16th November, 2022 - Webinar replay

13 easy ways to repurpose your existing content to get more enquiries

Phil Bray 0:00
Good morning, everybody, and it’s 10 o’clock. Welcome to today’s webinar. It’s our final webinar of the year, more of which later. And today we’re gonna be talking about 13 easy ways to repurpose your existing content to get more enquiries. Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you, will have noticed we’ve changed something. It was going to be 10 Easy ways… But as I was writing this webinar, I came up with a few more. So you’ve got 13 Easy Ways. Usual time honoured tradition though, I’m going to hand over to Dan, to explain how we do things. And then we’ll dive into the content.

Dan Campbell 0:38
Thank you. Three extra ones. Wow, that slightly softens the pain of it being the last one of the year, doesn’t it? So there is that. Hi, I’m Dan. I’m the head of branding and design here at Yardstick. And as usual, I’ll be keeping us on track and on time, and fielding your questions and comments. So to do that, we’ve got two options, we’ve got the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen, or the chat function. So take your pick, I’ll be keeping an eye on both as we go along. And looking at the attendees list today, it’s nice to spot plenty of familiar names. But for any newcomers among us (and there are a couple I can see), we operate a very safe space here, in this little Zoom Room, together. There are no silly questions, I promise. So, don’t be scared to shout up if something doesn’t make sense, or you have any questions or anything like that. The same applies, I mean, if your experience differs from what Phil is saying, you know, we’d like to hear opposing views. So, whether you agree or disagree, simply don’t understand, get those questions in and get the comments in, and let’s have a good debate about this. So, I’ll be reading them out as we go, and at the end, we’ll time permitting, sweep any final questions up. So, don’t worry if we don’t read yours out immediately. We’ll sort of filter them through at appropriate times as we go. And, as usual, a follow-up email and recording of this session will be sent out thanks to our very own Abi Robinson, who will be taking notes on any resources or assets Phil mentioned. So, for the final time of the year, over to Phil, to tell us how we can repurpose content, save time, enjoy a slightly easier life, but more importantly, get more enquiries.

