Economic uncertainty and inflation have led more than 40% of U.S. companies to trim their marketing budgets. These cuts pressure marketers to maximize return on investment and improve performance with limited resources.
Many content teams struggle with a heavy workload, feeling they must create, create and create some more. All this content is supposed to engage users, out-rank the competition and convert buyers. Instead, you often end up with a tangled ball of strategy, suppressed creativity and content made for algorithms, not people.
What if I told you there was a way to generate more creative, impactful content that nurtures audience relationships with less work? Enter: amplified marketing. This strategy extracts maximum value from a pillar piece by amplifying its content in other formats across channels.
In other words, amplified marketing empowers your team to do more with less. Successful implementation involves three concrete steps: identify, create and amplify.
Step 1: Identify
Start with identifying your audience. Who’s the content for? As marketers, we already know this is the first step. But when we are under pressure, we tend to skip over it. Avoid the temptation! Because when you take a moment to really focus on your target audience, you can better serve their interests and needs. So take a breath and remind yourself of the basics of your audience:
- What motivates them?
- What are their greatest frustrations?
- What content do they tend to gravitate toward?
- Where do they interact?
Refreshing your understanding of your audience helps you prioritize your audience’s needs when creating your material.
Next, identify your subject matter sources — the internal or external experts and thought leaders who can effectively deliver your message. Who are they? Don’t assume they are in your C-Suite or people typically in the spotlight. Maybe there are others in your company, among your customers or in your industry who have less notoriety but may be really relevant to your audience.
Last, identify the existing assets you have that could help here. What content, videos, recordings or episodes do you already have that could be repurposed — even just parts of them — to resonate with your audience today? There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when you’ve got access to plenty of valuable assets ready to reuse, repurpose and amplify.
Step 2: Create
Create something great that you’re excited about. Something you can’t wait to share with the world. Record a conversation with one of those thought leaders you identified in the last step. Get them on camera sharing a story or a hot take. Capture a customer or partner talking about important news or insights your audience will appreciate. And now that you’ve identified existing content that could be helpful, pull all that to the surface, too.
Now you’ll have a range of content and be ready to get creative with it. Think of all the cool ways you can use these resources together to make episodes, series, posts, campaigns and other cornerstone content. It’s fun and efficient creative marketing work.
Step 3: Amplify
Stopping at a single podcast episode or webinar dams a waterfall of resources. So next, take that cornerstone content and amplify it! The great news is that you get to be creative AGAIN as you look for ways to atomize that foundational content.
- Wring it out into smaller pieces: clips, key takeaways, audio- and videograms, pull quotes.
- Look for ways to use those pieces together: playlists compiling multiple recordings, embedding a clip into a blog post, leveraging a pull quote from an interview in an email cadence.
- Mix the old with the new: Combine the most recent pieces of your previously identified existing content with new content to fuel different channels. For example, add clips of existing keynote talks and webinars into a new video for your audience’s specific and timely interests.
- Amplify your content across channels in different formats to obtain maximum reach. For example, use short sound bites on all your social media platforms or in email. Cut the presentation into smaller bites for marketing material or the website. Leverage individual angles as the basis for articles and blogs or as inspiration for a new webinar. Build a conference presentation based on the original source.
When you and your team aren’t limiting yourselves to solely creating net-new content, you’ll be free to get more creative with your precious resources of time, budget and existing content.
Your target audience browses on various platforms engaging with content in many different ways. Diversifying and amplifying your content exposes more people to your brand in their preferred way — the core messaging remains the same no matter where the user finds the content.
The business case for amplified marketing
How does amplified marketing impact the bottom line? It pays dividends by saving time and effort, maximizing resources, building trust and authenticity and aligning messages.
Save time, effort and cost.
B2B content marketers spend 33 hours a week creating content, leaving just seven hours to manage campaigns and social media, develop strategy and define brand identity, among other responsibilities. The uneven split hinders creativity and generates burnout.
Amplified marketing saves time and nurtures creativity. Rather than struggling to generate the key points in a vacuum, content marketers can use original insights from thought leaders to develop more thoughtful and impactful assets based on those experts’ thoughts.
This approach empowers marketers to think and act more like journalists than attempting to actually assume the role of the thought leader without the expertise to do so. It’s more fun and more effective.
Maximize resources.
If you’re struggling to do less with more, you’re not alone. Remember that more content isn’t necessarily better. Don’t spend money and exhaust your team by asking them to create large amounts of mediocre content. Instead, invest your time in creating better content that is more likely to create real, human connections with your audience — quality over quantity. Sharing relevant, rich content across multiple channels generates more mileage from your work and reaches more people with less time, effort and resources.
Create authenticity.
Amplified marketing enables marketing teams to prioritize humans before algorithms. Teams using this approach have the capacity to think more creatively and critically about audience needs, preferences and behaviors. This breeds authenticity that generates trust and strengthens the connection between the audience and the brand.
Align messaging.
Sometimes, marketing feels isolated from the rest of the company. When content marketers try to channel expert voices, important messages can become misaligned. But by working directly with the expert’s words, marketers can align the resulting content with sales, product and leadership strategies.
As today’s creators raise the bar on content expectations and budgets grow tighter, marketers face a choice: feel pressured to keep running faster on the hamster wheel or be bold with new ideas. Amplified marketing generates unique, relevant and engaging content faster and easier across platforms without burning out your team or budget.
About the Author
Lindsay Tjepkema is CEO and co-founder at Casted, the world’s leading podcasting and video platform for B2B marketers. Since its start in 2019, Casted has been empowering marketers at brands like IBM, Salesforce, Gong and HubSpot to maximize and measure the value of their audio and video content. With two decades of hands-on experience in marketing leadership and as a tech founder, Lindsay shares her experiences as a speaker, podcaster, and member of the Forbes Business Council and the Entrepreneur Leadership Network. She and her husband have three amazing boys (including twins) in Indianapolis.
