Compounding The Return On Your Content

Last month, a survey of 329 senior executives in North America — by digital consulting firm PulsePoint Group and the Economist Intelligence Unit — found that an astonishing 84% of senior execs in North America reported improved marketing/sales effectiveness as a result of investing marketing budgets into social media initiatives. Eighty-one percent said that a social media presence had helped their companies increase market share.
But the social world is a cacophony of voices. How do you differentiate yours? Through content marketing: by gathering and shaping content to every channel you want to use — both social and traditional.

I was struck recently by an article by Joe Chernov on the CMI website, in which he outlines ways to make content work harder. “Just as an individual sniper can take out an enemy’s weapons armory with one shot, a single piece of content also has a multiplying impact on an organization’s global marketing effort. “ What he says is important. Content should beget content.

Here’s just one example of how our firm has made that precept work for us.

Matt Wolfrom, who leads the Technology Practice at Makovsky + Company, and Matt Makovsky devised a marketing thesis tied to the breaking news of Facebook’s launch of a “brand timeline.” Their thought leadership piece ultimately became a business development marketing machine for the agency.

Targeted to heritage-brand CMOs, an abridged version of the original draft became a bylined article in the “CMO Strategy” section of Advertising Age. A long-form thought-leadership version became the topic of a My Three Cents blog, which was syndicated to Forbes and other outlets. The Ad Age piece was further socialized with tweets and retweets by both the publication and personal account holders. The article was reshaped into a mailing to the top 1000 CMOs of heritage brands and other CMOs, clients and prospects. Ultimately nearly every tech executive of note had a copy of that article. The original white paper — and its many spin-offs — ultimately led to two partnership opportunities for the agency.

Not to shape, reshape and make the most of content is to ignore a critical corporate asset.