Your organic content — be it social media posts, email marketing, blog articles, or something else — is the fuel for all your acquisition efforts.

Organic social media posts that receive glowing engagement can be boosted as paid social media ads. Clever landing page copy drives ad campaign performance and inspires people to take action. eBooks and other downloadable resources can fuel your newsletter sign-ups. Meanwhile, your newsletter acts as a re-engagement tool that reduces churn.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Before a customer buys from you, they go through a series of stages. Moving from awareness to consideration and, eventually, conversion. At each of these stages, your brand content provides opportunities to engage these leads, show off your value, and guide them towards becoming loyal customers.

In this article, we’ll explain how you can expand your brand’s content creation engine to maximize its potential and reap the rewards.

1) Start with a strong foundation

The foundation of your content creation strategy is fundamental to its success. Having a strong base will support your marketing’s resilience — making sure your brand reaches the right people in the right places and gets them to take the right actions.

Before you start crafting content, you need to know what topics and formats will perform best in your industry, niche, and audience. These will then form the foundations of your content creation strategy.

Your customers are always the best place to start when establishing your content creation strategy. Speak to your customers to find out what makes them tick — and what ticks them off. Establish their needs and pain points, then consider how you can make content that addresses these needs, positioning your brand and products as the perfect solution.

To analyze the foundation of your content in a technical manner, we recommend using an analytical tool such as Ahrefs. With Ahrefs, you can analyze keywords on a more nuanced level and develop a solid understanding of what content types work well within your industry and niche.

On the other hand, never underestimate the power of a simple Google search. Entering your keywords into Google can return streams of valuable information. You can glean information on which businesses take the top spots in search results, find out what related questions people also ask, and gain insight into your customers’ thoughts and queries.

Working with an experienced content strategist in your industry can also reveal your audience’s content needs and where to find success. Alternatively, you might already have a strong notion of where you need to start thanks to your own previously collected data.

2) Engage partners for co-marketing

Who said you had to go it alone? Leveraging brand partnerships for co-marketing is a powerful way to strengthen the impact of your content creation engine.

When you engage partners for co-marketing, you double your reach and expertise — all of which translates to doubling your results.

Consider which partners will add value for your customers. When choosing brands, you may want to ask yourself:

• Does this potential partner align with my brand niche without being a direct competitor?
• Would this brand’s audience be interested in our products?
• How does this brand add value to our audience?
• What other benefits would result from this partnership?

Engaging a brand partner that’s well-aligned with your niche and industry will expand the topics you can cover while tapping into their audience to grow your own community. If you partner with someone who’s an expert in their field, they can also bring more credibility to the table.

Some of the ways you can partner with other brands on content creation include:

• Newsletter swaps
• Blog exchanges
• Social media takeovers
• Webinars
• Podcasts

If your brand already produces content, it’s likely you have existing pieces that could be repurposed or refreshed as part of a partnership. For example, do you have a high-performing blog post that could be delivered as a podcast with a brand partner?

Be strategic with your partnerships. Select brand partners wisely and work together to create content that stirs your audiences to action. Do that, and your co-marketing will start to drive more sales.

3) Repurpose your content

You don’t have to start from scratch.

Just like you can repurpose content for brand partnerships, you can also turn it into different mediums within your own channels.

Review your best-performing content across various formats such as webinars, blog articles, and social media posts. Then, explore how you can repurpose this content in a new medium.

Repurposing content is a valuable tactic that brands often overlook. But by refreshing old content, you can escalate its potential returns.

Let’s look at some of the ways you can repurpose content to generate more traffic and sales.

Webinars

Webinars don’t have to be a one-off event. You can expand the shelf-life of your webinars by transforming them into new content formats.

If you recorded your webinars, you could upload them to YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media channels. These can be full-length videos, or you could make shorter snippets that pinpoint the webinar’s key takeaways.

Bite-sized content is a great way to turn one long-form content piece (e.g., a webinar) into dozens of smaller ones (e.g., short snippets) that are shareable and easily consumed.

You could also turn your webinar into an audio recording for a podcast. In the U.S. in 2021, there were approximately 120 million podcast listeners, making it a powerful acquisition channel. Turning your webinar into an audio recording for a podcast is a great way to tap into a new marketing stream and reach even more people.

