When you hear the term “content marketing,” it’s easy to think of big brands with six-figure advertising budgets and a team of writers and designers to create the content. The thing is, it doesn’t matter how “big” your brand is. Even if you’re a solopreneur, content marketing can make a significant difference for your ability to build your brand, attract and engage with your audience, and convert customers.

People no longer make a knee-jerk purchase because of an ad they happened to see on TV or online. Instead, they consider various options and do their research before making a decision.

I’ve seen a Meme online where one punter says to the other, “Are you sure you’re an expert? Because I haven’t seen anything about you online.”

Content marketing is important because it answers your audience’s questions. With content marketing, you can build trust with your audience, improve conversions, connect with customers, and generate leads. And, in today’s age, customers expect high-quality, consistent content from their favorite brands.

When done right, your content will help you distance your brand from the competition. It will engage potential customers and provide the information they need to make their decision. It will present you in the best light possible.

But, as I’m sure you’ve all experienced, creating quality content can take up a fair amount of time — social media has made it like a 24 hour news cycle. It can feel a bit like the beast that needs feeding all the time!

So in this episode, I’m here to help simplify this content creation process a bit, so that you can get way more return on your effort.

I’m going to walk you through a step-by-step method for creating one piece of content and repurposing it into multiple different channels. In fact, I’ll teach you how you can actually generate content for 10 different channels with that one, hero piece of content.

Sound good? 

Here goes!

First things first, we need to establish what is the one piece of content that will be like the hero piece, the piece that you will then be able to repurpose across the variety of channels. 

And even a step before deciding what that piece is, you really want to consider what the end goal of the content should be for your business.

For an eCommerce business, the purpose of your content marketing is twofold:

  1. Attract and engage your audience to prime the pump for a sale, and
  2. Drive traffic and sales in your online store.

So you need to make sure that the hero piece of content is going to achieve those two important goals. If the content does not build your audience or drive traffic and sales, repurposing it across different channels is a bit of a waste of time. You might feel busy and productive, but it won’t shift the needle at all. 

And seeing as this whole strategy is to save time, let’s make sure we’re choosing the right kind of content in the first place!

So what kind of content do I suggest you start with? 

A customer testimonial – in video format.

Research has proven that the MOST influential forms of advertising are word-of-mouth recommendations and customer testimonials or reviews posted online.

According to market research firm Nielsen, recommendations from friends are trusted by 92% of people, and consumer opinions (testimonials and reviews) posted online are trusted by 70% of people.

Compare that to the number of people who trust your own branded website – 58%. Or who trust the emails they subscribe to – 50%.

When your customers share their opinions about your website or your products, this can also be a very high quality source of traffic to your website. 

So, customer testimonials are both persuasive sales messages and they can really drive traffic to your website. 

For this content repurposing strategy, you need the testimonial to be in video format first. So before we get into how to repurpose your content, I’ll start by sharing just quickly how you can ask and collect those testimonials, as a few of you may be wondering about that bit!

Q1: “Before”

In your first question, you want customers to describe how things were before they bought from you.

Yes this might seem like an easier question for those selling products that provide a solution to a very clear need, such as our client Baby Loves Sleep who solves the problem of babies waking at night with their ‘startle reflex’.

But, this question can work for all products. For example, I could easily describe my search for the perfect pair of jeans that fit and flatter my figure and don’t roll down over the post-baby-belly!

The goal here is to help potential customers to recognise themselves in the ‘before’ descriptions.

Q2: “During”

In the second question, ask customers what, specifically, did they love about your products and about their experience of buying from you.

Key word here is ‘specific’. Concrete, tangible examples sell. Vague, intangible words do not.

For example, a comment like ‘Great!’ is not going to help you much, is it?

Whereas, something like this will be a lot more persuasive:

‘OMG these are so comfortable! These are my new favourites! I have 2 other pairs (light blue & dark blue) but I love that the black is dark black & not faded. Only washed them once so far & they have retained their new look. I love that they are elastic & thicker than jeggings so you don’t feel the need to wear longer tops to cover the crotch.’

Q3: “After”

If appropriate for your kind of product, ask what things are like now for your customer.

