The Missing Rs of Content Marketing.

I recently got an email from a smart and credible “content marketing platform” inviting me to discover the three Rs of content marketing. Now I’m a sucker for alliteration and any kind of tristicle with a common leading letter. So I clicked into it.

Apparently those Rs are Reorganise, Rewrite and Retire. Say what? I honestly didn’t get it. So I delved a little deeper looking for wisdom and here’s what I found.

Consumers are inundated with more than 2,900 marketing messages a day. Cool number. No notion of where they found it, but obviously a big problem. Don’t panic though, when executed successfully content marketing elevates your brand, leading to quality engagement with your customers. That’s good. I guess it’s a lot like old-school marketing but cooler.

Then I got confused again. Having posed the problem and proposed a sound solution the infograph was all about how to send more stuff with less effort. Really? If people are drowning in content, the answer is to send more of it? Apparently so. And it’s easy. Don’t double up your workload… remember the three Rs. Here’s what they say.

Reorganise.

Reorganising is all about pumping out content in different ways. That’s right, “pumping out”. Why not Reorganise your white paper into an infographic, expand on a great blog with an e-book, or convert an e-book into a cheat sheet. It’s that easy. Just reorganise to make the same stuff look different. And pump it out. Super.

Rewrite.

This is an important point. It inevitably happens: you invest brainpower, time and money into an amazing piece of content... and it goes stale. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? No one likes stale content. So fix it by looking out for Overachievers and Trendsetters before you examine your content to see if it’s worth re-writing. Excellent advice.

Retire.

The last little gem was my favourite bit of the whole ‘thought-leading’ journey. I learned that Retaining content that’s past its expiration date damages your company’s authority and credibility. You reckon?  Their solution was to dump the stale stuff. Good idea. But I wonder if it works just as well if you craft great work that doesn’t go stale in the first place?

Here’s three more Rs in response.

I’ve always thought that great communication was all about connecting with people. You know, thinking about the customer and what they care about. Less about sending more stuff. More about making stuff that matters. Call me old-fashioned but it seems to work.

We certainly find that quality engagement with customers can happen if you have quality content that people want to engage with. And the best way to deliver that is: get to know the customer, respect their time and attention and reward it with something that’s relevant, helpful or genuinely entertaining to them.

Don’t get me wrong, Reorganising, Rewriting and Retiring are all good too. But we do it before we hit send: what’s the best way to reorganise this communication to make it easy for the customer? Let’s ruthlessly re-write until it’s brilliant. And which of those first thoughts and crappy ideas should we retire so they never even see the light of day?

Because that’s how you Respect, Reward and stay Relevant to “pump out” stuff that matters.

That’s what I reckon what do you think?