Each month we spotlight something that could be a ‘marketing heavy hitter without a sh!t ton of work’. And this month we want to focus on one theory that governs all that we do.
The Anchor Theory.
That’s correct! The whole entire POINT of the anchor theory is to create one piece of solid, longform content (in our case, it’s our podcast).
And spin 👏 that 👏 thing 👏 into as many 👏 pieces 👏 of content 👏 as you 👏 CAN!! 👏👏👏
Why are we focusing on the anchor theory on the 4AM Report this month?
Because it’s DREADED PLANNING SEASON! And it’s DREADED PLANNING SEASON in the middle of a global pandemic, to boot!
Good times. Good times.
But here’s the thing: Marketers still gotta market. Businesses still gotta…business? Well, you catch our drift.
And we’re here to try to make it easy peasy for you guys to launch yourself into 2021!
Ok. We’re NOT promising jetpacks.
But we CAN promise that you’ll be swimming in a sea of quality content – including keyword-rich written pieces to help drive organic SEO. Which helps drive people to your website. Which helps drive people to get to know you. Which helps drive people to hire you! (well, in a perfect world! 😂)
Hashtag, you’re an expert.
Basically, assume you have a podcast episode or a longer blog post, a report or virtual recording of an event, whatever your anchor piece ends up being. Surely, within that body of work, you’ve made a slew of smaller, individual points.
Stop and think of the four formats:
❶ Written format
❷ Audio format
❸ Video format
❹ And, the graphic or image format
Determine which one your anchor piece is – and then use the other three to expand upon your anchor piece – highlight some of the best bits from your long form content.
Let’s have a look at a bit of what we talked about in the podcast this week. It’s chock-a-block with goodness.
The Three Bs: Budget, Bandwidth, and Burnout,
“Let’s talk the three B’s – budget issues, burnout issues, and bandwidth issues. Obviously, because we speak with so many people on an ongoing basis, whether it’s through our regular client interactions or through various discovery calls and other things, we keep hearing these problems repeatedly, one of them is budget, our budgets have been cut. We know everyone’s budgets have been cut through the year. And in a lot of cases, our advice tends to be: go back and relook at those line items. If you don’t have those in person, event tickets that you’re paying for in the moment, are you then applying it to some type of experiential thing that you’re doing for your virtual events, you know, really thinking about that line item. And then the second part of it, like we said, was just bandwidth. So many people are having to change the nature of their job at this time, to try to get the same level of attention and to get the same level of work output. So that is proving to be difficult. And that’s what leads to the burnout in the end, right? There’s no line between your work life and your personal life, it’s a free for all shit show! When we hear about a lot of that, we find that the anxiety comes from approaching things on like an ad hoc basis.”
“So for example, like often we get people who come to us, and they want quotes for a bunch of blog posts, or one quote for a bunch of video production, and we tend to tell them, let’s start from what you have, let’s audit what you have, is there something that you already have that we can use, again, because a large part of the work has been done, and you’ve probably used it once or twice? And you know, there’s room for further utilization. And isn’t that music to a client’s ears when you’re like, ‘Oh, you’ve already done such a great job producing all of this stuff, we’re just going to take it and reorganize it and put it together differently with a different intro…’ they get quite excited to know that we, as content creators, are really into what they’ve already produced and able use the anchor theory to do that. We’ll make other shorter videos, which we batch produce, because we’re content creators, we do this for a living. So yeah, like we said, a podcast episode, release some of the video, the shorter points. Take the notes from the podcast episode, have it transcribed, give that some attention, you can’t just put it in as it is it needs a writer or an editor of some sort, to go through it. Create a blog post and social posts. And, then you use it in the written medium.”
The Three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle
“There are some people who find that hard to believe, when you take a look at it [longform content piece], and you’re like, Okay, here’s this one report, out of which you can get, like two or three months of content, without rewriting a whole lot of stuff! It boggles the mind, right? until you start seeing it come into play. And then you realize this is what agencies have done for years and years. And maybe it was a closely guarded secret, but it shouldn’t be anymore. This is the kind of thing that I think every marketing department, whether internal or external, should be practicing. I think Episode 58 was the one in which we talked about how we take our podcast and split it. So, go and listen to that one, if you want to use the Anchor Theory for the podcast medium. For this episode, we’ll talk a bit about two common pieces of content we see people have and not use often: a lot of reports, whether they’re quarterly reports or reports that are put out once a year. A lot of research and good work, by the way of writing, design, expert interviews, etc., goes into them. So how could you use that? And then the second one is people do have a lot of virtual events, whether they’re Q and As, roundtables, speaking/coaching, that kind of thing. And how can people take that kind of content and use it again?”
“Here’s a little sneak peek everyone, we are going to be putting together something for the end of the year based on our podcasts and our videos and our blog posts. Again, we’re kind of practicing what we preach here. We’re going back through our content and putting together an end of year report. But when you do write something that’s longer like an ebook, a report or a longer thought leadership article, you know, longer than just a normal 500 word blog, what we really love to do, and our writers Lindsey Bell and Melissa Andrews, they do a wonderful job at it – they go through as they write and they’re like, ‘this would be a great quote to go into a quote card. Oh, look, this section here where we’ve talked about three points that are all related. Let’s pull those out and create a separate piece on, you know, the three ways to boom.’ They’re always, as they’re writing, making notes that are so helpful for our team for when we go back and turn that one report into several other smaller pieces of content, that could also be posted on your website as separate blog posts. Some are appropriate for social media only. Some are great for their own individual blog posts, you know, if you put a fresh introduction, a little spin on it, a few tips can become a blog post. Also, graphics – an infographic – or identifying, ‘hey, this would be a great episode of the 4 AM Report! Or we’ll make a video on this one point here, or that one point there. It’s almost like everything related to that topic can be found and identified in the report, and before you know it that report can spin itself into months’ worth of wonderful content again, creating that SEO magic, and driving people back to your website, those kinds of things!”
You’re going to hear a lot more from us this month on the Anchor Theory, so start thinking about your own content, and the extendibility of it. In the next few weeks we’ll delve deeper into the budget and the bandwidth and various sales pipeline problems that you can use the anchor to solve.
Check us out over on Apple Podcasts – subscribe to us – you won’t regret it!
Plus, if you’re losing sleep over a particular marketing/business related problem during this Covid-19 economic uncertainty, or if you have a guest idea on the topic, let us know. Drop us a line at c+p digital.
And as always, sweet dreams…well, hopefully!
