Investing in content marketing isn’t just about growing sales or building better relationships with customers. It’s also about building a collection of assets that, when properly used, deliver ongoing value.
A common mistake organizations make is to treat each piece of content like a one-time event rather than as an asset with ongoing value potential. The thinking is “publish once and move on.”
Most content is capable of being much more.
The Long, Long Life of a Blog Post
Professionally produced content is much more than the sum of its parts. A single piece of content—an article posted to a blog, a video on social media, an infographic (the list goes on)—can be the source of a wide range of additional pieces.
Blog posts are still foundational to any content marketing strategy. That’s because they are still a significant source of value. If you need proof, look at the statistics from HubSpot.
Read the marketing chatter on the web and you’ll see plenty of conversations about why blog posts matter. They generate leads, support a website’s SEO goals, and promote the organization’s expertise.
Those are all wonderful value-add components, but they follow an important and often-missed detail. Blog posts explore ways to condense complex ideas into digestible language. In other words, they contribute to an organization’s capacity to talk about itself.
In a way, blog posts are a laboratory to refine the details of a brand.
That is a big reason why marketers don’t want articles to just sit on a blog. They want to leverage their creativity in as many ways as possible.
Marketers leverage all the channels available to them to squeeze value from blogs:
- Put a condensed version of the article into automated emails to customers and prospects.
- Promote each post on social media, making sure to reframe the topic over several posts spread over several weeks (and months! and years!) to reach the most people.
- Make a graphic or a video retelling the article’s content in a visual format to reach more people.
Each of these examples highlights an important point about blog content: It’s yours. Do what you like with it.
AI Makes Value Easier to Achieve
Cultivating the value of “old” content is no longer a strictly manual process. AI allows organizations to quickly recast their existing content in new ways.
Tools like ChatGPT or Google Gemini are mediocre writers at best. They fabricate facts, string together junk sentences, and abuse clichés without shame. Think of them as talented but lazy college freshmen trying to hit the word count requirement on the morning an essay is due.
To get the most from AI, it needs to be fed with good raw materials. Professionally produced blog posts are among the best categories of raw materials for generating fresh marketing content.
Even without training your own custom GPTs, ChatGPT can generate a bunch of useful social media posts from a single article. A custom bot using ChatGPT or another platform can be trained on all the style rules your organization has developed to frame its brand. Once dialed in, a custom bot can produce a mountain of unique social media content from a single article.
Be mindful that editorial and writerly expertise are still indispensable in this process. Even with high-quality prompts, every AI tool tends to wander off target. A writer’s skill is needed to add the right touch of brand fidelity and humanity to the AI’s output. A trained editor’s talents are essential for catching and removing the robotic style AI tends to use.
Exploring the Video Content Production Chain
A blog post doesn’t need to remain in the text realm. It can also become a video.
Video content is becoming easier and cheaper to produce. That’s excellent news because video is also becoming the most popular option for consuming content online.
In a nutshell, here’s what an inexpensive video production process looks like:
- Distill a quick script. A short script built on the core ideas of a blog post can be made by hand or with the help of AI.
- Compile some stock video footage. Videographers don’t need to spend a week filming at your location, although we recommend that for the best outcomes. You can use stock footage to edit together a concise video to accompany the most important component of the video: the words.
- Hire a voiceover performer. Freelance voiceover performers are affordable and provide high-quality recordings from their homes.
- Edit, produce, release. Video editors work with the content to ensure transitions are seamless and final edits are appropriate for your preferred channels. Different platforms have different requirements. (Instagram and TikTok prefer vertical formats for phones, for example.) Put together a few versions to reach the most people.
By launching this process from a blog post, you’ve cut out the hardest part: figuring out what to say.
Red Mallard will help you squeeze the most value from your content.
Are you sitting on a pile of underused content? Don’t leave its value untapped. Call Red Mallard to begin to leverage your content today.
