??Content Development: How Many Times Can I Reuse The Same Content?

Dear fellow zoomers in marketing,

Taking yourself out of it and thinking from the perspective of your end-user can be a challenge, and even when you have practiced this exercise it can still be a challenge for other members of your organization, so it will be important to emphasize and advocate for your end-users experience when you notice that it isn't being fully leveraged, this is especially true when we have discussions around content reusability and recycling/upcycling. So today we are reviewing three major points that will help your team understand how to leverage content upcycling and how often you can do it.

Point One: Your audience is typically way larger than your team.

Your team works on improving your brand and enhancing your marketing daily. That means they will see the same piece of content and feel completely inundated. They saw it in development, go through QA, be posted, and then get reported on, it is reasonable to feel at that point as if you've seen it hundreds of times! Can we do something fresh? The end-user perspective here is that for an organic post, they have probably only seen it once - if you're lucky maybe twice, and if it has been a few weeks they have probably already forgotten that they have seen it at all. It is completely worth it to fill up your content calendar by running that same piece of content again and giving it another opportunity to reach the same individuals and new individuals so you have a more consistent reminder of your initiatives.

Point Two: The average person in 2024 sees 10,000 ads per day.

According to Siteefy the average American sees 10,000 ads per day and only about a quarter or less will actually be relevant to them, and that does not even account for the other portion of content that an end-user is seeing daily that is organic. If you know your end-user is seeing over 10,000 different pieces of content per day, and only one of those pieces of content will be yours, it begins to make more sense to increase the number of times you make any piece of content available. To be top of feed or top of hashtag you will need to be recent, relevant, and engaging. So allow yourself to prove that what you created can gain more engagement by using it at least twice!

Point Three: Being a resourceful marketer, social media manager, and content developer.

As an often small team with the priority of developing content, keeping things fresh, and always being focused on ideas, we often hear that resonating call to come back to earth from our idea clouds to maintain consistency. While we are striving to be unique and engaging we as marketers will still have those quantifiable goals of what we are supposed to accomplish, and this means keeping your content calendar full, with at least a month of cushion, to ensure you aren't scrambling on what to post. Recycling your evergreen content will allow you to fill in the gaps in your calendar so your posting frequency is not under scrutiny while you are committing those hours to ideation and creativity, the simpler name for this is "CYA" cover, your, ass. At minimum content upcycling can be used to CYA and ensure your deliverables are being met, and to your leaders, this is a second opportunity to contribute to increasing the metrics on a particular initiative, that is a huge benefit if you ask me.

The down-and-dirty conclusion!

Do not be scared to advocate for content to be utilized at least twice, and do your best to educate your peers about the benefits of upcycling your content utilizing industry facts and standards, do not be afraid to present upcycling content from the perspective of opportunity, because even if your organization has seen this graphic 1,000 times your end-users have not. Being able to time upcycling well and leverage it to fill holes in your content calendar is training you to be a better strategist around content creation and usage. So as they said to us in grade school - reduce, reuse, and recycle!

Until next time zoomers.

Signing off for the day. [TGIF!]

-Claudia Lopez