If you’re an inbound marketer, or if you’re just starting to get familiar with inbound marketing, you’ve probably become pretty familiar with the inbound methodology. It’s all about attracting your best prospects to your site, converting those visitors into leads, closing those leads into customers and ultimately delighting those customers to become promoters of your brand.
When you get down to the core of inbound marketing, though, the whole methodology really centers on one critical component: creating content. Quality content that speaks to your prospects and piques their interest is like gold to inbound marketing. After all, they don’t say, “content is king” for nothing!
Once you’ve finished creating your first set of high quality, thoughtful content that will engage your prospects, you may be anxious to start promoting that content and get the ball rolling. At this point, it’s easy to feel tempted to take a break from creating more content – after all, you’ve just finished the process of creating your first content set, and surely that will last you for a while, right? But how long is too long to keep promoting the same content pieces?
No, it won’t actually start turning green or grow any fur, but promoting the same old content again and again to your prospects will turn them off just as much as a moldy piece of food would. Having alternative pieces of content to promote will keep things fresh by giving your other pieces of content a break.
Here’s another way to think of it: have you ever been a guest at a party, only to arrive and find out the host only put out one type of snack and/or beverage? Having only one or two sets of content readily available to promote to your prospects is sort of like being that host. Instead, keep the people who are following you on social media and visiting your website interested and engaged by giving them a variety of options.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you can’t re-promote a content piece once you’ve already published it on social media. In fact, you should promote the same content more than once on platforms such as Twitter, whose users’ feeds are continually changing and updating. Much like the reason why commercials are aired on TV more than once, sharing the same content a few times will increase the chances of your followers actually having the chance to see that content.
Keep in mind that there are a few best practices for promoting the same content piece more than once:
Know the shelf life of each particular content piece. If the offer is only good for a certain time of the year (say you're offering a fall consultation special that runs through the end of October), know the time range that's acceptable for promoting that content. Give yourself a 3-4 week range before the offer "expires" to promote it across your various marketing channels.
Work with your wording. When you promote the same content piece multiple times in a short amount of time, avoid boring your followers by varying the introductory text that accompanies the offer, instead of consistently repeating the same phrases. You shouldn't have to change much, since the root of the phrase should remain similar, but a little tweaking can go a long way. Take a look at how we recently changed up our wording to promote the webinar we're hosting this week:
Typically, you can get away with promoting a new content set for about a month, if there are enough individual content pieces within the set. We usually recommend that content sets include at least 3 pieces – one for each stage of the inbound funnel – that can be promoted throughout the month.
Once that month is up, though, it’ll be time for you to start sharing some new content pieces. Your followers will be ready to see something new from you, so keep working on creating quality content pieces and you'll have a fully stocked content library in no time!
Need some help when it comes to content creation? Download our free content creation template & worksheets by clicking below!
Topics: Content Marketing
