You feel like you are treading water. You can never seem to get enough qualified leads through your funnel. One more piece of original content thrown at you might take you under.You look around for a life ring. Re-purposing might keep you afloat. You could reach more prospects in new channels without a lot of effort.Re-purposing can help you get more leads and sales out of your original content. But you’ll have to think differently about content creation; it helps to identify opportunities to re-purpose before you get started. How to make more out of lessLEGOs are made for re-purposing.Think about the biggest LEGO piece you’ve ever seen. It’s not very big, is it? But you’ve probably seen some amazing LEGO creations. Even before they started making fancy shapes beyond the basic red and white bricks, you could make some pretty cool stuff.And the best part is that you can take it all apart and build something else, maybe even more inspiring. Like an NMR spectrometer.LEGOs are jaw-droppingly successful. What makes them so powerful is the simplicity of the individual components.Why shouldn’t your marketing be as easy and successful as LEGOs?When you think about content like LEGO bricks, it becomes easier to see how to assemble and reassemble it into multiple forms that are each inspiring to your prospects and customers.

Two eight-stud LEGO bricks can be combined in 24 different ways and three eight-stud bricks in 1,060 ways. 6 of them in nearly a million. - Source 

How to make re-purposing part of your content planning process

A map will lead you to treasureYour prospects will ask many questions along the path to becoming your customer. Some of these are unconscious questions that may uncover a need or opportunity. Even after she becomes a customer, there will still be questions about how to best use your product or service. And of course, there are many in between.A buyer’s journey map will show you what questions you need to answer for your prospects.Smaller pieces combine for big results The answer to every question should be considered a piece of content. These are your LEGO bricks.To build something useful, we need to know the shape of the bricks we will use. The same is true for content. We need to know if the answer to a question should be a paragraph, a bullet list, a photo, short video clip, or a piece of data, for example.With this information in hand, creating content (original or re-purposed) will be easier. Imagine handing your subject matter experts a list of questions and the format(s) you need for each answer. Instead of asking them to write a complete document (which can be overwhelming), they provide answers to those questions in those formats. (You’ll assemble them later.)How simple is that?Assembly is easyNow everything is awesome! You are the master builder. You get to decide how to use all the pieces in your collection.Most of them will be assembled into larger assets. A few at a time (webinar) or a lot (FAQ). You might use some of them just as they are (a tweet?). Re-purpose them for different channels.Putting the answers together may take some massaging and a little wordsmithing. You’ll want to make sure all the pieces have a consistent brand voice, but you should do that no matter how you develop your marketing assets.The possibilities are endlessJust as a question can be answered in many formats, the answers can be bundled into many different assets, e.g. webinar, whitepaper, brochure, case study etc. For each question, you'll decide which deliverables make sense.Keeping track of the questions, answer formats and final deliverables seems like a big task. Right?But with a simple template, keeping track becomes a breeze.And I make it drop-dead easy for you.The Words 2 Wow Content Planning Tool shows you exactly the content you need to generate leads and close sales.What’s more, this turbo tool also shows how to re-purpose your content without effort. And without pain.Not sure what questions you need?The tool comes loaded with 52 questions your customers might ask. It is ready to track answers, formats and deliverables. Of course, you can change the questions any way you like.Ready to stop treading water and sail through your content marketing smoothly and quickly?Contact me to get a free content planning tool.