(Re)Sessions 2: How to Repurpose Content Like the Pros with Market Muse Founder Jeff Coyle

Lindsay Tjepkema: You can't reduce the volume and expect to somehow have a higher convergent rate.

Jeff Coyle: Exactly right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: You can't do that in anything, you can't do that in sales, you can't do that in marketing. Welcome to Casted's Amplified Marketing podcast. This is the second episode of The Recessions, a limited four part series empowering you to think differently about your marketing, no matter the size of your budget. We'll cover things like how have marketers adapted during past downturns to future proof their company, and what kind of creative ideas that you can implement to help both your brand and your demand? And how about how amplified marketing can help you do more with less? That's a familiar feeling, right? When you're always being asked to do more with less, how can you respond as a marketer? I'm Lindsay Tjepkema. I'm CEO of Casted, the first and only amplified marketing platform built just for you by B2B marketers like you. This is episode two of The Recessions, where I spoke with Jeff Coyle, who is the co- founder and Chief Strategy Officer at MarketMuse, a content intelligence platform. As content marketers, we are constantly being asked to do more with less, right? So during an economic downturn, that rings even more true. As your resources become scarce, the solution isn't more content. It's never been the answer actually. So in fact, when you have lower capacity to create really kick ass content for your brand and your customers, it's imperative that you focus on optimizing and repurposing all that content you already have. So simply turning the faucet on higher or maybe even turning it down lower, it's not going to do a thing. It's how you shift your approach to content that actually matters. So Jeff walks us through three steps to get the most bang for your buck and to distribute your content successfully. You can't reduce the volume and expect to somehow have a higher convergent rate thing. You can't do that in sales, you can't do that in marketing, it's all about getting as much value as possible of what you do have. If you're going to do 100 episodes or one blog post or whatever it may be, how are you going to bring it out? And that's this whole notion of amplified marketing and amplifying the content that you have is you've got, and it's not even just about the recession, it's about the pressure that marketers are under.

Jeff Coyle: You should be doing it anyway.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah, we've got to get more value out of this stuff, a higher return on that creative energy.

Jeff Coyle: And the three ways that you can change the way that everybody thinks about it. First of all, you got to have that self assessment. What is your content efficiency rate? How much content have you created or touched? First of all, do you know your why? Why you did it? Did you set goals and how many of those achieve their goals? The average team I'll talk to is 10%. They create 10 things for one of them to be successful, okay? Now, if you say," Okay, well how much does content cost?" And you're like," I don't know,$ 200?" Okay, well now 10% uh oh, that's$ 2, 000. And by the way, it's not 200, if you put it in the all- in costs you're talking about... So people are really spending tens of thousands of dollars per effective page. So that's the first thing, you've got to know your true effective page rate. And by the way, if you bake in all the people who touch it, all the resources-

Lindsay Tjepkema: Oh my gosh.

Jeff Coyle: And you're actually below a thousand bucks per effective page, call me because I want to sharpen those knives. But second, you would be in that upper echelon.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: Typically, you're in that massively higher. So the check who you are, but then it gets really, really important to use data to decide what you're creating or what you're updating, where you have momentum, where you have looked at your site, your strengths and weaknesses. Obviously, the whole punchline here is I run a company called MarketMuse that automates all this stuff. But anyway, but the other one is make sure if you're spending money on content, on that raw material, the resource that you have a plan of getting ringing the most out of it, getting the most bang for your buck. It sets the deck in your favor. If you have multi- channel distribution, if you have multi- format distribution already teed up with some level of automation, and those people who are doing those tasks are typically, not knocking them or anything, they're not the subject matter expert. You're able to put them into somewhat of a repurposing or redistribution assembly line effectively. And you can do that. So your first go at this might be, okay, well, for every audio recording I do, every webinar recording I do, I absolutely have to have a summary, maybe notes, and also a transcript that's formatted well so somebody could read it. That's the easiest way to mentally think about a distribution channel or a repurposing campaign. But as you go, you get into more and more ways that you can get a lot of value out of this hour we spent today, or the$5, 000 we spent on an ebook, or the$ 50,000 we spent on that ebook or white paper so that it can turn into end things.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Right.

Jeff Coyle: And when you get into that habit of end things per source material, you start maybe two things, then it becomes five things. You start to see which of the channels are producing the value.

Lindsay Tjepkema: But easier said than done, am I right? Content repurposing can feel a bit more tedious when you're literally creating a new, the same material, the same thought leadership, the same strategy over and over and over. But when it appears in your customer's inbox or in their podcast feed, or maybe even your website's blog, they can't tell the difference. So they're not coming through your content and they're not going through it with a fine tune comb. So, to them, it's just helpful content. So how do you start flexing your content repurposing muscle? Jeff dropped some knowledge for you on that topic.

Jeff Coyle: It requires discipline. You have to do it. It sometimes feels like lower dimension work like it's not actually up to your skill grade. And if you don't have somebody who's doing it for you maybe, or somebody on your team or somebody who you've hired as a consultant, you feel like it's lower value. So you got to hold yourself accountable to that or find somebody to do it.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It is worth the time.

