As we pack up the tree and decorations, ease back into work mode, and make that trip to the bottle bank, here’s a particularly timely favourite phrase from Authentic HQ.
Reeling from the Christmas excess, consider carving your content turkey to take the pressure off, while you get up to speed in 2023.
What is carving the content turkey?
Over Christmas (or Thanksgiving for any of our American friends), many of us spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for one main meal.
Every year, on these special occasions, we gather friends and family together, putting on a feast.
The bird, the stuffing, the ham, the roasties, 2kg of sprouts, cheeses galore. Enough booze (or non-alc choices) to open an off-licence. And don’t get me started on desserts.
Afterwards, there is usually plenty of food left over. So, what we do with it?
Over the festive period, you can feed off that main meal for weeks. The Boxing Day lunch, bubble & squeak, picky teas, turkey curry, sandwiches, soup, and so forth.
Similarly, when you create a substantial piece of content – that important interview, the (gulp) annual report, a major event or a new podcast series – you can and should repurpose elements and sections, where you can – re-distributing it in additional formats and through supplementary channels.
Dine off it. And don’t forget about teasing in advance.
Even if you can’t say much, you can still say something.
Content extension ideas
To give tangible examples to whet your appetite, you could:
Turn your expensive five-minute conference review into teasers, short promotions for social, and behind-the-scenes clips, overlaying some easy-to-read graphics with key quotes. Also think about asking forward-thinking questions for the next event push.
New announcement in a press release? Create a countdown or carousel for social media using key figures. Use smartphone video clips, to give authentic top level reaction, or get your colleagues on the ground to announce/explain rather than the C-suite.
Tease your upcoming event with testimonials from former attendees, drip-feed new speakers or topics in the run-up, or film at the event location in advance.
Your annual report. It’s a big effort getting this over the line; we all know the pains. Soften the blow by taking styled-up shots of the front cover and key pages, tagging people involved on social. Thank the team(s) involved. Get them to become ambassadors, sharing teasers and driving interest.
New podcast? Get carving! Film some behind-the-scenes shots, or a 20-second interview with the speakers on a smartphone, and use as promotional assets. Shoot some candid reportage pics of people laughing, or take some audio or images and make your signposting come alive.
We all spend so much time and effort coming up with the ideas, fleshing them out, tonnes of organisation and collaborating to create something standout and interesting, that occasionally the opportunity can be over before we know it.
Thank you, next.
Don’t cringe at repurposing content
If we’ve met or spoken, it’s likely you’ll have heard me use the turkey phrase. It’s a clear way of explaining my overarching approach content marketing, regardless of sector or channel.
Constantly producing brand spanking new content – blogs, social posts, videos explainers, PDFs, all-of-the marketing spiel – can feel endless and laborious.
This can easily make you lose interest in producing new ideas, or result in sub-par content churned out for the sake of it. It gives us a break from being on the ‘what next’ hamster wheel.
Don’t fall out of love with your content – work smarter, not harder, and react to what goes down well.
(NB: Your strategy should already be in place – the audience(s), the why, the outcomes, the measurement – let’s have a chat if not)
Get in touch if I can help you with your content approach or strategy.
Or your leftovers.
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