Your marketing team has spent considerable time and effort to create print collateral that effectively delivers your marketing message to your audience. Print marketing collateral is a trusted and reliable medium by which to communicate with customers and prospects. It can provide the type of in-depth information prospects need to move them along the sales funnel and to help them ultimately make a purchasing decision.
It would be a shame—and a colossal waste of resources—to not leverage that same material to support your online inbound marketing efforts, as well. Repurposing content for online use is a great way to fully maximize your investment in print collateral and to make sure your message reaches the highest number of people possible.
Do some digging. Trust me, it’s there. Whether it’s stuffed in a file cabinet, buried in various folders in your email, saved on your desktop, in printed brochures from trade shows, or in whitepapers or case studies, you have useful content—it’s just waiting to be proverbially dusted off and repurposed.
Give it a fresh spin. Be creative! Mixing and matching up print pieces of content can help put a fresh spin on it. Package smaller pieces of content together, break out highlights of longer pieces or simply switch the way in which they are formatted.
Repurpose, don’t duplicate. You can’t simply use the exact same content in print as you do online. Online content should be more pithy; shorter nuggets of information, bullet points, headlines and sub headlines that enable readers to quickly scan for pertinent information.
Break it down. Few people are going to sit down and read a whitepaper online. Break down the content and segment into a series of blog posts, podcasts or articles to make the consumption of the information more digestible online. Give readers the option to download the entire whitepaper if they want more information.
Dip into your print pipeline. Don’t forget about less obvious examples of print collateral that can be converted for online use, such as media kits, instructional materials, market research and infographics. Dig through your sales and media kits, for example, and you’ll find interesting statistics and charts to validate claims of your product offerings for your online audience.
Put brochures online. Use Adobe’s Acrobat to convert the original files used to create print brochures to a PDF file that is suitable for use on the Web. Using Adobe Reader, your prospects and customers will be able to view, download or print your online collateral, a great way to deliver info-packed content, such as whitepapers or eBooks, online.
Dust off those product spec sheets. Seems like no one reads technical product specification sheets, but even these seemingly boring pieces of collateral can be given a new life by converting them into online interviews with product managers, using video or text.
Keep in mind print collateral should not just be reused, but repurposed for online use. By repurposing print collateral for online use, you’re maximizing the number of people who view your content by reaching new audiences across different channels. Plus, you're also saving time and money in your content creation efforts!
How have you repurposed your print collateral for online use? Share your efforts in the comment section below!
Photo Credit: Journalistic Compositions
Barb Schmitz is professional writer with more than 20 years of experience writing for B2B and B2C publications and web sites. She served as an editor on Computer-Aided Engineering magazine for more than 10 years before starting her own PR/freelance writing business in 2000. Her expertise includes interviewing, researching and writing whitepapers, blogs, eBooks, case studies, and feature articles.