Jeff Coyle: It's so worth the time. But I find that that is often the... And then doing it every time. Always making sure you check those boxes. Hold yourself accountable, hold a team member accountable for actually doing it. I mean, as simple as the compare, I love podcasts because they're always easy to use as an example. Because everybody can understand the idea of going from podcasts to show notes, podcast to transcribe, podcast to annotated transcription, podcast to-

Lindsay Tjepkema: Clips.

Jeff Coyle: I'm going to add my commentary into the transcription. Or going from a book, guess what? Book's not accessible. Let's create a thousand pages that promotes the book. People get that. But when it comes to, for some reason, when it comes to their blog or their product pages or their product marketing materials, it's a mental block.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: Because they don't realize... But like a book? Yeah, let's promote the book. Podcast? Yeah, let's transcribe it. Easy for them to understand. Everything else gets into like," Oh yeah, I would never even have thought to turn my blog post into 75 other things," but you can.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: And that's the key.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. And I think that that's such a fun mind shift to make.

Jeff Coyle: Yes.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And it's a relief. I mean, when you're in the shoes of a marketer or marketing team, marketing leader, and there is this hamster wheel and this treadmill that keeps the incline keeps going up and it's just slowly increasing in incline and you, you're expected to keep running faster and faster and faster. And that's just not sustainable. It doesn't feel good. But going back and getting creative about this is a good thing that we already have. How else can we use it? What are some fun ways that we could use it? How can we send more people to it? How can we pull from it? And that's something that one person can do. That's something that an entire team of people can do. And it's a really important reminder always but especially now in this, maybe we're in a recession time, when everybody is trying to do more with less. And by the way, sometimes it can feel icky. Like," Oh, I'm just doing more for the sake of doing more. I'm creating more for the sake of creating more." It's not. If you have something that's performing well, if you have something that's on point for what you're trying to say, that means it's resonating with people. That means people want it. And if you give people more opportunities to find that thing or experience that thing, you are actually serving those people well.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. Everybody doesn't learn the same way as well. Everybody doesn't consume content. So there's actually some, long ago, like 10 years ago, I was doing presentations about doing persona mapping to learning models. And it sounds so nerdy, but it's some people learn through auditory. Some people learn by reading, visual, and hearing. Everybody kind of just assumes that's true. But then their content strategy just doesn't follow through with that. What they come up with is dogma that they feel is one size fits all, but there is no one size fits all. Some people love to listen to podcasts on their way to work. Some people love long podcasts, some people love short. Long form content, short form content, visual, there isn't one way. Unless you've got this beautiful, absolutely true model that all CMOs of 100 plus employee companies only like to read podcast or read infographics... Try to tell me I'm wrong there, right?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah. If your ICP, your ideal customer, is actually people who are auditory learners. That's it.

Jeff Coyle: Good for you. Bravo, I'm very proud of. Maybe if you're selling orchestra equipment, you might be able to pull that off, but I don't believe it.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So we're in the midst of a recession, technically. If you and your content marketing budget is reduced at any point, Jeff recommends that you start with some quick wins. So what things can you do to implement quickly with fewer resources, or if you want the same excellent output that your customers are accustomed to? Content audits don't have to be a huge rock that you have to spend thousands of dollars and weeks doing, thank goodness.

Jeff Coyle: So you've got to know your surgical quick wins at all times. And it should hurt you on the inside that you're not doing them. You should have a list of blogs that are going to win that you just haven't gotten around to. That's kind of your job. If you're a content strategist, if you're an editorial lead, if you're a search engine optimization professional is to always know what those things are. So when you're doing a content audit, really try to break it into the why. What we often see is people doing tail waging the dog content audits. So what does that mean? Traffic leads, sales, one team's KPI, the other team's KPI, organic, whatever. They're not aligned. That's another topic for another day. But then we're making decisions about keep, update, kill. That's the traditional content audit.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yep.

Jeff Coyle: It misses so many things. It misses so much nuance. What isn't being discussed is, was the article high quality? What topics did it target? What audiences did it target? What was the goal of the page? This is the killer for bad SEO audits, by the way, is they only look at entrance traffic to determine the value of a page. What? What if that page is the way finding off of the main guide and a lot of people click on it two paragraphs in and they go to this page and it doesn't generate any direct conversions, but it's providing expertise?

Lindsay Tjepkema: Sure.

Jeff Coyle: Plus not all pages that don't generate traffic... They don't need to generate traffic to actually help organic search performance either. Think about all the pages about a topic. They work together in a big old blob. And I'm glad we have video today because you're seeing me shake this blob.

Lindsay Tjepkema: The blob is moving across the screen.

Jeff Coyle: So all the articles, all the articles you have about CRM, all smushed together to allow Salesforce's" What is CRM?" page to rank.

Lindsay Tjepkema: As it pertains to your brand presence, it can feel good to prune pages, blogs, podcast episodes, et cetera, from your public feed. I get it. I love that purging. Marie Kondo all day long. Especially, if you feel that content is from long ago when your focus was on something else or your audience was a bit different. But hold your horses. Easy there killer, don't do it. Think about how you can repurpose or approach those pieces of content differently, especially in times of recession or having to cut back on your budget.

