As marketers, we are of course familiar with the well-worn mantra of ‘content is king’. The concept has paired with the advent of the World Wide Web to completely revolutionize marketing practice, from being a typical ‘features and benefits’ sales approach to something more subtle – and a lot more fun.
The only trouble is, all that content takes time. It’s a monster that never sleeps and always needs feeding – and coping successfully with that contains its own challenges. What is the best way to keep the flow of ideas fresh and to ensure that what you are producing is really creating value?
COPE: A System For Success
This simple principle has the potential to change your whole approach to content creation. COPE stands for Create Once Publish Everywhere – a philosophy which will extract the maximum value from every piece of content you create. Put simply, it means everything is created from a multi-channel perspective using a single process. It enables under-pressure marketeers to meet the demands of an increasingly fractured audience that inhabit multiple channels and expect a seamless interaction across them all. From interactive videos to wanting to create a digital magazine, it can be the magic technique to support your work.
Why It Works
One little word: efficiency. The goal of every business organization, COPE can squeeze extra creative juices from the same amount of effort. Planning to repurpose what you do means that you create it with those parameters in mind from the start, rather than trying to retrofit things. This saves precious time, money and effort, allowing marketers to focus more on pursuing the original ideas.
Winning over your audience is about listening. Image
How To COPE
Finding out the compelling story is at the heart of this technique. Particularly with business to business marketing, you must find the human angle buried at the heart of what you need to say, and build everything around this. It then becomes the hook you need to hang everything else from. Far too many companies still try to construct their marketing narratives around a soapbox approach that just tries to showcase a few Unique Selling Points – but actually, you have to work on finding something which will resonate emotionally with your audience. This depends upon knowing exactly who they are, doing your research and constructing some personas. This will help you understand the approach needed. Next, you need a framework and a process to work through, outlining exactly what, where, when and how you’re going to place your content, having tailored it for each channel.
Create a Feedback Loop
To truly understand the success of your COPE strategy, you’ll need to create a feedback loop, using both social listening techniques and analytics, to truly understand which content has been the most successful and why. Track the topics and trends which demonstrate the most shareability and engagement with your audience over time, and use this to refine your content strategy even further. So whether it’s turning a blog post into an infographic or a video into a white paper, you have captured the essence of what makes it useful content to your audience.