Most importantly, always remember to ask, ‘Would you recommend this product?’

In addition to this sort of ‘testimonial sandwich’ style video, you could also ask some customers to do some other specific content. Like, demonstrating how to use the products and why they love them, or teaching something, like one of our makeup clients has customers showing how to achieve a very simple makeup look. 

There’s any number of different types of content you could ask your customers to produce on video – just start looking at your most frequently asked questions, or even look at any written customer reviews you’ve collected over time to see what are the most common features people are praising, and ask customers to showcase those on the video they create for you. 

How to ask for it:

  • Send an email to a segment of your list (purchases in, say, the last 6-12 months)
  • Offer an incentive – go in the running to win a significant prize
  • Tell them how to shoot the video (portrait phone orientation, light in front of your face, no clutter in the background)
  • You could also look into using this app: https://www.videoask.com/testimonials
  • Tell them how to submit it (email? dropbox folder?)
  • Tell them the due date for submitting it
  • Email 3 times over a couple of weeks and potentially share the call-out on your socials as well.

So these video testimonials become your hero piece of content. But once you’ve collected them, what do you do with them? 

So now let’s get onto the variety of ways you can use and repurpose this piece of hero content.

  • Write a blog – attention, interest, desire, social proof (video testimonial), action (products featured with shop buttons). Embed video in the blog, and create a title graphic sized for pinterest
  • Post it on YouTube
  • Post that title graphic on Pinterest with a link back to your blog.
  • Use quotes and stills from the video, or even the whole video – perhaps displayed in a cool graphic of a phone or laptop – to create several social media posts
  • Create an audio-only version of the video (or even of the whole blog), and add that as a podcast-style audio on your blog. 
  • Once you have collected enough of these and could have  podcast-style audio files of enough blogs with customer testimonials, you could host these on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, to get in front of more potential customers via those channels.
  • Post the transcript from the blog, &/or the video as well, on the Testimonials page on your website. You can also embed a video like this on your product page – having social proof at the point of purchase is incredibly influential to getting a customer over the line to buy. I’d suggest adding it in Tabs under the Add To Cart Button.
  • Share an excerpt from your blog along with the video in an email to your subscriber list. Plus feature the products mentioned or demonstrated, and maybe an incentive if you want to be more aggressive with your sales-generation.
  • Add a video testimonial into your new subscriber welcome automated email flow. Usually I make the second email in this flow the one that features social proof. 
  • Use them in paid advertising – depending on the content of the videos, you can use them in cold traffic ads or warm retargeting ads.
  • Last idea – feature the testimonial in a Press Release. Much like the format of a blog, if you follow the Attention, Interest, Desire, Social Proof and Action format within a press release, you can start to be featured in various other media outlets.

Now, as you can hopefully see by now, collecting and using this sort of video content from your raving fan customers can (a) be really influential at building your brand and driving traffic and sales in your online store, and (b) be a very efficient way to actually create a tonne of content, and who doesn’t want to save as much time as possible when running your business! 

Hopefully what I’ve shared with you today in this podcast episode will be helpful to get you moving with this strategy.

But if you do want a more in-depth training and learn the step-by-step process to put a system around this – because a systemised approach will always be easier and more efficient than an ad-hoc approach – you might be interested in my Brand Rep Blueprint training. 

Basically this mini-course shows you exactly how to turn your raving fan customers into Brand Reps or Brand Ambassadors. Thinks like the ‘face of L’Oreal’ – you want to capitalise on the opinions and experiences of your best customers so that you can use that in your marketing to help build your brand, grow your audience to fill it with more people just like your best customers, and drive more traffic and sales through your website. 

When I implemented this in my own business, a program I called Consultants at the time, it quickly became responsible for a significant proportion of my sales growth.

Listeners of this podcast can enjoy 50% off my Brand Rep Blueprint, meaning you’ll pay just $97 instead of $197. 

It comes with 12 training videos and loads of template downloads to help you implement this strategy in your own business. 

Head to https://www.catherinelangman.com/brand-rep-blueprint to grab yours today! No discount necessary.