How we manage the spreadsheet
We have tried to manage this spreadsheet in several ways. What has worked best for us is that Jodi Harris, our Curatorial Director, “owns” this list. Although many of us can add examples, Jodi is the person who reviews everything to make sure it’s right for you. (Or, better yet, I can email Jodi an idea, and she’ll add it.) Plus, she reviews and edits all the examples to make them appear consistent and accurate.
I don’t want to stress this too much, but the only technology we use is Google Spreadsheets. It is neither sophisticated nor technical. It’s not automated. All of our reuse requires manual copying and pasting. Each instance of reuse involves some tweaking. Still, it’s a great place to start preparing ourselves for more consistent reuse.
Now that our content marketing examples are organized and localized in one source, we can use them much more easily. Although we’re in its infancy, we’ve used these content marketing examples to create the eBook we just launched: 75 Examples to Boost Your Content Marketing Creativity . Here you can see how the Airbnb row in our spreadsheet translated into a page in the e-book.
The Airbnb information captured in our spreadsheet turned into this in our eBook.
Here’s the same Airbnb example of the spreadsheet as it translated into one of our weekly Facebook posts.
The Airbnb information captured in our spreadsheet turned into this in our Facebook post.
A few notes on this approach:
- The Airbnb example (above) was something we posted on Facebook a few months ago. While we reuse some of the examples across multiple channels, not all examples are used everywhere.
- There are times when the text used on Facebook is different from what’s in the eBook – and that’s fine for our purposes. Of course, if you’re using smart content to keep things consistent, you’ll have to handle things differently.
- As you can also see, not all of the information in our spreadsheet is used every time. Here, Mo marks the specific person who provided the example while omitting other details.
Another advantage: fewer emails
In addition to allowing us to create content faster, this way australia mobile number list of storing our content marketing examples has reduced emails. Gone are the days of Mo emailing me for something to post. Once an example has been approved for use, it’s marked “Ready for Facebook,” right in the spreadsheet, so Mo can enter the example of their choice. Then, after posting an example, Mo saves the date. This data is useful for the whole team. For example, it only took me 60 seconds to request the Facebook screenshot because Mo had saved that post date.
Summary
Of course, this is just the beginning of how we can use – and endlessly reuse – our content marketing examples. We have many other ideas.
And that’s just a simple manual reuse. We are talking Czech Republic Phone Number List about a few people who copy and paste. Think of the power of a reuse strategy becoming more powerful as you scale reuse to a larger group and automate that reuse. But no one starts there. Your smart content journey should start where you are.
Chances are you have a type of content that you can use for editorial purposes that would benefit from a systematic approach and reuse strategy. I hope this story inspires you to think about your own ways to organize content into chunks for reuse.
