Using The Content Blender To Expand Your Marketing Budget By 5x

Banks that complain about not doing enough in marketing or not having a big enough budget may just not be taking the right approach. We rarely see a bank fully utilize their content. If done right, you can get at least five times the conversions for almost the same expense as you spend now. What bank wouldn’t want five times the loans, deposits, or fees?  In this article, we explore our approach to content marketing and how to “Relate, Repurpose, and Recycle” and how to use the “Content Blender.”

The Main Event

The Content Blender starts with producing an attention-grabbing event and having the right to create derivative content. Maybe this is one of your bankers talking about increasing the cash flow for a small business, or maybe it is even a paid speaker talking about the upcoming election, future of interest rates, leadership, or other interesting topics.

For that matter, you may want to interview a local celebrity, host a panel discussion, or get creative and host an event such as a Shark Tank-like investment competition.

You record the event and maybe even turn it into a live cast on YouTube, Facebook or Periscope.

Our favorite is to bring in a notable speaker for a keynote address for client or employee appreciation. Having a live audience is not only fantastic for those that attend, but it creates an added layer of intensity, visual interest as you get pictures of the crowd and creates social validation of the message.

Now, most companies would stop there and be happy with that effort. But you are just getting started.

Video & Audio

Once the speaker, interview, panel, or activity is recorded, you take the video and bring it into post-production to put an intro, outro, branding, and call to action within the video. You can then post the video on your website, Youtube, or Vimeo channel.

Since videos are all the rage these days, Google then moves your search ranking higher and even has a special section for videos in every search. Embed the video on your website, submit a video site map in order to make it easy for Google to search your videos and get customers, partners, and others to link to your content and you could find your bank on the first page of the search rankings for the same cost of producing the video.

You can now take the audio from the video and turn that into a podcast using simple post-production techniques. Many customers, potential customers, potential employees, and partners don’t have time to watch videos but might listen to your content during a commute. Publishing the audio on Sound Cloud, Apple, Spotify, or other channels likely opens your bank up to a new audience.

Next, you can go back to the video and now cut it up into multiple segments that are two minutes or less. This not only gets you smaller pieces that might appeal to some time-challenged viewers but also gives you new headlines and descriptions to be found during a search. For example, if you host an event around the most efficient way to pass a business on to the next generation, by breaking the video up into smaller segments, you can also be found easily for estate planning, treasury management, wealth building, retirement, strategic planning, and many others.

You now take each segment and upload it to your respective social channels. This makes the video native on each channel and increases your reach while allowing you to target those that prefer one social channel over another.

The Written Form

Of course, having strong blog content in long-form does fantastic for potential customers years from now searching for answers. Taking the video transcript and reformatting into a written content piece or turning it into a Q&A not only gives you more content for the same price but also gives you a different spin in which to rank higher in certain searches.

Just like you segmented the video, you can also segment the long-form content over time and post shorter pieces of 300 words or less, just highlighting one aspect of the original video.

Recycle

Finally, you want to mix and match your content so that you can pair the videos up with the written pieces. Blog posts that include video content often attract three times more links from other websites that can help your search ranking. These recycled pieces are particularly useful when part of the original video content goes out of date, but parts are still applicable.

Relate, Repurpose and Recycle

While most banks focus on a single piece of content, the key to expanding your marketing budget is to expand your content production process. Instead of one piece of content, if you follow the above framework, you can get 40 or more pieces of content with very little extra effort. If you currently get five conversions from your average content post, then you might see 25 or more conversions for your effort, not to mention hundreds of more leads that could convert in the future.

We will also add that the Content Blender is positively reinforcing. As you gain more success with this marketing tactic, you will be able to afford higher-quality content, which will in turn, increase your reach, conversions, and profit. This all starts with producing content that your potential customers can relate to and then leveraging it up to appeal to different customers.

If you work backward, you can engineer your content into areas where you would like your bank to be known for such as with real estate investors, small businesses, homeowners associations or others. The key is to invest in quality content, use the above process, and put a little effort into marketing each channel.  Create just five of these campaigns and run simultaneously and you will easily have more than enough content for the whole year.