To the Power of Five
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More than ever, a successful lead-generation program relies on a steady stream of new content. And since the pressure to produce high-quality whitepapers and blog posts can be intense, Ardath Albee recommends the "Rule of 5" to ease your load and maximize results.
"The Rule of 5," she explains at the Marketing Interactions blog, "is that each and every content development undertaking should produce content assets that can be used at least 5 different ways."
There are various ways of putting the rule into practice. You can, for instance, create five versions of a single article—each tailored to address the specific interests of different segments or industries.
Alternatively, you might use the same research to create a whitepaper, a webinar, a podcast and a few blog posts.
"The secret to the Rule of 5 is planning," she notes, "and the biggest way to help yourself is by creating an editorial calendar to help you see how content development efficiencies can be achieved."
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Comments
I think what bugs me is your divorce from reality. Are tou seriously telling us all that we have to sit down and write 5 different versions of an article, or plan months ahead to an entire editorial schedule? You're nuts! I do not think you have done this yourself at all ... as then you would fully appreciate how and where the rubber his the road. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE to do what you suggest unless you have a staff of writers and time to devote and endless boring hours available to you to sit in front of a computer a tap away!.
Come back down from your lofty MBA marketing tower and when you have written over 100 articles like I have and then ask me to write the same thing 5 ways for each new audience segment - then maybe you will have a modicum of credibility http://www.brillianthealth.ca/
I'll take a different approach here...I think what you're talking about is getting the most from your original content. While re-writing an article for five different audiences might not be possible for most of us, taking that same piece of original content and using it, for example, as both a white paper and a smaller published article is more doable. We’ve been very successful creating white papers and then condensing the content into something a third the size (keeping the major points intact but knowing that the audience might be different) for publication as an additional stand-alone article.
Small firms with limited resources need to think about the various ways they can leverage original content as much as possible - that I think we can all agree on.
Patrick Lefler
The Spruance Group
www.spruancegroup.com