by Susana Fonticoba
When You’ve Lost the Will to Post…
A business owner friend was recently lamenting her “lack of excitement” toward planning her future marketing. She absolutely knew 2 things (1) social media was NOT working for her, despite many months of posts; and (2) the latest stats on email marketing remain true: it achieves the highest ROI in marketing channels.
She had ignored her email campaigns for a while and knew she had to get back in the game but felt defeated before she began – she didn’t know what to write about.
So I gave her my secret, which I’ll give to you right now…. Ready?
Like Dorothy’s Red Shoes, You Had the Power All Along
I told her to go back into LinkedIn, look at her post history, and copy/paste her content into a word document. We guesstimated she had enough email marketing content, at the ready, to populate campaigns for the next 2 years.
When you publish a social media post, not everyone who follows you will see it. I follow plenty of people and never see their post in my feed, no matter how many times they publish. Your content is at the mercy of “The Algorithm”, that mysterious and unapproachable formula we never have access to and certainly, no control over.
Marketing Where You’re in the Driver’s Seat
With email marketing, the control is in your hands. Your content is sent to the inbox of everyone on your list. Obviously they have a choice whether or not to read it, but at least you know it has a better chance at being seen because there is no algorithm.
With blog posting, the control is absolutely all yours. Take your social posts, expand on the topic with more detail and examples, and repurpose it as a post in the Blog page of your website.
Don’t have a blog page? Add one! It’s easy to do with all common website platforms today. And blogs on your website increase your search engine findability.
Easy Next Steps
- Go into your past social posts and choose some “recycle-worthy”
content –copy and paste it into a word doc. Keep going months or
even years back. If you’ve been in business for more than a minute
you probably have plenty of content already published that hardly
anyone has seen. - Bonus points – have you ever posted blogs? Submitted articles? Go
back into your past published posts and give them new life as email
campaign content. Even if they’re more than a few months old, some
topics stand the test of time and should be revisited. - Double bonus points – Now that you’ve mapped out the content for
the next several months, continue the path and plan on using evergreen
content at least once every 2 years. The best marketers I know do this,
and it works for them.
Yes, you’ll want to review our old messaging and revise as needed – but
that’s far less work than writing from scratch! And typically you’ll have already
created an image so that part of the task is done. Good job!
Bottom Line – If It’s Worth Saying, It’s Worth Repeating.
Take it from The Recycling Queen – people need to hear your message more than once or twice. And you’ll want to trust marketing channels where you
have the control.
Why start from scratch each time? Use what you already have.