Phil Bray 2:19
Cheers Dan, thanks. Right. So, a quick rundown of what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to start by explaining seven reasons why you need to repurpose your content. Because it isn’t always obvious, to a lot of people that we need to change the balance between content production and content promotion. And too often, as we’ll talk about in a minute, people believe that the finish line of the race has been reached when the content has been produced. But frankly, it’s only half the journey, maybe even less than half. We’ve got to keep promoting it, repurposing it, really imagining it. So we’ll talk about that a minute. Talk about some of the barriers, to repurposing content. And then talk about how you choose which content you actually do repurpose, do you repurpose, and reimagine blog A, B, or C? How do you choose which ones you should repurpose? And then we’re gonna go into the meat of this, with 13 pretty quick fire ways, they’re all easy, they’re all practical ways, you can turn your blogs into other content. So, as Dan says, please do leave your questions, comments in the chat or Q&A. And we’ll field those as we go through. Today’s the last webinar of the year. So, it would be good to get as many comments as much feedback as possible. That’ll be really helpful. And as Dan said, we don’t have all the answers. And there are some excellent marketers on this call. So, if you’ve got your own perspectives, your own points of view, please do share them with the group by putting them in the chat. So let’s start with the reason why we’re here. Why do you need to repurpose your content? And repurpose is one of those interesting words, I kind of struggled whether to use it or not. I wondered if it was one of those, rather wanky terms that marketers like to use. And, I couldn’t think of an alternative. So we stuck with it for repurposing content. But if anybody’s got an alternative, really happy to hear it. First reason, is for me, the most important. Producing contacts, costs, it takes time. And that time isn’t free. If you outsource it to someone like us, you pay for our time, and your time isn’t free. You absolutely need to be thinking of what else you could be doing with that time. So once you’ve invested the money and the time in producing the content, repurposing it maximises your return on investment. It’s so important that once you have that blog, that guide, whatever it is, that you squeeze as much value out of it as possible. Number two – it opens up repurposing, it opens up your content, to new audiences, or new people joining your audience. So two examples of what I mean by that. Let’s say for example, you’ve got a couple of audiences. You’ve got your newsletter database, and you’ve got your LinkedIn audience, your connections on LinkedIn. You publish a blog on a Friday, as Yardstick do, it goes out to the newsletter audience, and you post about it maybe a couple of times on LinkedIn. But only a relatively small proportion of your LinkedIn audience will actually see the blog. Or, if you don’t post it on social, and you just push it out in the newsletter, your LinkedIn audience in that example, will never actually get to see it. So, repurposing your content means you open up the content – the blog, in this case – to just a wider audience, it’s a bit like taking your show on the road. Peter Kay isn’t doing one location in the UK. Whenever he’s doing them. He’s doing lots of locations, to take his show on the road. And we need to be doing exactly the same with your blog. And also, we’ve got to remember that new people are joining your audiences all the time. And if I publish a… if at Yardstick we publish our blog on Friday, it’s about getting more people to sign up to your newsletter. And people who see them, sign up to our newsletter or become in our audience in two, three, four, five weeks time, they’re gonna miss that content if we don’t repurpose it, and keep re-promoting it. So, repurposing your content, opens it up to wider audiences, more audiences and new people joining your audience. Number three – this is probably not great for our business model. But repurposing your content means that you have to produce less of it. If you are repurposing your content, doing different things with it, it means you need fewer source articles in the first place. So, number three, it reduces the amount of content you need to produce. A very good reason for repurposing your content. Number four – if we’re talking about blogs, which we are doing later on, when we’ve done the 13 ways to repurpose, one of the things we’ve got to remember is not everybody wants to read text-based content. Other people might want to consume it in the form of a graphic, or an infographic, a video, a podcast, a webinar. We all consume content in different ways. And if we only give the content to people in one way, which is generally the way we prefer to produce it, you’re kind of alienating some of your potential audience. So number four, not everyone wants text based content, they want to consume it in different ways. Number five. It’s pretty obvious – the more you repurpose it, the more you re-promote it, the more increases the chances of people seeing your content. Abi wrote a brilliant post a while ago, the data for which I nicked for the LinkedIn post recently, about the half-life of social media posts. And the half-life of a social media post, is simply the length of time it takes for it to have reached half your audience. And it’s a matter of seconds on Twitter. It’s measured in hours on LinkedIn. But if someone misses it first time around, because they didn’t open your email that week. They weren’t on LinkedIn for a period of time. They weren’t on Twitter because they were on holiday. Repurposing your content, it just increases the chances of people seeing it. And of course takes us all back to point number one, it helps to increase our return on investment. Number six – if people don’t see your content and don’t engage with it, then it can get a bit… can get incredibly frustrating. That can lead to getting a bit downhearted. That can lead to producing less content. That could lead to you stopping producing content. So the more you repurpose, the more people who will see and engage your content. And the more enthusiastic you will feel about the whole process. There is nothing worse… and we’ve all done it. There’s nothing worse than putting out a social post that just dies. Yeah? Nobody likes it, nobody comments on it, nobody reshares it, or a blog that nobody reads. You’ve spent hours producing it, you thought was great, you put it up and just dies, for whatever reason. And that, as I say, can lead to, just a lack of enthusiasm for the process of producing content. So the more you repurpose, the more people will see it, and the more feedback the more of your own dopamine hits, you will get. And then number seven – help to satisfy the rule of seven. So the rule of seven simply states that someone needs to have engaged with you, or be touched by you, at least seven times before they take a call to action. I suspect in this fast paced, online digital world, where those touch points can stack up really quickly. You probably need more than seven. But, the more you repurpose your content, the more you re-promote your content, the sooner you will hit that magic number of whatever it is seven, eight, nine, however many times. But, the simple truth is, you do need to make sure you are touching people with your content on a regular basis. And repurposing it, makes it easy, it makes that easier. So it’s those seven reasons why we should be repurposing content. Dan, did I see something come in from Paul?