Jeff Coyle: Consolidate pages, expand them, change their target persona, before you get rid of them. It's so worth it to consider how they weave into the clusters on your site. I see so many bad decisions and I can tell you why they exist. They exist because there are people who advocate pruning and they don't know why pruning can work. Sometimes deletion and consolidation can work, but it's very rare and it's only in certain situations.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Certain situations for sure.

Jeff Coyle: They advocate pruning for everyone. Half the people who prune, probably more, at least half because the reality is pruning is very rarely the absolute right thing to do, but they're actually going to do damage. So you got to be thinking about if you've never clipped a bonsai tree before, your first bonsai tree's going to look like crap. That's the reality. So don't do it just blindly.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: You're not going to have Mr. Miyagi's stuff at the end the first time you ever do it. If you don't know what you're doing, don't prune.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: I mean it, don't do it. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It feels good, right?

Jeff Coyle: It feels good.

Lindsay Tjepkema: You're getting rid of things that shouldn't be there, but that's not the case.

Jeff Coyle: Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: And that's absolutely true for podcasts and videos, by the way. It's not just webpages and blog posts. We actually had a customer that as we were onboarding them, they were like... They have thousands of episodes. They have many, many, many different-

Jeff Coyle: My dream.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Right? They had many different types of shows. Webinars, videos, podcasts, many different types over many, many years. And they're like," Oh, this is being sunset. Oh, this one is old. We're not even going to migrate those." And I was like,"No, no, no, no, no. You migrate them all. Migrate them all." Because it matters. And evergreen content it's called evergreen for reason. There's always something there that's valuable. And also, I mean, the last time there was this much talk about a recession was 2008. That was a long time ago. 14 years ago? Wait, hold on. Let's just inaudible on the fact that that was 14 years ago. I met four. It was four years ago, right? I don't even know.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, I know. It's scary.

Lindsay Tjepkema: So I think you just never know what's going to come back to the surface. And so why would you throw that away?

Jeff Coyle: Right.

Lindsay Tjepkema: I mean that you're still going to see a return on that creative energy and that investment.

Jeff Coyle: Oh yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Nailed it. Evergreen content is a win- win. But you may be thinking," My content is timely, or my audience is too niche. Can I still repurpose content that I created months or even years ago?" Yep. You guessed it. Here's Jeff again on that.

Jeff Coyle: Don't think that your discourse or your discussions or your topics aren't suitable for that. I see this a lot in comedy. I see this a lot in special interest where it's like two people yucking it up and they don't think that it matters. It really matters. It really-

Lindsay Tjepkema: It does matter.

Jeff Coyle: It could change the game for you. Yeah.

Lindsay Tjepkema: It totally could. Which I mean to bring it all home, it could change the game for you, now more than ever, when we're all forced to do more with less and whatever that looks like for anyone who's watching or listening right now. We're all doing more with less in some way, shape, or form. Less resources, less dollars, less people, less time, less energy, less desire to do more.

Jeff Coyle: All the above. All the above.

Lindsay Tjepkema: All of the above. Now more than ever, we need to be doing the things that really make a difference. Not only is it good for the business, it's good for morale and goodness knows we need that. Okay, so in closing, what do you want B2B marketers in particular to take away as they question," Are we going into a recession and what does that mean for my content? What do I do?"

Jeff Coyle: I think whether you are or whether you are not going to be impacted, really taking stock. Not blindly turning off channels or turning down channels, but think about improving your batting average and think about improving your wins when you do. Getting more out of your wins when you do have wins. And that's critical. And then think about your manuals. Labor, where you're doing things manually, where in almost all cases, a great majority of things that relate to content production have radical improvements available out there using artificial intelligence. That's going to be a much better discussion than how many heads can I cut? Because that's when tough stuff can start happening on a marketing team. Especially now when jumping jobs, the barrier for jumping jobs because of remote work doesn't exist. And if you have a LinkedIn subscription, you can watch it like it's a streaming network right now of new position announcements. And that is a one two punch that most marketing teams can't handle. I might have mentioned, I have a webinar series on content strategy. It's in the top of marketmuse. com. It says webinars, you can see over 100 content strategy discussions, everything from sales enablement, all the way to podcasts to repurposing. I just did one with Benjamin Shapiro on content automation. He's one of the most prolific podcasters there is. I think he puts out 17 a week. So if you want to get into that, go listen to that discussion. He is still pushing the volume game and he explains how in that most recent recording.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Cool.

Jeff Coyle: So go check that out. I really dig him. He's a superstar.

Lindsay Tjepkema: Huge thanks to Jeff Coyle, founder and Chief Strategy Officer of MarketMuse, which is a content intelligence platform. Schedule a free demo with his team or take advantage of their free content audit at marketmuse.com. You can also email Jeff, of course, and let him know what you thought of his insights today in this episode at jeff @ marketmust. com. Stay tuned for the final two episodes where we dive deeper into amplifying your brand during an economic downturn. Thanks for joining us today on The Recessions.