Content makes the marketing world go round. It doesn’t matter what your overarching marketing strategy looks like – content is the fuel source. You can’t go anywhere without it. The biggest problem is that content can be expensive to create. We operate in a business world where thousands of pieces of content are created every single second. Trying to keep up can feel like an expensive exercise in futility.
The key to successful digital marketing in an era of saturated online channels is extracting maximum value from your content. If the traditional approach is built around “single-use” content, you need to switch gears and opt for a multi-use approach that allows you to leverage the same content over and over again. One way to do this is by building out a “splintered” content strategy.
What is a Splintered Content Strategy?
The best way to understand the splintered approach to content creation is via an analogy. In the analogy, you start with one core topic that relates to your brand and readers. This topic is represented as a tree. Then, when you want to get more value out of the tree, you chop it down into big logs. These logs represent sub-topics of more significant topics. These logs can then be split and broken down into even smaller niches. (And this process of splintering the original topic into smaller/different pieces of micro-content can go on and on.)
Content splintering is not to be confused with content republishing or duplication. The mission isn’t to reuse the same content so much as to extract more value from the original content by finding new uses, applications, angles, and related topics. Not only does this approach help you maximize your ROI, but it also creates a tightly-correlated and highly-consistent web of content that makes both search engines and readers happy.
What You’ll Need for a Splintered Content Strategy
In order to get started with creating splintered content, you’ll need a few things:
- Keyword research. The process always begins with keyword research. First, you need to perform detailed SEO research to zero in on the keywords that specifically resonate with your target audience. This feeds your topic selection and actual content creation. (You can think of keyword research as developing a blueprint. Just like you can’t build a house without plans, you can’t implement a splintered content strategy without keyword research.)
- General topic. Armed with the right keywords, you can begin the process of choosing a broad topic. A general topic is a very basic, overarching topic that speaks to a specific target audience.
- Content writers. You’ll need a team of people to actually create the content. While it’s possible to do this on your own, you ideally want to hire content writers to do the heavy lifting on your behalf. This allows you to focus on the big-picture strategy.
- Consistency. A splintered content strategy requires consistency. Yes, there are ways to automate and streamline, but you have to ensure that you’re consistently churning out content (and that the content is closely correlated).
A good splintered content strategy takes time to develop. So, in addition to everything mentioned above, you’ll also need patience and resilience. Watch what’s working, and don’t be afraid to iterate. And remember one thing: You can always splinter a piece of content into more pieces.
How to Plan and Execute a Splintered Content Strategy
Now that we’re clear on splintered content and some of the different resources you’ll need to be successful, let’s dig into the actual how-to by looking at an illustration of how this could play out. (Note: This is not a comprehensive breakdown. These are merely some ideas you can use. Feel free to add, subtract, or modify to fit your own strategy needs.)
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Write a Pillar Blog Post
Typically, a splintered content strategy begins with a pillar blog post. This is a meaty, comprehensive resource on a significant topic that’s relevant to your target audience. For example, a financial advisor might write a pillar blog post on “How to Sell Your House.” This post would be several thousand words and include various subheadings that drill into specific elements of selling a house.
The most important thing to remember with a pillar post is that you don’t want to get to micro with the topic. You certainly want to get micro with the targeting – meaning you’re writing to a very specific audience – but not with the topic. Of course, you can always zoom in within the blog post, and with the splinters it produces, but it’s much more difficult to zoom out.
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Turn the Blog Post Into a Podcast Series
Once you have your pillar piece of content in place, the splintering begins. One option is to turn the blog post into a series of podcast episodes. Each episode can touch on one of the subheadings.
If these are the subheadings from the blog post, they would look like this:
- How to prepare for selling > Episode 1
- How to find a real estate agent > Episode 2
- How to declutter and stage your property > Episode 3
- How to price your property > Episode 4
- How to choose the right offer > Episode 5
- How to negotiate with repair requests > Episode 6
- How to prepare for closing day > Episode 7
- How to move out > Episode 8
Depending on the length of your pillar content, you may have to beef up some of the sections from the original post to create enough content for a 20- to 30-minute episode, but you’ll at least have a solid outline of what you want to cover.
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Turn Podcasts Into YouTube Videos
Here’s a really easy way to multiply your content via splintering. Just take the audio from each podcast and turn it into a YouTube video with graphic overlays and stock video footage. (Or, if you think ahead, you can record a video of you recording the podcast – a la “Joe Rogan” style.)
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Turn YouTube Videos Into Social Clips
Cut your 20-minute YouTube video down into four or five different three-minute clips and soundbites for social media. These make for really sticky content that can be shared and distributed very quickly.
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Turn Each Podcast Into Long-Form Social Posts
Take each podcast episode you recorded and turn them into their own long-form social posts. Of course, some of this content will cover information already hashed out in the original pillar post, but that’s fine. As long as you aren’t duplicating content word-for-word, it’s totally fine if there’s overlap.
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Turn Long-Form Social Posts Into Tweets
Your long-form social posts can then be turned into a dozen or more individual short-form tweets. Find the best sentences, most shocking statements, and most powerful statistics from these posts and schedule a series of automated posts to go out over a few weeks. (You can automate this process using a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer.)
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Turn Content Into an Email Campaign
Finally, take your best content and turn it into a series of emails to your list. You may even be able to set up an autoresponder series that slowly drips on people with a specific call-to-action.
Using the example from this article, a real estate agent might send out a series of 10 emails over 30 days with a call-to-action to get a free listing valuation.
Take Your Content Strategy to the Next Level With Splintered Content Strategy
There isn’t necessarily a proper way to implement a splintered content strategy. But, like everything regarding marketing, there’s ample room for creativity.
Conclusion
Use the parts of this article that resonate with you and adapt the rest to fit your vision for your content. Just remember the core objective of this entire approach: content maximization.
The goal is to get the most value out of your content as possible. And you do that by turning each piece of content you create into at least one more piece of content. If you do this efficiently, you will be successful.
Image Credit: by Kampus Production; Pexels; Thank you!
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