Dan Campbell 11:24
You certainly did, yeah. So, Paul makes two great points. The first is around the word, repurpose. Unfortunately, Paul didn’t offer an alternative, but mentioned that “wanky” is quite a good word. So, if repurpose isn’t a good word, at least you know that one of your words is? And then, so people leave your audience if you don’t keep them fed with content, which again, another great point.

Phil Bray 11:48
Yeah, I absolutely agree. Yardsticks’ blog this week (which I wrote this morning), we talk about building audiences in 10 ways. Everyone loves a listicle, don’t they? 10 ways to get people to sign up to your newsletter, or to increase the size of your database. And we start that blog, by just explaining, well, why do you need to keep building your database? And one of the reasons is, there’s some attrition there, your email database gets depleted. And that’s partly because people just leave it, they may change email address, or don’t update it, but also because they unsubscribe if they’re not getting value from it. So incredibly important that whatever content we put out, really does add value to people. It’s a great point Paul. Right, so, those are the seven reasons why you need to repurpose content, let’s have a look at five barriers. The first, hopefully, we’ve just ticked off. And that’s not understanding why it’s important. And, there were a bunch of occasions in “marketing”, where actually we need to just dig a bit deeper as to what actually is important. And this is a good example, everyone thinks about blogs and content, we’ve got to keep the most… we’ve got to keep producing – the more we produce, the better. And that’s right, to a degree. But, as I said earlier, we need to get this balance between content production and content promotion, right. And of course, repurposing content is all about the promotion of it. So it’s starting to rebalance these things. And very few advisers and planners actually get this balance right. Second, as I said at the start, in the introduction, one of the barriers, is that people see completion of the content as the end of the race, whereas it’s not, it’s just a pit stop along the way. It’s literally a pit stop on the way to the end of the race. So you’ve got to be thinking right, now I’ve got my content, what do I do with it? Or ideally be thinking about those two things in parallel. But certainly the production of the content is not the end of the race. Number three – I know there’s plenty of advisers and planners out there – and some may be on this call – who are a bit shy, a bit timid, and a bit worried about them being seen as promoting themselves too much, or over promotion, over exposure. And I think that’s something we’ve kind of got to try and put a pin in. Because if you are not promoting yourself, nobody else is going to do it for you. And one of the things we do need to remember is that the advisers, the planners, the mortgage brokers on this call, there are prospects out there. There are people out there, there’s consumers out there, who will be better off financially, have a greater sense of financial wellbeing after working with you. Therefore, the more you promote yourself, the more good you will do, by helping these people. Just slight change of mindset, but it’s really important. The better you are at promoting yourself, the more people will have financial wellbeing, the more people will have a better financial future, the more people will feel confident about their financial future. So for me, you have an obligation to be promoting what you do. And as I say, remember that nobody else is going to promote you. You’ve got to do it yourself. There’s a fantastic blog that we’ll put in the follow up, about – it’s not one we wrote, it’s somebody else – about why people shouldn’t be afraid of self-promotion. I’ll look it up. And I’ll get Abi to put it in the follow up, I recommend reading that. And then you have some people who worry about repeating messages. They worry about the fact that, “Oh, am I flooding LinkedIn? Am I doing too much?” No, that one post a week you’re putting up is not going to flood anybody’s timeline, yeah? And we should be posting on a regular basis, on our social channels, for example. We have some people who worry about, “I don’t want to overload people with newsletters, I’m going to send them once a quarter.” Well, again, that doesn’t work. It’s just really important, because not everybody sees your messages. Not everybody reads every article, not everybody reads every social post, so we’ve got to keep repeating those messages. And then finding the time. I do completely understand that. It isn’t easy to find the time, to be marketing your business, promoting yourself, producing content, promoting it, etc. So numbers one – four, there is a certain illogicalness that we can defeat. Finding time, I can’t necessarily find time in your diary, other than of course, you can outsource it, to your friendly marketing agency that specialises in financial services. But those are the five barriers. So we’ve talked about the seven reasons to do it. We’ve talked about some of the barriers. Dan, what’s come in on the chat?

