No matter what your marketing operation looks like, you always want to work smarter, not harder, especially when it comes to marketing campaigns. One of the most consistent challenges for marketers is producing consistent, quality content at scale, but it doesn’t have to be.
Whether you’re strapped for time or limited in knowledge, creating a batch of custom-tailored content for your latest campaign isn’t as difficult as it sounds—if you work strategically. Over the years we’ve helped brands of all sizes maximize their marketing campaigns using one simple strategy, and today we’re going to show you how to do the same.
Divisible Content: The Key to Easy Marketing Campaigns
One of the classic rookie mistakes marketers make is approaching every piece of content as a standalone piece. While everything you make is important, the most successful content marketing campaigns work as part of your larger content ecosystem, helping you tell a collective, cohesive brand story.
Instead of sinking all your resources into one piece of content at a time, consider a more effective approach: a divisible content strategy. It’s basically an intentional approach to content creation, wherein you create multiple pieces of content from a single asset. This approach helps you easily increase the amount of content you have, tailor your message for specific groups, and maintain a narrative through-line.
Here’s how to do it.
1) Start With Cornerstone Content
A divisible content strategy works best if you’re starting with a larger, high-value piece of content. There are two ways to approach this:
- Comb your existing archive. You probably already have a popular evergreen piece on hand. This might include an e-book or things like videos, interactives, or even in-depth interviews.
- Create something new. If you’re starting fresh, think about a topic you can speak about authoritatively, specifically something that provides value to the people you’re trying to reach.
Ideally, this content will cover a topic in depth. If you’re working with existing content, you may find that you have enough information there, or you might realize you need to fill some gaps. If you’re working from scratch, you’ll want to make sure your main piece of content is comprehensive enough to give you fodder for additional divisible items.
Example: Let’s look at how one piece of cornerstone content from LinkedIn might get the divisible treatment. Here, we have a great e-book: Data Driven Recruiting: Find Quality Hires Faster with Talent Pool Analytics.
2) Look for Stories
Review your content to see what information might be most relevant to the groups you’ll be targeting in your marketing campaigns. Again, the richer the content, the easier it is to do this. Even if your content is on the lighter side, you can still identify subjects you may expand upon or enhance with additional info.
Think about what type of info will provide the most value to the people you’re trying to reach. What do they want or need to hear? What subjects are most interesting? What information could make their lives easier? How can you translate it into useful or interesting content?
Consider:
- Tips
- How tos/tutorials
- Education around a complex process or subject
- Interviews
- Roundups
- Data visualizations
This can all be helpful fodder for marketing campaigns.
Example: Looking at the TOC of LinkedIn’s e-book, we see chapters that discuss various aspects of recruiting. From “Three steps to being a strategic talent advisor” to “How to research and refine your talent pool,” there’s a lot of great content here.
3) Simplify the Message
A good marketing campaign is crafted around a single message. Don’t try to do too much in one divisible piece. If you can’t simplify, you should break it into two pieces.
(Note: If you’re not sure what you’re trying to say, a brand messaging framework can be especially helpful. Follow our guide to identify your main brand messages.)
Example: In looking at the intro chapter of the e-book (“What’s the big deal with data driven recruiting?”), we see a clear message: Data empowers recruiters to hire the right people quicker and faster. Thus, a campaign around this story is ideal to promote the LinkedIn Recruiter platform.
3) Choose the Right Format For Each Divisible
To make the most impact with your marketing campaign, you need to deliver the right message at the right time—in the right package. Thus, the format you choose matters. To figure out what form each divisible should take, consider:
- Channels: Where will you be promoting your campaign? What type of formats are best for those channels? For example, visuals are ideal for Instagram, whereas thought-leadership articles are great for LinkedIn.
- Resources: Are you capable of producing your campaign in-house, or would you need a freelancer or creative agency?
- Content: Some types of stories are best told through particular formats (e.g., data-heavy content is ideal for data visualizations).
If you’re not sure what might work best, here’s a rundown of different visual formats.
Example: Knowing their story, channels, and goals, LinkedIn could easily spin their e-book into various divisibles.
Each of these works as a standalone piece (with its own message and angle), yet they can all promote the larger piece (the e-book) through different channels. Best of all, by strategically planning divisible content in conjunction with e-book creation, they could maximize their creative resources and work more effectively. That’s a win at every point.
And there you have it. Divisible content is one of the simplest, easiest ways to create targeted content without stressing yourself out. But that’s not the only way to work smarter.
Don’t Stop with Divisible Content
There are a ton of things you can do to make your marketing campaigns more successful and, more importantly, easier for you. If you’re looking for more tips and resources….
- Brainstorm even more ideas with these tips to come up with great campaign ideas.
- Get inspired by these awesome examples of marketing campaigns.
- Learn how to master your content creation to work smarter, not harder.
- Follow our best practices to run better marketing campaigns.
- Find out how to measure the success of your campaigns to figure out if what you’re doing is working at all.
Of course, if you need help with any part of your marketing strategy, hit us up. We’re happy to help.