Don’t Lose Another Prospect: How to Scale Content for the Modern Buying Journey

How to Get Started with Scaling Your Content

1) Shift Your Mindset

Invest in content today to meet the learning preferences of tomorrow’s buyer – or, as the Gartner illustration suggests, a group of buyers.

I’m a Millennial, and in recent years I made the decision to purchase a new car, buy an engagement ring, and commission the build of a new home, all without physically touching any of these items. Digital content enabled all of this in my buying journey.

For Gen Z, who grew up with smartphones, content will play an even bigger role. And this buying habit will influence their professional purchasing decisions.

2) Create a Content Map

Creating random blog posts, whitepapers, or videos won’t cut it. To truly maximize your content’s effectiveness, you need a strategic plan that aligns your content with every stage of your customers’ buying journey – awareness, consideration, and decision. Identify your buyer personas and their pain points, and then match each with the right topic and format (videos, blogs, podcasts, etc.). The goal is to have your content readily available for your buyers to consume as they are researching options and solutions.

As Greg Alexander always says, “professional services are bought, not sold.” Let your content guide the purchasing decision.

3) Plan Smart with a Content Calendar

When paired with a content calendar, your content map becomes actionable. It’s a tool that goes beyond logistics and scheduling. You can use it to find synergies across departments and all business needs.

For example, if your content map calls for filming a client testimonial, consider using that same opportunity to gather insights for a whitepaper or to gain a deeper understanding of product UX improvements. One effort, multiple value streams.

4) Leverage Opportunities for Efficiency

AI is becoming increasingly important in content creation, but AI alone is not going to maximize your yield. You need to actively reduce go-to-market bloat by maximizing outputs from every opportunity.

One of my clients took full advantage of this advice and applied it to their largest annual event. The keynote speaker was Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame. Instead of settling for his standard speaking contract, we sought an additional 30-minutes to conduct a private interview to talk about business trends and insights.

Mr. Wonderful accepted the invite, and we captured his live keynote presentation and a private video interview.  The following is a list of assets my client realized from these recordings :

• Keynote released for on-demand viewing
• Private video interview was streamed live on social media
• Excerpts used for short-form videos
• Audio excerpts used for podcasts
• Transcripts helped create magazine articles/blogs
• Pull Quotes used on social media
• Event testimonial created with excerpts
• Photos and video stills were published on the website

And all of these assets were stored and shared cross-departmentally for future use in marketing communications.   

In short, the client maximized efficiency by transforming ‘parent’ content to spawn multiple ‘offspring’ content pieces downstream. 

5) Lean into Collaborations

You likely have access to vendors, partners, and clients who are more than happy to share their expertise. Crowdsourced or user generated content is an effective way to increase your output and publishing frequency, while minimizing the overall cost to feed your content engine. This happens every day on social media, with brands co-authoring and/or co-marketing content.

Some examples include:

• Hosting expert interviews – feature others’ expertise in your blog posts, videos, podcasts
• Co-authored webinars – tap into each other’s audiences
• Content submissions – leverage your community to share the load

We also practice what we preach.

This is how WorkerBee.TV is driving our own marketing initiatives, which you can see outlined below.