Whenever I step into a new product marketing leadership role, one of the first things I do is a deep dive on the pre-existing content. Most companies have some absolute golden nuggets of great content in their archives, plus I feel like familiarizing myself with this content is an important step in my discovery process.
As I go through content that already exists, if I notice, say, a blog post that needs a few small tweaks to bring it up-to-date, I tackle those on the spot. Google loves to see refreshed and updated content, so it’s well worth the small time investment, plus it’s almost as easy to make those tweaks while the file is open as it is to click the close button.
But, as I conduct this audit, I also tend to come across a lot of content that feels like an out-sized time investment for the payoff given where the audience may be in their buyer’s journey. In the early days when content marketing was new, yes, the fact that you were giving away valuable information had meaning to your audience. Nowadays, giving away the most useful piece of content in the world isn’t enough — you need to make sure you’re giving that information in the right format, in the right “investment,” to the right person, at the right time.
What Does Audience Investment Have to Do With It?
One of the single most significant mistakes I see companies making with their product marketing today is in not aligning audience investment with content marketing. Sometimes we forget that just because content doesn’t have a sticker price doesn’t mean that it’s actually “free.” Your audience is constantly making decisions about where and how to invest their attention and if the investment your content asks for is larger than their willingness to invest in your company right now, they’re going to ignore even the best content marketing piece.
Generally speaking, when a buyer is brand new to your sphere, they’re going to be less willing to invest their time and attention. This is a good place to put short form content, especially content that’s friendly, funny and personable. Early in the relationship is not the time to pull out a white paper (no matter how valuable) unless your audience has extraordinary interest in your niche. The longer someone has known about you and been doing research into your solutions to their problems, the more inclined they usually are to go deeper which can mean long form case studies, research papers, white papers and more.
Maximizing Content ROI: A Product Marketing Leader’s Strategy
One of my current freelance clients sells an applicant tracking system in the healthcare space — this applicant tracking system helps recruiters and medical care facilities to recruit, qualify and retain healthcare professionals.
Most of their audience is HR professionals and operations folks and their content has been created accordingly.
Over the years, I’ve worked with many HR audiences in the B2B SaaS space and I’ve learned they tend to be very people-focused. That means my client is likely to have the most success sharing lots of customer stories with them, sharing channels for user-generated content (like G2), and sharing short, personable videos.
Based on my user research, HR professionals are likely to enjoy roundtable webinars more than a “lecture” style webinar. They’re likely to enjoy seeing happy customers talk about what they enjoy about a SaaS platform. As audiences go, it’s also a very busy, very discerning audience. They tend to trust the people in their circle to make great recommendations, but otherwise, it can be challenging to earn their full attention.
Leveraging AI Tools for Efficient Content Marketing
Let’s apply this to our applicant tracking system. First, we’ll go through the webinar archives, looking for those times when customers said something we can distill down to a 2 minute (or less) video excerpt. Using a tool like Pictory.ai means you can upload your video, scroll through the automatically generated transcript, highlight the text you want to capture and export just that section of the video in one click. Done manually, getting the timings exactly right and refined can easily suck up fifteen minutes or more, but Pictory makes it nearly instant.
As a first step, we can use this webinar excerpt on our social media accounts to point to that webinar. The transcript of the clip can be a great start for the description.
Staying with the same webinar that highlighted customer success stories, we could assemble several customer transcripts into LinkedIn slides using the great AI tools Canva offers.
From there, we could upload a clip of our customer success webinar into a tool like Ezgif.com which takes video and turns it into compressed animated gifs and we could use that animated gif in an email campaign.
Effective Prompts for ChatGPT Brainstorming
For our email campaign, we can use a tool like ChatGPT to suggest three distinct, compelling email subject lines for us to test for this campaign. My ChatGPT prompt for email subject lines to test in a campaign typically looks something like this: “Provide 10 email subject lines likely to have strong open rates and click thrus based on the provided content. Three of these subject lines should be funny, three should be serious, three should include emojis and one should be a wild card. All need to have a professional yet friendly style.” I like to ask for more subject lines than I need because I like ChatGPT best as a brainstorming tool so from there, I’ve often found myself combining two subject lines into one, or going a completely different way but inspired by the phrasing of one of ChatGPT’s suggestions.
Notice how all throughout, we haven’t needed to create any new content yet and we’re keeping the focus on what our HR audience has indicated they most appreciate when researching a new B2B SaaS — customers and their stories. We’ve spun out several easy additional content pieces from one original source (and we’ve barely just begun) all in about 15 minutes.
From there, we’ll be able to more deeply engage with our audience across multiple channels — email, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and more. We can even use these AI tools to make small tweaks (Canva does a great job of adjusting exports to the exact optimized dimensions of each social media platform, for instance).
Creating Impactful Microcontent for B2B SaaS Marketing
Microcontent has always been worth the time investment, but never before has it been so quick and easy to put together professionally and effectively. What’s more, by creating microcontent, you’re allowing the content you already have to do double, triple, or even better duty on your behalf.
It’s a great way to get up to speed in a new role (spinning out microcontent on already-existing assets) and it’s also important to get your team accustomed to always thinking of ways they can spin out any one piece of content into additional bite-sized pieces for additional exposure.
In a New Role, Start With a Microcontent Engine to Maximize Success
Stepping into a new product marketing leadership role is a journey of discovery and optimization. It’s also a great time to begin to create a foundation of using AI tools to amplify the content you’re digging through as you conduct your discovery. Just as I familiarize myself with the content archives to unearth those golden nuggets and ensure they continue to serve our evolving goals, so too must we adapt and reinvigorate our approach to content marketing in today’s saturated digital space. By leveraging AI tools and strategic repurposing, we can refresh and extend the life of valuable content, ensuring that it reaches the right audience, in the right format, at the right time—without requiring the heavy time investment that once was a barrier.
Our exploration of turning a single webinar into a multitude of engaging, audience-specific content pieces serves as a testament to the efficiency and effectiveness of modern marketing techniques. This approach not only maximizes the potential of existing content but also echoes the discovery process I embark upon when I take on a new role: making the old new again and seeing the familiar with fresh eyes.
The digital marketing landscape will continue to evolve, but one constant remains—content is king, and the ability to adapt and repurpose that content is the ace in any marketer’s deck. Whether you’re just stepping into a new role or looking to breathe new life into your content strategy, remember that the key to success often lies not in creating more, but in making the most of what you already have.