Scott Services: Best Tweets from #SEMrushchat: How to Diversify Your Content On a Limited Budget

One of the biggest challenges for businesses with a small marketing budget is to create effective content campaigns. Great content takes a lot of time, effort, and at times, money. So in last week’s SEMrushchat, our guests Kelly Hungerford and Mack Collier, and the SEMrush community discussed ways to diversify content strategy affordably.

Topics included identifying content to update / repurpose / reuse, strategies for creating content, ways to repurpose content, user-generated content, and tools for visual content. The experts that contributed their insights pointed out many critical things businesses should consider and also things to avoid. We tried to include the best tips below.

You can retweet any of the tips below by clicking on the Twitter logo next to the quote.

Your audience learns in different ways and uses different technologies to view that information. If I am researching a product, I might want a blog post that does a deep dive. If I am in a store and just want to know how a product works, a video might help.

Diversity in content talks to the diversity of your buyers, customers, and end-users. If you know them well, chances are good you’re already creating a strategy that is diverse enough in content forms and types to reach them .

When a brand is trying to reach a new audience or has found gaps in its competitors content to help boost SERP and SEO rankings.

Diversifying your content allows you to keep things fresh for your audience. No one wants to see the same thing over and over. It also allows you to essentially test a wider array of content and see what works best.

People’s behaviours change. Diversifying your content strategy helps you adapt to these changes so that you can fulfill your audience’s requirements.

When you diversify your content strategy, you’re remaining agile and attuned to what your audience wants to hear, where they are, and how you’re going to reach them. Agility = essential in content marketing.

Sounds overly simplistic but the first step is to analyze which content types and forms your customers and community love. See how you can atomize it further into micro-content, or enlarge it into a bigger pieces.

Look at your Analytics/GSC data — what’s bringing in traffic? What is acquiring links? And, most importantly: what’s CONVERTING? Definitely keep that content (obviously evergreen) updated. And repurposing will only help the stats!

Your data will give you a pretty good indication if you are reaching content fatigue with your audience. If a piece of content (like a whitepaper) is doing really well, you may consider turning it into an infographic or hosting a webcast on the topic.

I’ll add that also focus on strengthening and improving your BEST content as well. Content that is already performing well can always perform better, this is especially true for blog posts where search rankings are so important and dynamic.

Analyse market trends and get user feedback. Pieces that appear to be a hit with your audience can then be updated accordingly, whether its purpose is to inform, engage or sell.

Check those metrics, if something is doing great, learn from it, why is it doing better than the rest, is it the topic? Is it the layout? and use your findings to create something new.

Pull quotes from the content and create simple images to share across social media. Record short videos of executives, customers, or experts summarizing or promoting the content.

Find creative ways to get user-generated content for content, video, and images. All free and typically better than your sales-focused content.

If you have a small biz with no (extra) marketing budget, you need to make mountains out of molehills. Curation is my favorite tactic and strategy. You earn so many riches through strategic sharing of quality content and relationship building.

Write it in house (ouch!). Think wide and deep. Look for fresh approaches. Try different media that you can do yourself. Curate – Repurpose. Repurpose. Repurpose (but don’t go repeating yourself).

First, I encourage you to get CURIOUS and get CREATIVE. There are so many excellent free tools out there to help you create stunning visuals (Canva), broadcast video content (YouTube), and more. You just have to be willing to get your hands dirty to experiment!

You don’t need a large budget to diversify your content! Explore new: mediums, visuals, questions, CTAs, headlines, platforms, updates, etc. Try: infographics, video, podcasts, audio, photographs, polls, live video.

Carefully, strategically, and with analytics follow-up. Too many brands repurpose big content into a smattering of low-quality, un-targeted blog posts that don’t really do anything. Don’t repurpose just because it’s easier. It doesn’t help you or your audience.

Take your best content and break it down into Q&A sections or guides for different audiences – beginners to advanced. Reuse those Q&As in images and videos for social media, customer service or related content on your site.

Creating simple infographics, turning the post into podcasts and videos, creating quotes for social media, using the post as the basis for an ebook or physical book, and using the post to build your next service offering are a few ideas.

I always start with a blog post because well-performing blog posts are typically long-form content. You can take that blog post & distill it down to a shortlist of takeaways for a newsletter, or use the takeaways separately with images to share on social sites.

In my mind, all content is interchangeable. Videos can be made out of your blog posts. Infographics can be made out of your videos. Podcasts can be crafted from video content. All of your content can be repurposed into new versions that serve other platforms.

After a few years of your content being out there, it can become irrelevant and at times, your imagery/video can be outdated. Fresh images, new video shoot can pivot your topic to intrigue new users again. If was already working before, updating will amplify it.

UGC content can be good or bad; its all about relevancy of content. So encouraging it on-site or off-site requires promotion, policing & monitoring.

Make your audience feel welcome to contribute UGC. Ask interesting questions of your audience that begs to be answered. Share the comments and photos from others in your audience to create a precedent.

WE LOVE UGC! How to encourage UGC submissions: Share their work, credit their posts, show appreciation, offer a reward, hold a contest/giveaway, have a branded hashtag ,and ask. People will WANT to share if they feel a part of the community/brand voice.

I have seen companies burn money on UGC because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Really need to know your market and what they respond to. Can’t really do it with low budget product brands! But you really can do it with a fan base.

UGC might not work as well for all industries. In healthcare, for example, compliance could be a sticking point depending on the product, the claim, etc. Make friends w/ compliance and to try and find a path. If there is no obstacle, look into UGC!

Incentivize your audience! – Contests, giveaways -> Shoutouts, mentions, and features. These are great ways to incentivize your audience whilst gaining insight from them.

Always have rules for UGC if you are asking for it. Don’t get stuck using something that doesn’t fit your company values or that doesn’t represent you well. I don’t like saying no to people as a blog editor, but I have to do what is best for SEMrush, always.

We have a long list of tools people recommended. Check them out, and FYI, the top mentioned tool was Canva.

Images

Video, Audio, and Animation

Thank You to All of Those That Participated

Each week, we monitor the SEMrushchats looking for tweets that offer expert-level insights. So, please participate in the chat and share your advice. Don’t miss this week’s SEMrushchat discussing Landing Page That Users (and Google) Will Love on Wednesday, July 31st at 11 AM ET/4 PM BST with Unbounce.

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