This is a story of content reuse in action. At the Content Marketing Institute, we collect content marketing examples to share with our audience. We used to collect content marketing examples on an ad-hoc basis, but have recently started collecting them in a systematic way that lends itself to reuse – and saving time for our team.
Maybe you can figure out how we did things?
Someone would see a good example and email me – or someone australia mobile number list else from the editorial team. “Great example,” I would reply, and if I felt organized, I would store this example in my personal email folder. I don’t know what the others did, because I never bothered to ask.
Or, one of our blog posts would have a great example, and I think, “We should include it in a roundup” (a future post pointing our readers to our favorite examples).
Not so scalable or efficient, right?
Things got a bit better when we started collecting all the examples in a Google Spreadsheet, but everyone was recording different types of information and doing so inconsistently. This first spreadsheet was a good starting point, as we all had access to a single source of content, but lacked standards on what to record and how. It took work to prepare the examples to share.
For example, every Wednesday, our community manager, Mo, would email me and ask, “Do you have an example ready for this week’s Facebook post?” (We post an example a week.) I would go to the spreadsheet, search through the ideas, and format something it used. It might not seem like a big deal, but week in and week out we spent time emailing each other, and I spent time looking for an example and then preparing it.
I knew there had to be a better approach. Enter smart content.
A smarter way to organize content
I started learning smart content concepts in late 2014. Although I’m far from an expert, there was a lot in the concepts that made sense to me. I decided to use these concepts – especially the core concept of designing content for reuse – to make sense of the content marketing examples we collect.
As with any business process, we had to start at the end. I knew we needed a better way to have examples ready for our weekly Facebook post and at the Czech Republic Phone Number List same time wanted to update our content marketing examples eBook. I also have other ideas on how we could reuse this content once it’s curated.
Knowing our goals helped me decide what types of information to collect about each content marketing example in our Google Spreadsheet. I started recording these things every time:
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