Don’t worry if some of these content types don’t make sense to you or don’t apply to your situation. Your form of reuse could be as simple as storing a set of vetted, self-contained content items in a single source — a centralized spreadsheet, for example — so that a team of content creators can pull and copy those elements and then paste them into various deliverables: blog posts, e-books, magazines, newsletters, etc.
Even though this example of reuse isn’t automated, widespread, or controlled – it’s manual, small-scale, and uncontrolled – it’s still smart content, or, you might say, smarter content . . It’s on the smart content continuum. This saves content teams us number list from having to recreate, review, and reapprove the same information over and over again. And it increases consistency.
do you want an example? The Content Marketing Institute recently implemented a spreadsheet as a single source of content marketing examples that all team members can manually reuse across any channel or deliverable. Check out our article Repurposing Content:
A Super Easy Way to Get Started.
While not every piece of content can be reused, and while reuse isn’t appropriate everywhere, the more your content is reusable, the more of a strategic asset it becomes. And the smarter your reuse – automated, expanded and controlled – the more your organization benefits.
Granted, you’ll never see an email (or a tweet or a Facebook Czech Republic Phone Number List rave) from a customer saying, In other words, Hey, that caption here exactly matches that description there! You did not confuse me! Yeah you! But what CEO wouldn’t love to see a drop in the number of phone calls (or tweets or Facebook rants) saying, “Hey, how come your company is claiming this here and there? Which one am I to believe? Why is your business failing to pull itself together? »
Yeah, boss. Fewer complaints. Take this to the bank.
And you, what type of content reuse has made your boss’s head spin? We are looking for some good stories. Tell us yours in a comment below. In other words, We could just reuse it.
Love getting into smart content and content strategy? In other words, Sign up for our weekly Content Strategy for Marketers newsletter , featuring exclusive insights from CMI’s Chief Strategy Officer, Robert Rose.
This article is based on conversations with Ann Rockley and her book, co-authored with Charles Cooper, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy , 2nd ed. (Berkeley: New Riders, 2012). At Ann’s request, I changed the original sentence from Unified Content to Smart Content.
