The fight to produce something unique, truly eye-catching, in a world where so much content is created and consumed online, through various screens, proves itself an ever-growing struggle; audio, imagery, text articles, video – you name it, we’ve got plenty of it. And while this will continue to play a huge part of content marketing, as the laws of SEO demand, and the speed at which we appear to be able to consume this content to keep up with both news and trends increases, how can you ensure that you don’t get lost in this buzz.
We may see marketers reverting back to the ideas they left behind a number of years ago, or versions of them, so we ask: are there new ideas to be had, or are we all going to be recycling more and more. We’re ever told to recycle to save the planet, is the recycling of ideas too such a bad thing? Is it a lack of innovation or is it a case of using what we have to create and find new innovation? After all, the act of recycling is often to make ‘waste products’ into something new, not to directly use them again.
Budweiser, over March’s International Women’s Day celebrations, harked back to the Mad Men advertising era, recycling their own content marketing campaign, and revamping it with a modern and more powerful message. What do you think? Is this a lack of ideas or a fresh idea to both utilise the content they have already created and in the same move recreate the values they used to promote.
The online publication Buzzfeed recently expanded, again – how? They expanded to reach offline. That’s the wrong way round right? Are they going backwards? No. They are reaching to stand out from the crowd. While Buzzfeed is one of the big players, we have online publications fighting for our attention all day every day, so they did something different from their norm. They themselves classed this as a bit of an experiment, claiming that they would watch the results closely and unless it was incredibly successful, this would stay a one-off. That said, this ‘one-off’ experiment which gained attention quickly!
Taking content and repurposing or playing around with it for your current content marketing strategy can allow you to focus in on a point only touched on previously or target towards a slightly different audience. Applying a plan for this reuse will ensure that your content recycling does not overlap too heavily and edge into the territory of copying.
Our final thoughts on this approach: don’t be afraid to think inside the box – if you think it’s been done before or you see an opportunity to reuse and repurpose something you have created already, take it. Copycats aren’t cool but recycling is. Stand out from the crowd and doing something different, even if that does mean dipping back in time!
