3 No-Cost Content Marketing Tweaks That You Can Make Today

Is your business meeting all of its content marketing goals?

Could your goals be more ambitious?

Do you even have goals?

Before this turns into a game of 20 questions, let me start by stating the facts.

According to the 2014 Content Marketing Impreative, 93% of B2B marketers are now engaged in content marketing, and 82% of business intend on increasing their content marketing budgets in 2014.

With marketers taking such an aggressive approach to ramp up their current efforts, your business can either refocus their strategy, or fall behind.

But before your open up your wallets, check out these 3 no-cost content marketing tweaks that will help you deliver more value to your prospects starting today.

Don't Just Share Content Once

Are your followers seeing your social media posts?

With something like 9,100 tweets surfacing per second and 1 million links shared every 20 minutes on Facebook, the lifespan of your post is actually pretty slim. 

While many marketers would argue that they stray away from sharing content more than once to avoid the risk of coming off as spamy, in actuality, they're leaving valuable website traffic on the table.  

They way I see it, sharing your content on social media once is like squeezing a lemon half way and then complaining that your lemonade is weak.

It's silly. 

When it comes down to it, recycling content is only as spamy as you make it out to be. The key is to vary the way in which you present the content to your audience each time.

By reformatting the delivery of your message you are not only alleviating the fear of spam, but you're increasing the odds that your new message will resonate with someone new. 

Check out how we "remixed" this tweet 3 times to rerun it on social:

The title:

Post-Its, Headlines, and the Mom Test: Talking Content with @JayBaer https://hub.am/1iwyUdN

A quote:

"Competition forces you to improve, innovate, or fail." - @JayBaer https://hub.am/1hPi3nE

A question:

Does your #ContentMarketing pass the Mom Test? Learn why @JayBaer says it should... https://hub.am/1itaH83

It's that simple.

Pull a statistic, attach a sense of urgency, pick a different quote, accompany it with an image, and start getting more out of the content you worked hard to create. 

Build Out an Editorial Calendar

We're firm believers in posting a blog article on every day that ends in Y.

To be clear, this frequency may not be realistic for every business (we get that.) The point I am trying to make here is that it is deciding upon and sticking to a publishing frequency is something that every business should be doing. 

A blog editorial calendar serves as an organizational way to define a plan for publishing and actually stick to it.

With a pipeline of content ideas and deadlines easy visible, it's much easier to start writing, and much more difficult to ignore due dates. 

While many marketers turn to an Excell sheet to map out their content, we've seen a lot of success with the interactive project management app, Trello (and it's free!)

In fact, our Trello calendar has recently gone through a renovation that is shaping up to be one of the smartest adjustments we've ever made.

In an effort to create content that we were certain will resonate with our buyer personas, we've organized our calendar into 3 separate boards named after our 3 personas (Holly, Maggie, and Charlie.) 

Now every time we come up with a blog topic concept, we're forced to assign it to the persona that it lends itself best to. If there is every any uncertainty, we've attached a detailed account of each persona to the top of each board for easy referencing. If the topic doesn't fit one of the 3 personas, we don't write it. 

Coming up with valuable, engaging content ideas has never been easier. 

For more on setting up a blog editorial calendar on Trello, check out this step-by-step tutorial.

Craft a "Sunday Post"

Sometimes the answer to improved content marketing isn't more content, but smarter content.

Upon recognizing that our blog subscribers were only religiously reading every post we put forth top to bottom in a false sense of reality, we saw an opportunity to repurpose some of our existing content. 

Every Sunday we publish a reoccurring post that serves as a round up of all of the past week's content.

Accompanied by a brief introduction, we provide a link and short description of the posts that went out on our blog Monday-Saturday to make it easy for subscribers to catch up.

The "Sunday post" (as we commonly refer to it), takes about 20 minutes for us to whip up and it performs really well every week. 

Rather than let these missed moments with subscribers fall by the wayside, we advise you to take the 20 minutes to pull together your week's work and re-serve it up to them.

Perhaps they had a jam-packed Tuesday and didn't catch your post, or they liked the offer at the bottom of your Thursday post but knew they didn't have time to download and read through the ebook. Whatever the reason being, we're certain you can find it in your heart to forgive them. 

After all, if you're including a bottom of the post call-to-action at the close of every article, then each of your articles is functioning as a conversion opportunity. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a unique way to represent your audience with a conversion opportunity?