The Pu-Pu Platter and Creating Content Marketing Samplers
I’ve been working on my new book, Toilet Paper Math, and last week I talked about the three Ps of thought leadership. Today I want to talk about pu-pu, or the pu-pu platter of content marketing. Hey, what would a toilet paper book be without a little potty humor?
Seriously, though, a pu-pu platter is something you’ll find in a Chinese restaurant or a Hawaiian restaurant and it usually has an assortment of foods. This can include an egg roll, chicken, shrimp, beef, you name it. Basically, it’s a sampler before you order the main course. It’s a good idea to sample things, to get a taste of what they’re like. That’s what the pu-pu platter has to do with content. I’m talking about creating samples that get people to order your main course. The end goal of all of this is to obviously get them to consume the full meal of your content.
The Content Sampler
Next I’m going to break this down from long-form content to the most basic or awareness content.
In-Person Meeting
The biggest kind of content that I’ve been part of and have instructed my clients to hold is a meeting. An in-person meeting or a half-day meeting, it could even be online. Generally, it’s a seminar or a webinar or training that happens in person. I do the same thing with a half-day LinkedIn Bootcamp. That’s my version of what I do and I know customers can do the same thing. The beauty of this is it creates a ton of content. Usually, there’ll be three, four, or six different presentations. Think of what you can do if each one of those was recorded. You could have six individual presentations that you could use on the web. You might even want to hire a photographer and a videographer to record everything that’s going on that day.
There’s a ton of content there. You could also broadcast it as a live stream on social media. You could break each presentation down into its own micro presentation. Then, you could convert those to audio for podcasts. You can create teaser videos to drive traffic to future versions of this or future events. You can create pictures for social media and you can create awareness graphics that will give away some of the core training concepts to attract a new audience.
Webinars
The virtual version of in-person meetings are webinars. Webinars tend to be about a half-hour or an hour long. Think of it as one piece of that all-day presentation. Webinars are a great tool to build know, like, and trust around your business. You can do a simple PowerPoint or slides presentation, mix in some live demos, and create a tool that can be used over and over again. You can upload them to Vimeo or YouTube to speed them up on your website and create shareable links for social media.
Don’t forget, you can do some of the same things mentioned before. You could broadcast it live on social media. You could post it on your website to collect names. In other words, somebody has to sign up to watch the replay.
You can convert the presentation to audio or an eBook. You can convert the slides into an eBook. And, you can take those slides and turn them into teaser graphics and again, you can have a ton of different pictures and content to post on social media.
Videos
Videos can range from anything from short to long. One of the things I could tell you about video on the internet is brevity is king. People will pay attention to a 30-second video, a one minute video. But if you start to get to the five to 10-minute range, they better have a reason to want to watch that much content. If you’re going to create videos, you could take a 10-minute video and cut out one-minute chunks. The other thing you may want to do is use a closed captioning program to put the words being spoken up on the screen because a lot of times social media does not automatically turn on the audio when it gets to that video.
You can create little short teaser videos using something like Animoto, Visme, Vimeo, and Canva will even allow you to export audio and video together. So when you’re creating these shorter videos, there are lots of different ways to do them.
I want to make sure there are two key things that you do. Number one, you hit them with a bang upfront. You want to get attention when it’s in a newsfeed. The second thing is you want to make sure there’s a call to action. Either in text on the video or at the end of the video, some programs will let to put in a link to go somewhere. The CTA is used to drive traffic to your webinar or your next live presentation. Again, you can host them on YouTube or Vimeo.
You can post them to social media. You can drive traffic to other videos or blogs or a website. Then, you can use this to create ads in social media and search advertising. You can create awareness for other content. And, you could use a video to drive people to your podcast or to your blogs and with some tools like Vidyard, you can actually embed those videos in an email. There’s lots of different ways to use them.
Podcasts/Audio
Another tool, which I’m very fond of is podcast or audio. With audio, you can do a whole bunch of things that you might not think of. For example, I transcribe this podcast every single time and turn it into a blog (which you’re reading right now). Sometimes I grab little bits and pieces of it and turn them into quotes or what I call Baconisms and then I can throw them up on social media. I can convert this podcast to text. I can convert it to a presentation by adding slides. And I could also take the tips and turn them into one-minute pieces that become a flash briefing on Alexa.
Again, from this audio, there are lots of ways to use it to attract people to more of your content. Podcasts are listened to in cars, in offices, and when people work out. It’s a very personal type of content that can build your reputation as a thought leader and expert.
Ebooks
Ebooks generally are a combination of blogs or they’re written from scratch. An eBook is a great way to get people to come to one of your webinars or to get them on your email list. One of the things I like to do is to sequence a series of blogs and then turn them into an eBook. If you write a series of four or five or 10 blogs, you could do anything from a simple small book to something you could sell on Amazon as a full-blown book. One of the things you want to think about while creating an ebook is would somebody pay $5, $10 or more to get a copy of it? If they would, it becomes a great giveaway.
Blogs
Blogs generally sit on your main website. But they’re also great because every time you post a new blog, Google will re-index your site. It becomes content that all the other pieces can be driven to. Blogs are a great way to explain your processes, share ideas, generate conversation, and encourage engagement. They can be short (300 words to get indexed by Google, or long (2500 or more words) if you are showing research or explaining a more complex topic.
You can convert a blog into a slide presentation. You can create a podcast into a blog. Then, you can share it on social media. You can drive traffic back from social media to the blog. There are many different ways to take that and use it, including turning a series of them into an eBook. Blogs can be standalone cornerstone pieces or a series. You can take old content and give it new life with a freshen up and some new images.
Blogs are generally educational but can be entertaining and help you generate thought leadership. Blogs can also be aggregated or curated by other websites. My blogs are automatically imported and shared with a website called Business2Community.com. They can be copied and imported to other websites like Medium, Quora, and other content aggregators. You can also convert them to articles shared on LinkedIn.
Infographics
Infographics can take complex ideas and turn them into eye candy or graphics that people may want to read that will explain what’s in your blog, what’s in your eBook, or what’s in your webinar. Tools like Visme and Canva have infographic templates, graphics tools, stock images, and more. These make it easy to visualize process flow, data, and other complex ideas. Think about taking that and shrinking it down into an infographic. They’re also great for social media and included in your presentations.
Awareness Graphics
These are simple, scroll stopping, eye candy that gets people to click on them to get to all of the other content I mentioned earlier. They generally have a headline and an image that invoke emotion. The goal is just that, to get attention and create awareness.
Final Thoughts
I’d like you to start thinking about creating content in a way that turns everything into a sampler platter and gets people to consume your main course.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about creating a content marketing sampler. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to your expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?
To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/