The Content Marketing Solution: The Content Marketing Pyramid

content marketing. Content marketing, when done right, provides interesting, valuable information to your current and potential customers, helps you build a meaningful relationship with said customers and establishes your business as an expert and thought leader in your industry. With all that content marketing is and does, a lot is required of content marketing teams. It’s that team’s job to continually create great content of every size and form, make sure it’s seen and read by as many eyes as possible and achieve the projected results, or even exceed those expectations. Trying to keep up with all that demand under that kind of pressure can be overwhelming and stretch a content marketing team, their strategy and content too thin. But it doesn’t have to be this way. The solution? The content marketing pyramid.   What is the content marketing pyramid? The content marketing pyramid is a graphical representation showing a process of joining infrequent, time-consuming content pieces with minimal-effort, recurring content pieces. Basically put, it’s our old food pyramid but for content creation, with more of what’s needed at the bottom and less of what’s needed toward the top. The pyramid is divided up into 5 sections (from bottom to top):

1. Curated Content
2. Short Form Blog Posts & Website Content
3. Infographics, Webinars & Presentations
4. eBooks & White Papers
5. Print Books

The foundation of the pyramid, curated content, consists of smaller content pieces that aren’t necessarily planned in your editorial calendar. They’re spontaneous and frequently sent out to the masses because they don’t require much effort or resources to produce. This content includes Tweets, Retweets and blog comments, which you could sit at your desk and do all day. Because this content is considered low-effort content, it makes up the biggest part, or the foundation, of the pyramid and your content marketing efforts. Moving up the pyramid, the next section is short form blog posts and other short pieces of website content put together by fusing the content from the foundation of the pyramid. You could take comments from curated posts to be the base for a short form blog post for your website. This content requires a little more time investment but is still rather easy to push out. The next section is made up of 3 different types of content: infographics, webinars and presentations. They aren’t considered long form content, but they do take more time to create and necessitate more resources to produce. This also means this type of content is more impactful than the two sections below it. eBooks and white papers, the fourth section up the pyramid, still require time and research to create, but can be formed by combining several short form blog posts together. The very top of the content marketing pyramid is print books. This type of content requires the most time and effort (and patience) to create, which is why it’s at the top. Print books can be put together by grouping some of your eBooks, webinar notes and long form blog posts together in an easily and enjoyable read. The great thing about this pyramid is that you have the choice to start at the bottom or the top. While we showed how you start at the bottom with small content pieces and work your way up to one big content piece, if you have a giant, heavy-duty content piece, you can start at the top and work your way down by cutting it up into smaller content pieces. Why should you care about the content marketing pyramid? The content marketing pyramid should be something you incorporate into your content marketing strategy if you haven’t already. It helps your team get more of your content out into the world using the same amount of effort you’re giving now. It also incorporates two best practices of content marketing: duplication and usability. For any marketing campaign to be considered successful and effective, the audience needs to see the same marketing message in multiple places at various times. The content marketing pyramid does this by sending out the exact same message through several content types. In terms of usability, the pyramid allows you to provide the same content marketing message in different content sizes and forms so you satisfy every kind of audience with the type of content they prefer to consume. Repurposing content isn’t a new idea in the content marketing world. But when you use the content marketing pyramid, your content marketing efforts are efficiently effective. It helps ensure your content marketing message is distributed in various forms through various channels so it’s seen, heard and absorbed by your target audiences.]]>