are writing a case study or briefing somebody else to do it, some of the paragraphs could be reused at the time to generate a press release. Top and tail it with different content to suit your target media and you have just saved time and money. From a copywriting point of view, it is just as easy to write that bit more at the time when the work is being carried out.

There are many other ideas for using content that can be changed in minor ways to support the wider sales and marketing operation. Taking the case study as an example, why not ask your copywriter to produce key bullet points that could be included in a PowerPoint presentation for your sales team. It gives them something new to talk about and creates a library of case study slides that could then be used depending on the particular prospect you are selling to.

Taking it a step further some of the key points made in the case study could be used to formulate the core elements of an article that could be sold in to your target media.

Keeping the train of thought going, customer quotes from case studies could be used on your website, your email footer, a new brochure, and fact or data sheets as well as many other ways. Where the quote appears a link or reference to the case study should also be included. You could also create a short case study that could be used on the website and longer one for print.

Integrated Copy is the Key

The skill is to produce copy that is integrated with the overall piece, but can be used in isolation. When you have started to master the art you then simply create new marketing collateral almost totally from existing material.

For instance, you may want to focus your sales and marketing effort on to one particular sector. If you already have several case studies that have been written with content reuse in mind you can take elements from each to create an application case study for that market. Again, there may be a need to write some introductory copy, but this would take minimal effort to pull together.

Content reuse may not be something you have not considered before, but we believe that it will help you to maximise your marketing budget. It also helps to create new collateral and content that keeps your message fresh and gives your sales and marketing team much more to work with as they carry out sales and marketing campaigns.

Written by John Bancroft