From 140-character tweets to 14,000-word print books, most content marketers now understand the value of producing content of varying lengths and format. But those that try to churn out equally high volumes of content at every length will soon find themselves collapsing from sheer exhaustion.
Enter the Content Marketing Pyramid, a framework which I first blogged about in 2010.
Some have compared this content model to the old model of the food pyramid, and there are a few similarities. Both pyramids stress the importance of creating a strong foundation and building on that foundation with segments that are consumed (or created) at increasingly smaller intervals.
The base of the Content Marketing Pyramid is curated content, which is relatively low effort and lends itself to high frequencies. As we move up the pyramid to short form blog posts to infographics to ebooks and white papers to print books, the content becomes higher effort and lower frequency.
Compared to curated content, print books are expensive and time-intensive to produce, so they’re like the sugars and fats at the top of the food pyramid, which we’re urged to use sparingly. Otherwise, we might get a stomachache (or in the case of content marketing, burn out).
Using this framework, content marketers can quickly identify areas in their marketing program that lack content. If your content looks more like an inverted pyramid with content curation campaigns, you might want to add more of the latter so you’re hitting all the major content “food groups” and getting a more balanced diet
One way to do this is by moving content through the pyramid instead of treating each segment separately. Re-purposing content gives you more mileage out of each idea, saving you time and energy. This is not only for your sanity, but for the benefit of prospects who consume content in different formats. Some are ravenous ebook readers, while others prefer the more interactive environment of a webinar or the shorter format of a blog post.
Here’s a look at how we might move a single piece of content through this process:
Our 34-page ebook called How to Feed the Content Beast (without getting eaten alive) is targeted at content marketers and contains tips on supplementing their existing content with curated content.
Next, we might turn the ebook’s content into a webinar and use it to generate email signups. During the webinar, we could conduct a poll and gather data for an infographic. We could also offer the original ebook as a free download before or after the webinar to reinforce the message.
In addition to a webinar, we might break up the ebook’s content to create shorter blog posts and website blog content for our own site or as guest posts for other relevant sites.
Lastly, we could intersperse the blog content created above with relevant content curated from other sources to offer more diverse perspectives on the topic.
We could also move a piece of content through the pyramid in the other direction, starting with content curation and working up to writing an ebook or print book.
Looking for more ideas on content marketing and curation? Download Curata’s eBook How to Feed the Content Beast.