Leverage your content

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. I'm coming to you this week from Kaikoura, New Zealand. If you see little brown dots behind me, it's because I am on a deer farm. I don't know if you can see them in the video or not but I am surrounded by a herd of deer. This week, what I want to talk to you about is I want to talk to you about how to take one piece of content and use it for thought leadership throughout the year. So back in I think 2014, we decided that we wanted to start doing an annual research project for AMI and we wanted to go out and talk to CMOs and other people who hired agencies and we wanted to ask them a specific set of questions around a very focused topic. So it's been about how they hire and fire agencies, what they want from their AEs. This year's research was why they bring work in house versus giving it to an agency. But the key to that research is not only what we learn which is always fascinating and helpful but what we do with it after we get the research. And so what we'll do is we will take a single piece of research and we will slice it and dice it into over 50 pieces of content that we can use throughout the year. And one of the things that agency owners are always saying to me is "I know we should do more thought leadership but we don't have time." And what I'm saying to you is it's not about creating new content over and over and over again. It's about creating what we call cornerstone content, something big and meaty like a research study or writing a book or a series of speeches. And then slicing and dicing that content. So when we get done with a research project, obviously we write a summary for that research project. But then we start thinking very strategically about how else we can use that content. So a typical research project for us will turn into over 50 pieces of content. Typically we start with writing two or three keynote speeches. So we use the research data to get invited to be presenters at key conferences like Inbound or Content Marketing World. So we have two or three presentations out of that. Then we're going to do at least 2 or 3 podcast episodes around specific factors inside the research and then we do two webinars on different topics that the research sort of opens up for us. We'll write three or four articles that we can submit to publications like AdWeek or AdAge or other publications like that. We'll do six to eight video clips on different aspects of the research. We'll write another eight blog posts and then we'll probably do, I don't know, 10 or 20 tweets, 10 Facebook posts, several Instagram posts and graphics. We'll make a few infographics out of it and a few LinkedIn articles and then we will also turn it into two to three lead magnet pieces. So ebooks, things like that, infographics. But when you add all of that up, that's over 50 pieces of content that we could use throughout the year A, to really demonstrate our thought leadership in our space which is around how agencies function and what agency owners need to know. But B, it gets us invited to new opportunities. It gets us invited on other people's podcasts and best of all, it means that we have 50 pieces of content ready to go that we don't have to worry about throughout the year. So as you're thinking about walking into next year and you're thinking about positioning yourself as more of a thought leader, around the niches and verticals that you serve, be thinking about how can you build cornerstone content and then slice and dice that content so that you have content throughout the entire year. Alright, give that some thought. I'll be back next week.