How intelligence helps you extend the life of your content

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Leverage these three techniques to extend your top-performing content’s life from 18 minutes to forever

Read the full article at: contentmarketinginstitute.com

Most marketers would be tempted to believe that it’s ok to publish a piece of content, share it a couple of times, and then move on to the next piece.

That’s absolutely not the case, as Julie Gauthier, our director of marketing explains in an article on Content Marketing Institute: “With 9,100 tweets scrolling by per second, the average lifetime of a single tweet is no more than 18 minutes. Twitter is our live radio broadcast, Facebook is live TV. Content doesn’t stick there, but is washed away by the next update almost as soon as you’ve hit publish.”

The answer is not to robotically share the same content 10,000 times or to spend millions on paid promotion. There are techniques to help you be smarter about how you promote and amplify your existing content, and artificial intelligence now has the power to take you one step ahead of your competitors.

3 techniques to extend the life of your content

Don’t be afraid to promote your content several times – intelligently

Some marketers are reluctant to share their content multiple times because they think they need to focus on the “next thing” or that they will spam their audience.

It’s actually not the case: since your content is seen by a very, very low percentage of your audience, if you promote it smartly enough you’ll reach a whole new segment of that audience.

Make sure to stay human by spacing your social shares. Create two or three social media messages per post so you can rotate them over two to three weeks. Here is the exhaustive list of tips to help you promote your content the most effective way.

And remember, “if your content is good, nobody will blame you for promoting it several times”, explains Julie Gauthier.

Amplify your organic reach can generate 3x more traffic or leads

Content amplification is key here because it will help you generate results over a longer period of time.

It consists in re-sharing or emailing successful content long after it’s been published. In other words, this technique focuses on your own channels rather than using some form of advertising or paid promotion.

Content marketers need to analyze their content performance with metrics such as traffic and leads post by post. It is the best way to identify the pieces which results need to be amplified. We wrote an article on the matter, with 10 very useful tricks to help you get the most out of amplification.

Content marketing influencer Jeff Bullas, have been using this amplification technique since 2011 and noticed significant results: “These (content amplification) tactics were key to growing my Twitter following that now stands at 465,000+ and building my site traffic to over 5 million hits per year.”

Extend the life of some of your content to forever by being systematic in your amplification over time

“If content is relevant and evergreen, there’s no reason to stop sending traffic to it. If you don’t, you’re still leaving money on the table.”

This is the most advanced technique that will help you generate the most results because you’ll constantly know how your content as a whole is performing and you’ll take the most appropriate action on any given day.

For that last technique, you’re going to need intelligence. And by the way, intelligence will also help you optimize and be systematic with your content promotion (sharing multiple times) and amplification (re-sharing the most successful posts).

How to leverage intelligent content marketing automation to maximize your results

We now know that you must audit your content regularly if you’re looking for real results out of your content marketing. The information you could get from it is pure gold and luckily, intelligence can make it even more accurate.

We published an article on intelligence where we explain that “a recent report from Narrative Science based on a survey of 235 business executives conducted by the NBRI found that the most important benefit seen with AI-powered solutions is its ability to give intelligent predictions based on activity“.

That sounds really powerful. But at this point, you are probably wondering: what is actually intelligent content marketing automation?

It consists of technologies that are capable of making or even implementing relevant recommendations to improve a company’s content performance by combining analytical data, publishing history and artificial intelligence algorithms.

“One of the biggest things with technology is being able to scale what you do. There’s so much work involved: you can’t be in content marketing without technology.” – Ian Cleary

Step up your promotion and amplification game

At this point, you already know how to promote and amplify your content in the most effective way. But how to handle this properly when you have a huge amount of content and distribution channels? Intelligent content marketing softwares like Scoop.it Content Director help you plan several weeks of promotion at once, space them the right way, and monitor the impact on each piece of content.

Intelligent content marketing automation goes even further

Identify improvement opportunities

Intelligence offers predictive insights that have a huge impact on content marketing. They help you generate more from your content investments in the following ways:

Intelligent recommendations based on content performance
Reminding you what to do next with each and every post
Uncovering actionable opportunities to improve to implement in a few clicks
Make better decisions

Intelligence gives you the opportunity to understand how to get more from your existing content, which is a nice and efficient alternative to creating more content. Once you re-share the top performing blog posts on your channels, you’d be more likely to generate traffic and leads given their traffic patterns and historical conversion rates.

Know what content to create

Machines aren’t expected to replace humans yet. They aren’t expected to write content for us. But they are definitely here to help us generate content ideas in a much more predictable way by identifying trends, keywords or ideas that are appealing to the targeted audience.

Another way technology facilitates the process of content creation are checklists and automated tests to ensure the quality of the content before we publish and distribute it.

“We need cognitive content marketing: technology should deliver topical ideas based on trends, the business problems I want to solve as well as on influencers or customers that I want to reach.” – Bernie Borges

Demonstrate the value more clearly

Intelligence helps you make content marketing an undisputed and proven strategy and demonstrate its value clearly. Improvements are still expected – it should be better integrated to provide measurement across the whole lifecycle in a personalized manner.

“The measurement side is currently not good enough. End-to-end tracking needs to be improved so that the data isn’t lost from one stage to another or from one tool to the next.” – Ian Cleary

Want to work smarter and start generating real results from your content marketing? Find out how to use the new Scoop.it Content Director to help you become a smarter marketer!