Content is king. I think we can agree: No matter how well planned and well financed, your lead marketing efforts fall flat if you aren’t saying something that the right people want to hear.

Content is also a killer. Transferring the thoughts in the minds of your company’s subject matter experts into material that’s engaging and interesting is labor intensive. But if you’re offering content in exchange for a little information about your prospects-their e-mail addresses, their names, maybe even their biggest challenges and some indication of how soon they want to address them-the content has to be worth their while.

Repurposing is the answer. The good news is, if you put in the time to create a powerful piece of content, you can make it work exponentially.

Last year we performed a “Content Audit” of all the existing content we’ve created at Bulldog: Webinars, white papers, articles, case studies, original articles from our Marketing Watchdog Journal newsletter. It was a big task, and while kind of arduous (can something be “kind of” arduous?) it was unquestionably worthwhile. The audit helped us create an overview of what kind of information we have. Who it speaks to (a manager or a CMO, or both?). Which solutions it addresses.

Armed with that information, we could begin repurposing to fill in holes. Using the existing content as a basis, we created content in other modes, so that we made the information available to people at different stages in the buying cycle, with different preferences for how they get information. Don’t have bandwidth for a one-hour presentation? We’ll turn it into a podcast. Prefer video to a 16-page white paper? We’ll give you a video white paper-you can have both.

This was about making our marketing customer centric. Our prospects and existing clients have different needs. They take their information different ways. At various stages in their planning and execution of lead marketing activities, they need different information. But creating something for every prospect at every stage of the buying cycle on every topic…well, it’s an overwhelming task. And it’s not necessary. Not when you can repurpose great content in a variety of ways.

Some examples:

• Analytics Manager JT Buser spoke at the Innotech Austin e-Marketing Summit in Austin. A segment of the recording became a podcast on “What Is Benchmarking,” offered on-demand on our site.
• VP Services Tim Wilson wrote a white paper on multidimensional lead scoring. The content became an hourlong radio interview, blog entries and a video white paper. It also fed numerous discussions and small presentations.
• We wrote a case study of one of our clients, Intermec Technologies, highlighting their successful multipart Webinar program. That became Web page content and a live and on-demand Webinar.  

This exercise is a lot like cooking. You have to start with good ingredients. Good content that hits the right note, says something useful and is well researched. But once you make that investment, you can make it work overtime.