Why lean content marketing is the future of content marketing

You’ve heard it before: you need a content strategy. But how can you make it impacting without huge budgets and resources?

Source: www.slideshare.net

After having initiated and run #leancontent meetups for more than a year with great speakers in San Francisco and New York City to explore that topic, we’ve put together a framework for Lean Content Marketing by trying to regroup the key ideas that were discussed.

Only great content makes an impact since Google and social networks killed low quality content. Not to mention that it hurts your brand.

The problem is that great content is costly. And takes time to produce.

Some have deep pockets to solve this. RedBull for instance became a media company with its own record labels, studios and a content pool of 50,000 videos.

Do you?

As an SMB, chances are… no.

So how does a content strategy for the rest of us look like?

Answer: Low cost / fast / high impact.

Easier said than done of course but here in Silicon Valley we have examples every day of companies with limited budget changing the world in a radical way. So we got inspired by the Lean Startup movement and together with other marketers decided to apply that to marketing: speed and agility can make up for lack of budget.

Here’s a framework on how to become a lean content marketing master. L.E.A.N means:

L like Leverage:

– Leverage existing audiences on platforms such as SlideShare, Quora, Medium, etc… SlideShare for instance has 60M+ visitors monthly and excellent SEO. Think about using as a visual blog to bootstrap an audience as we did.

– Leverage your community: encourage contributions. Start a blog contribution program. Write round-up posts from testimonials.

– Leverage existing content: don’t just create, curate. 85% of professionals who used content curation in 2013 said it helped them save time to maintain their online presence (source: our 2014 survey on the impact of content curation).

– Repurpose your own content. Repurpose. Remix. Turn a blog post into a SlideShare, a SlideShare into an infographic, an event into a blog post, etc…

– Leverage influencers: involve them in your content strategy by inviting them to participate. If you’re aligned with the right influencers, you’ll not only get valuable content contributions for free but they’ll help you distribute it.

E like Experiment:

– Don’t overthink: testing >-trumps over-thinking anytime. Learn by making mistakes.

– Put quantity before quality. This might sound a paradox but only practice makes perfect. So because you need quality, you have to start with quantity.

A like Automate:

– Automate content sourcing through curation discovery tools.

– Use cross-posting to publish to all your channels in one click while adapting the message to each of them.

– Use scheduling not just to plan in advance but to post multiple times your content and maximize distribution.

– But automate authentically: keep it real and leave humans in control.

N like… N’ Measure!