There’s no beating around the bush – emerging brands are often strapped for resources, and when it comes time to allocate their money… well let’s just say marketing is among the lowest items on the totem pole. 

However, with the rapid growth and evolution of digital marketing, social media, as well as a variety of other communication channels for the consumer, leveraging these platforms to share content that delivers value CAN lead to sales and organic growth for your business. The only resource needed is a little time and effort on your part.

And to make the most of this time, you want to develop content assets that can be repurposed in a variety of ways so that it does double-duty (even triple- or quadruple-duty) across several of these platforms.

What it comes down to is four basic steps that, if done regularly, will supply you with an abundance of content to share on a regular basis. They are:

Step 1: Determine marketing style
Step 2: Build the long-form "pillar" content (videos, blogs, podcasts, etc)
Step 3: Chop up that content into micro-content for various platforms
Step 4: Distribute that content on various platforms in a context that's native to each

Now don’t get me wrong – these steps can be a bit tedious at first, but once you get into the rhythm of things, you’ll soon find yourself creating the pillar content with these pieces of micro-content in mind. When used correctly, these steps will have an immediate impact for your company’s organic growth and success. Oh yeah and the best part is, these methods are 100 percent FREE – all it takes is a little grit, motivation and hustle to properly execute this marketing method. 

Determine Your Marketing Style
First thing’s first – determine your companies marketing style. What do I mean by this? Here’s a quick example: If your company is selling sporting equipment, you have a specific target demographic and need to understand how this demographic speaks, the language they are using, what new social trends in the sporting industry are of interest to them, the size of the industry and what the consumers are talking about. You need to push content out that resonates with your demographic or else you are simply wasting your marketing efforts. Providing consistent content that has value for your community will drive traffic, start conversations among your relevant community, and build trust with your brand. 

Create Pillar Content
The long form “pillar” content is the backbone of all of your content assets. This long-form content includes blogs, podcasts, videos and keynotes. This is generally your content that takes a longer time to consume, so for example a blog post that’s longer than a few hundred words or a YouTube video that’s longer than five minutes, or a full length podcast. I like to call this your “meat and potatoes” because the rest of your content for the day or week will be derived from this one piece! 

Chop it Up!
Once we have the long form content piece, it’s time to break it up into smaller pieces, such as quick written blurbs, gifs, memes, quotes, pictures and short video snippets. Here’s an example. Let's say you make sports nutrition products, and you recorded a video interview with an athlete about how he is using your pre-workout mix to perform better at the gym and in his sport. The video includes footage of the athlete working out, perhaps playing his sport, and includes comments about how much the product has helped him excel. This is the long form piece of content and is posted on YouTube.

Distribute the Content
This is where it takes your personal creativity and knowledge of these social media platforms to knock it out of the park. If you see a picture opportunity, for example, from the footage of the athlete working out, you might want to grab it for an Instagram post. You can repurpose that picture onto Instagram with a quote from the conversation AND include the link of the full YouTube video in your profile. You can also transcribe that video and make it into a blog post, also linking back to the video. Then, you can edit out the testimonial snippet from the video and post that on LinkedIn. Same goes for Twitter. You can post a quote from the video related to enhancing sports performance. In addition, you can pull the audio from that video and make it into a podcast.

See what we did? We took one piece of long-form content and created several new pieces for several other platforms, edited specifically so that it’s relevant to each particular platform – text-heavy posts for blogs, image-heavy posts for Instagram, shorter text-and-image combinations for Facebook and LinkedIn, etc. All from one pillar piece of content.

Again, this will be a bit tedious in the beginning, but over time you’ll begin creating this long-form content with repurposing in mind, and your organic reach from all of this content will be tremendous. Keep in mind that content is a marathon, not a sprint, and this method will help you stay in front of potential customers, and deliver value to your audience that will build trust, generate relevant conversations on these platforms, and create life long followers -- many of which will ultimately become customers.