Life is busy. This is made painfully obvious in the way multitasking has taken over every aspect of our personal and professional lives–hello there tv remote bottle opener! Nothing serves a single purpose anymore and that should include your marketing content! Yes, we are talking about the content that you and your team spent countless hours dreaming about, writing, revising, rewriting, rereading, editing, revising again… yeah that content. Or perhaps you hired a freelancer or agency to create the content for you. In either case, precious time and valuable marketing budget were spent on creating the marketing theme, the copy, the visuals, the video, and all of the other assets in your marketing library. Now you need to take that content and get as much value from it as possible.

Preparing Your Content To Go The Extra Mile

The days of writing an article, posting it to your site, and moving on are over. Take a few extra steps once the article is completed to ensure that you give it legs, and get some free promotion to allow more eyeballs to view it. After all, this is content about your destination, and shouldn’t every target audience that will influence your success want to read it? When an article has been composed, take the time to do the following:

1. Write a couple of social media posts related to the article. One post should be just the title, one to summarize what the article is about and one to appeal to each target audience that the article applies to (more on that below). Consider creating posts that pose questions that are answered in the blog.
2. Select imagery that will accompany the article and assign different images to different social media posts.
3. Be sure your content is “evergreen” or relevant over time. Then, schedule and set up the social media posts to run at various intervals throughout the year.
4. Write a brief overview on the content and schedule when it can be posted in your newsletter.
5. See if it will fit into your annual visitors' guide or other publication.
6. Modify the copy in a few key places of your content to allow it to resonate with a completely different audience. For example: if you’ve written an article that lists The 10 Best Restaurants in Town, tweak it to create a second blog post titled Top 5 Family-friendly Restaurants and then a third article about 6 New Eating Spots.

Re-dressing Your Content for A New Purpose

Outside of blog posts or news articles, your website is sure to contain valuable information people are looking for. How you present that content on your website may fit the bill for a general audience, but you have more than one target audience. Those audiences are likely looking for similar information, but with a different eye or mindset for how they intend to use the information. One way to cater to each target audience is to create landing pages to help consolidate relevant information for each target audience. For example, a destination’s website may have information helpful to a meeting planner, but those bits of information are most likely scattered throughout the website (not just meeting venues, but dining and accommodation options). Attractions may also have a similar need such as gathering information for large groups, or helping guide a visitor to other attractions or activities nearby. Help each group by providing one page that centralizes everything they need, even if it is just guiding them to the various locations on your website. The benefits of reusing website content in this manner include:

• The ability to house information used in several places in one central location and customize it with little effort to take on a new tone that is more compelling to each audience segment.
• The ability to guide the user experience more directly without giving too many outside options that will cause your call to action (CTA) to get lost. In a nutshell, improve your conversions!
• The ability to track your efforts more closely, without the external, accidental traffic clutter.
• The ability to market this new landing page or mini-site with ads, effectively making a niche market campaign.

Use this blog entry to challenge you and/or your staff to:

1. Revisit all of your existing content to get as much bang for your buck as possible from it.
2. Think ahead as new content is created about the possible/multiple uses that content can have.
3. Think about how current and new content can flow (and reflow) through different content outlets over time.