Maximising your content marketing for a successful integrated campaign

Graham McGregor is a Fame Marketing Expert. You can get his free marketing guide The Fame Advantage Volume 1 at www.GrahamMcGregor.com.

OPINION: I received some great advice a few years ago from Edward M Yang, managing partner of Firecracker PR.

Edward explained how to use your content in a number of different ways in your marketing.

Let me pass you over to Edward for his comments.

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Those in marketing know that “content marketing” has become the centrepiece of many marketing departments, and a critical aspect of successful integrated campaigns.

The term “integrated” is important because more and more, silos are coming down between different marketing functions.

SEO, PR and content marketing do not exist in their own silos any longer. Each bleeds into the other. Done right, each can magnify the benefits of others.

A concrete example of this is in leveraging one piece of content for multiple purposes.

For one client, we created an infographic, which have become relatively commonplace today. But it’s not the creation of the infographic that is special, it is how you use the finished product to achieve marketing goals that can make the difference.

The finished infographic was posted on the topic of telecommuting. A webpage was created on the client’s site with a descriptive URL, along with appropriate title and description tags. Social sharing icons were put on the page as well.

From there, we submitted the infographic to numerous websites that accept infographic submissions.

We also built a list of targeted reporters and bloggers who had written on the subject of telecommuting in the past year, using a mix of an online media database and just Googling news articles.

Our pitches to them were tailored to each individually. Each email pitch touched on a past article they wrote, then informed them of our new infographic and how it might be useful for one of their upcoming articles.

One pitch that hit pay dirt led to an article in Mashable, along with a link to the client’s webpage with the infographic. We also posted it on Reddit and some other message boards that led to tweets and retweets (social media mentions).

Since then, Googling “telecommuting infographic” yields both the client’s webpage and the Mashable article in the top 3 results on page 1 of Google (high search engine ranking) out of 149,000 search results.

For the client’s monthly newsletter to their in-house database of prospects and customers, we used the infographic as the lead article (newsletter marketing).

Finally, we took the raw text data of the infographic and used it for a follow-up email to our target list of reporters and bloggers. We reminded them of the first email we had sent, and told them this list of stats might be useful for them (press relationship building) since the infographic was in a graphic file format.

Here are the exact steps you too can leverage one infographic into real concrete results for your own PR efforts:

Pick a trending topic: One of the keys to being successful in PR is staying on top of hot topics in the news. You’ll find that suddenly every writer is talking about one topic for a period of time. Ride that wave. Scour sites like Yahoo News and Buzzfeed.

Search existing infographics: See what’s already out there. Find out what they’re lacking and what you can improve upon. Maybe the other infographics are outdated.

Research good, quality data: An infographic is only as good as its data. Find reputable data sources, and make sure to list them in small print at the end of the infographic to give credit to the original writer.

Make it pretty: An infographic has to be visually appealing. Don’t skimp and use someone from Fiverr. Find a reputable designer and ask for at least three samples of infographics they’ve done.

Give clear guidelines: The more detailed you can be of what you want to the designer, the less heartburn you’ll have. If you have no idea, then tell the designer the overall goal and let them take a stab.

Post it on your website: Make sure you set the URL of this webpage something descriptive with the keywords in it. Add social sharing icons, so people can easily disseminate it.

Research reporters and bloggers: Find out who’s written about your topic in the last year. Search Google news or just Google itself. If you subscribe to a media or blogger database, do some keyword research. Search on Twitter as well.

Pitch them: Write a customised pitch for each person. Make an intelligent comment on something they’ve written. Give them the link to the infographic. Keep it short and be polite.

Post to infographic websites: Do a Google search for “infographic websites” and other variations. Submit them everywhere you can. Some are free, some may require pay. Decide if it’s worth paying for it.

Follow up your pitches: For those that didn’t run your infographic, send them a follow-up email. Include in it a copy and paste of all the data from your infographic in text form and tell them you hope this might be helpful. I find the best way is to reply to your own sent email so they can see your original pitch.

Try Twitter or LinkedIn: Where else can you post the infographic? Your Facebook page? LinkedIn? Twitter?

Graham’s comment: I like Edward’s comments on finding multiple uses for the same marketing content that you create. What other ways can you use some of the marketing content that you have already created?