A while ago, when I was still working in Corporate, I joined a LinkedIn content marketing webinar, not expecting much more than a few tips on creating good B2B content. What I got – thanks to the amazing Jason Miller – was a super-entertaining afternoon and one of the most useful analogies I’ve ever heard or used, which I’m happy to share with you.
We all know that creating great content is hard. It takes up so much time and so many resources and even if you spec it really tightly, it’s never going to be promotional enough for sales, technical enough for product management or flexible enough to do everything that marketing needs it to do. That’s why it’s vital to get every last scrap of value from your precious investment of time and money – by treating it like a roast turkey.
The perfect roast turkey, whether it’s for Christmas or Thanksgiving, is the subject of strong opinions and intense expectations leading up to the big day. It is generally a pretty expensive purchase, as food goes, takes a lot of time, effort and stress to prepare and cook, and needs careful checking to make sure it doesn’t end up slightly raw or dry as a bone. The only way to make all that effort worth it is to make as many different meals and snacks from that turkey as you possibly can. Turkey sandwiches, turkey noodle soup, turkey curry buffet a la Bridget Jones, Coronation turkey for even more sandwiches, turkey blinis and so on.
That’s what we need to do with hero content – a whitepaper, eGuide, book webinar, keynote speech, whatever it is. I want you to think about how you will break down that content and reuse/repurpose it to get the most bang for your content buck:
- How many different ways can you use it to reach your audience and feed as many of your channels as possible?
- Can you make ‘snackable’ content from that big beast of a piece?
- How can you empower your sales teams with that snackable content?
I spend so much time working on this very thing for clients that it’s become a verb – to turkey – at Wise & Zeal. I’m working on a guide to designing great content – ping me if you’d like a copy when it’s ready. If you’d like some help turkeying your content, or with any other aspect of your content marketing, August is a great month to chat.