You could also transform your webinar into written content. Write a recap of the event on your blog, including a link to watch the video on demand.

Finally, a webinar makes a great lead generation tool. Use your old webinar content to capture more newsletter subscribers by offering the slides as a downloadable resource when they sign up to your newsletter list.

Blog

Don’t neglect blog posts once they’re published.

If a blog performs particularly well, you could compile other posts on a similar topic. Then, combine these blog posts into an eBook full of valuable insights.

Another way to repurpose your brand’s blog content is to turn key ideas into organic social media posts. Think quote graphics and informative carousels on Instagram, Twitter threads, and live videos for Facebook. The organic social media possibilities for repurposing blog content are nearly limitless.

You could also use the topics discussed in your blogs to answer relevant questions on Quora. This demonstrates your value and positions your brand as a potential solution to a challenge consumers face.

Blog articles can even be used as part of your paid ads strategy. Not all ads need to be sales-focused; some serve to point consumers in the right direction. Link ads to your blog posts to focus on satisfying the needs of customers who are still in the early stages of decision-making.

This is a win-win situation, as you’ll be able to help these customers solve a problem with your blog post and retarget them with sales-focused ads.

Social posts

Six hours on Facebook, 15 minutes on Twitter, 48 hours on Instagram, 20 days on YouTube — the lifespan of a social media post is short.

However, you can bring high-performing posts back to the top of the feed by boosting them with paid ad spend. Boosting posts is a smart way to get your best posts back in front of your target audience.

If an organic social media post has produced a storm of interest in your audience, consider pitching it to brand partners as a webinar topic. Alternatively, offer to write a guest post for their website on the same topic. These are two great ways to expand the reach of your organic social media post, broadening your content engine.

Social media is social. It’s a place to establish and strengthen relationships in your industry and community. Leverage your social connections by asking industry experts about their insights into a topic you recently discussed on social media. Then, turn this into a round-up post to distribute across your blog, email marketing, and social media pages.

You could also turn your organic social media posts into podcast episodes. Go through your best-performing posts and make note of which topics resonated with people the most. Then, look at developing podcast episodes on these topics, or see how you could turn it into a happy-hour chat with other industry experts.

Outside of your own social media posts, look at posts your customers shared. This user-generated content (UGC) is a goldmine of social proof. Leverage UGC by resharing customer posts on your social media feeds (with permission, of course.)

4) Build an engine that scales

If you want to expand your brand’s content creation engine, it needs to be scalable; this is pivotal to the success of your eCommerce content strategy.

Rather than creating content on the fly, develop a process that identifies your best-performing content and how you can take advantage of it across your other channels. Having a well-defined process for content amplification means you can strategically improve the potential of high-performance content without wasting your team’s time.

You can’t amplify every piece of content, nor should you. This is why it’s key to be strategic. Develop a list of KPIs that you want to measure and use social media insights and website analysis tools such as Google Analytics to identify what’s performing well against these metrics.

When looking to scale your content, you can use Ahrefs to do preliminary research into which content topics have the best potential to rank. From there, you can work with your team to develop a strong distribution strategy that works towards achieving your goals.

5) Outsource

The not-so-secret ingredient of many content powerhouses is they know how to tap into outside resources who bring unique skills, points of view, and insights to their content machine.

Partnering with content strategists and creators who are experts in your field will provide credibility, boost interest, and ultimately amplify the success of your content. These individuals can help you maximize content performance and amplification without needing to build an entire in-house content team.

First, identify the gaps within your current process. Then, outsource these skills to specialized freelancers, contractors, or agencies. This lets you produce high-caliber content efficiently and expand your brand’s content creation engine.

Wrapping up — Broadening your brand’s content creation engine

Content is powerful.

By getting smart about your content creation process, you can expand the lifespan of your content, foster deeper connections with your audience, and widen your reach.

When you invest in your content creation efforts, you invest in your customers and act as a beacon of light that guides them along every step of their buying journey through to purchasing.

Doubling down on content creation also helps offset the rising cost of social media advertising.

The higher cost of advertising is due, in part, to increased competition in the paid ads space. So, if you really want to make your eCommerce brand stand out from the crowd, you need to ramp up your organic content creation efforts.

Expand your content creation and output and watch it boost customer acquisition and loyalty.