Turn One Piece of Content Into Many, and Engage Audiences Across Multiple Channels
In today’s hyperconnected world, content is king. But creating content is a time-consuming endeavor—especially when you’re trying to reach audiences across multiple channels.
For many companies, it’s simply not a good use of time and effort trying to create unique pieces of content for every touchpoint or media platform. But recycling the same content across multiple channels also poses an issue, because content that isn’t optimized for a specific medium will most likely be ignored. Or worse, it can reflect poorly on your brand.
That’s where divisible content comes into play. By creating a divisible content strategy, you’ll be able to engage with audiences across multiple channels and platforms by repurposing a single piece of content into many.
What Is Divisible Content and How Can It Help?
Divisible content is any content that has been designed to be easily broken down into various pieces of sub-content. This benefits you and your brand in a few different ways.
First, it increases the overall amount of content you can produce without substantially increasing effort. That’s because most of the heavy lifting is done by cornerstone content—a single piece of extensive content that will serve as the basis for all subsequent content in the strategy.
With the cornerstone in place, creating sub-content—whether a blog article, social media post, or short video—becomes easier because it is informed by the research you’ve already done. This approach also helps create consistency between your cornerstone piece and the subsequent content that branches from it. Each piece of new content remains thematically consistent with your cornerstone but can be tailored to a specific audience or medium.
Creating Divisible Content: Start Big, Stay Relevant
The cornerstone of your divisible content strategy should always be a fairly extensive piece of content (e.g., a whitepaper, podcast, vlog, etc.). The more extensive the cornerstone is, the more opportunities there will be to mine it for sub-content.
Let’s say you’ve recently written a whitepaper targeting a corporate audience. While most of the whitepaper might be too dense for your average user scrolling through LinkedIn or Facebook, taking the points that are most relevant to that audience and turning them into an easily digestible blog post allows you to use the research you’ve already collected and quickly repurpose it. You now have two (or more) pieces of content that, while related, are optimized for different platforms.
Another important aspect of your cornerstone is that it should be evergreen. While it might be tempting to build your divisible content strategy around a trending topic, it won’t help if that topic ceases to be relevant in three months. The benefit of an evergreen cornerstone is that it allows your brand to produce smaller content pieces that maintain their value over time.
Perform an Audit
In implementing a divisible content strategy, some brands will opt to create new content to serve as the cornerstone. However, performing an audit of any older content, with the criteria for your cornerstone fresh in mind, is an equally viable approach—especially for established brands with substantial content resources.
This approach can also help you better define your strategy going forward, as it allows you to take stock of what has and hasn’t worked in the past as well as which pieces lend themselves better to one medium or another. And by deciding to repurpose an older piece of content into your cornerstone, you’ll be saving yourself the work that comes with starting from scratch.
Tailor It to the Target
To be clear, repurposing your cornerstone content isn’t the same as recycling. The goal of a divisible content strategy isn’t to just post the same video or blog on multiple platforms but to tailor your sub-content so that it relates to your cornerstone while still being varied and optimized for its respective channel.
For example, you could take a blog post and break it up into a series of accessible pull quotes that build interest as they roll out on social media, increasing the number of opportunities to engage with your target audience. You could also pull statistics out of a whitepaper and create a short video around them that drives traffic back to the whitepaper itself. This will not only increase the reach of your brand’s overall message but will also have you rising in the SEO ranks due to the increased number of links back to your cornerstone.
With a divisible content strategy in place, the options for engaging with your audience are many. You’ll optimize your time and effort and find yourself in a better position to create content that provides real value.