Content stacking will help your business engage your audience and save time on content production. Since this tactic can allow you to squeeze more value from their content investments, it’s odd that it’s not discussed online more often. Perhaps successful marketers would prefer to keep this winning strategy to themselves. You don’t need a huge budget for an effective inbound marketing campaign when you employ smart content production tactics.
What Does Content Stacking Mean?
Content stacking simply refers to the process of developing reusable content. You might craft a longer piece that you can also use as the basis for many smaller pieces. Alternatively, you might use a series of shorter pieces to create a longer work. You can use content stacking to help develop text, graphics, videos, or a combination of different kinds of content.
You can compare content stacking to slicing pizza into different shapes and sizes, adding slightly different toppings to each piece, and then offering these samples to people who will appreciate them the most. You now have the ability to distribute the slices widely in order to whet your audience’s appetite for the whole pie! With content stacking, you can give away many pieces of content for marketing and still retain your use of the original, intact pizza.
How to Stack Content
These examples of different ways you might reuse content should provide you with some inspiration for your own business:
- Start with longer content: You might start with an eBook, infographic, or long video that you want to use as a lead magnet. You may intend to have website visitors give you their email address and other information in exchange for this valuable content. Inbound marketers usually like using lead magnets to help grow their email subscriber lists. Some companies even sell this kind of information as a product.
- Use parts of the long content to create several short pieces of content: You can use chapters or sections from the longer work as the source or the inspiration for many blog or social posts, shorter videos, or advertisements. Of course, all of these shorter pieces should contain a call to action that directs viewers to the longer content. These smaller articles, videos, or graphics will address the customer’s pain points and drive them towards a more complete solution. You might distribute the shorter pieces on your company blog, guest blogs, social networking websites, video sites, and even as paid advertisements.
- Create mini-content and employ automation for scheduling: You could boil out even more value from your content by pulling interesting statistics and quotable quotes as the text for mini-content that you can schedule to post on social pages. You might use them to generate catchy headlines or even for eye-catching graphics and short, punchy videos. Automation tools like Buffer and Hootsuite will make your job easier and help improve your promotion schedule. Most studies have agreed that when it comes to social sites, publishing consistently over a period of time works best.
The Benefits of Content Stacking
Consider the primary benefits of content stacking:
- Cohesive messages: By having one piece as the source or inspiration for lots of related content, you should find it easier to target and engage your audience. Having an overall theme can help keep your marketing message focused and relevant, which should help attract the right people and keep them interested.
- Less work: You can spend less time and money when you have a single source for ideas, topics, and sources. You’ve already offered solutions for your customer’s pain points in your longer piece, so you won’t need to start from scratch.
- Wider distribution: By producing a variety of different kinds and lengths of content, you will have access to more distribution platforms. For instance, you might reserve longer videos for your own website or YouTube Channel but use short videos on social networking sites. As another example, you might create articles with different tones and focuses for your own blog, your social pages, and guest blogs. In the end, you can cast a much wider net.
How Can WriterAccess Help You Get Started With Content Stacking?
Once you accept your WriterAccess content, you own it. That means that you are free to use and reuse that work in any way that you please. If you employ content stacking, you should find that you get even more value out of your investment in quality content.
Marilyn K enjoys and understands inbound marketing. While she enjoys producing marketing content, Marilyn also specializes in business, insurance, software, and finance topics. Talk to Marilyn about your content stack.
