Thanksgiving and Content Marketing

Only one day to go before Thanksgiving and marketers on the other side of the Atlantic (Europe is my side) are ready to take a break, turn their brain off for a few days, spend valuable time with their families and stop thinking about marketing, content & ROI.

Wait a moment… ever heard about the Content Marketing Thanksgiving analogy?

The concept is simple. The idea is to look for opportunities to repurpose the content that you already have – exactly as you’re repurposing Thanksgiving food for some time. The analogy comes from an interview to Rebecca Lieb. When asked about tips for companies struggling to produce enough content, she replied:

“I use a Thanksgiving analogy. You cook up this giant bird to serve up on one glorious occasion and then proceed to slice and dice this thing for weeks on end. If you are like most families you are going to be repurposing this bird as leftovers for quite some time creating everything from sandwiches, to soups, and more. Your content marketing strategy can be thought of in the same way.”

The idea here is basic, but straight forward: marketer have to look for opportunities to repurpose the content that they already have. For instance, eBooks can be repurposed into infographics, SlideShare presentations, blog posts, listicles, video and then disseminated via social media channels.

Jason Miller adds:

“This concept can be taken a step further and applied to “Big Rock” pieces of contents . The idea is to develop an all-encompassing guide to whatever your keywords or topics are which is written strategically instead of instructionally. This type of content is very top of funnel and can serve many purposes such as SEO, fuel for social and lead generation, sales enablement, and event collateral to name a few.”

Rebecca Lieb, Jason Miller, Alex Barca (Curata) all mention the analogy, with small variations (the Thanksgiving analogy, the Content Pyramid, the mixology of content marketing, etc.). Jason Miller put the analogy, together with the Big Rock concept, at the centre of his book “Welcome to the Funnel”.

Same model could be summarized with the two concepts of the Content Marketing Power Law and Content Atomization. The power law is more commonly known as the 80–20 rule or Pareto principle. At its most rudimentary, it’s the idea that a small number of things generate the highest impact. Applied to Content Marketing: the top 20% of posts got more pageviews than the next 80% combined. Those 20% of the posts that give us the majority of the results can show us the way forward in terms of both the topics we should be writing about, and how to frame them.

Content atomization means taking a strong content marketing theme (the 20%, the big rocks), and executing it in many, strategically sound ways. Content atomization is an idea popularized by Jay Baer; others call it content recycling. The basic gist is that you extract as much possible value out of a single piece of content as possible by breaking it down into smaller parts or different formats. That’s exactly the concept of the turkey slices.

Janessa Lantz wrote a great post about it. Other people to spot the Power Law are Walter Chen who wrote about the content marketing power law back in 2014, and has some great data on how it played out for them. Larry Kim saw this same rule play out in landing pages, with 80% of the traffic going to the top 10% of pages. I wrote a short post about the Law.

All good readings, if you are a content marketer.

Oh, I almost forgot. Happy Thanksgiving!

Resources:

• Content Marketing Expert Rebecca Lieb Discusses Strategy, Influencers, and Leftover Turkey – Jason Miller on Marketo Blog
• A Brilliant Content Marketing Analogy; Thanksgiving Food for Thought, Literally – Jason Miller, LinkedIn Pulse
• Leftover Turkey: A Content Marketer’s Dream – Jason Miller, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Blog
• Content Marketing Strategy and the Thanksgiving Dinner, Alex Barca on Content Marketing Forum
• Content Marketing Pyramid and Thanksgiving Dinner, infographic