Dan Campbell 17:15
So, Paul sums it up really well, by saying, “If people won’t be better off by knowing about your proposition, then you have a problem with your proposition. So, promote it.”

Phil Bray 17:25
Yeah, absolutely. 100% agree. You really do need to be promoting your own work, because nobody else is going to do it for you. Right. How to choose the content you’re going to repurpose. So, if you have produced blogs on a regular basis, for example, how do you choose which one you’re going to repurpose? You’ve got to apply some of these 13 ideas. For me, you’ve got to take a data driven approach. And there are three key sources of data, that you can draw upon to decide which of your blogs you are going to repurpose, and re-promote. So the first, is your newsletter open and click through rates. So most of you that send newsletters, will probably outsource to an agency such as ourselves. And we’re going to explain a little bit about how we do that in a second. But we provide all our clients who take Yardstick Membership (which is our newsletter and blogging service) really detailed analytics. To show you open rates, click through rates, which were the most popular articles. So, use that data to help decide which of your blogs, you should repurpose. And if you don’t use Yardstick, if you’re using MailChimp or Constant Contact or something like that, or HubSpot, there’ll be data in the back-end, that will help you understand which are the most popular newsletters, and which are the most popular blogs. And by the way, this is a good reason why, if anybody on the call is still doing it, you shouldn’t be sending your newsletters via Outlook or Gmail. It’s completely untrackable. You don’t get any data at all, as to what people are opening, what people are clicking, what people are interested in. So make sure you’ve got the data in the first place, then you analyse it. Second source, Google Analytics. So if you go into the… if you’re in the current version of analytics, I know it’s changing for next year. But if you’re in the current version of analytics, and you want to understand which of your blogs are most popular, on the left hand side, go into the “Behaviour” tab. And maybe set the date range for a relatively long period of time, over the last nine or 12 months, year-to-date, something like that. And then look down the list. And it will show you which of the popular pages on your website. And it will show you in there, of course, blogs. You’ll see, punctuated amongst all the other pages, your blogs. So you can start to look at which are the most popular. And also it shows the average read time. So how long people are spending on average on each of your blogs. So you can start to see which are popular, and which are getting good read times. And, that will start to help along with your newsletter open rates. Help you understand which are the most popular types of content and it’s those who should be repurposing. And then on social media, what would you be looking at there? Links clicked, likes and comments for promoting different ideas and different types of content. And of course, you’ve got a couple of things there on social. Let’s say you put up a LinkedIn post, linked to a blog – the number of likes, clicks, etc, that will help you understand the popularity of that blog. But you might write a social post, just with an idea, just with a concept, sharing your work, where there isn’t actually a link back anywhere, there’s no link back to a blog. But even understanding the engagement of that helps. Because if you’ve written a relatively short post on a topic, and it’s got a bunch of comments and a bunch of likes, then that’s telling you, you can repurpose that social post into a longer blog post or a guide or a white paper. So, a lot of the time on social, you should be flying kites. We’ve seen over the past few days, haven’t we, various newspaper headlines, with government flying kites about what might get announced tomorrow. Do we freeze this allowance? Do we push this tax rate up? Etc. And there’ll be making decisions, partly on the feedback from those kites they’re flying in the press. Well, the same applies with your socials. Fly kites. come up with ideas, concepts, put them on social. If they fly, if people like them, people engage with them. And that’s telling you can turn that post into a longer form content, as well. But in terms of the blogs, as I say, take a data driven approach, look at your newsletter stats, look at your Google Analytics, and look at your social engagement. And that will tell you about certain types of content, the content you should be repurposing. The other thing I would have, is evergreen content. So this is content that you’re not necessarily looking at behind the data on. But you’ve got it ready to react to events. So, for example, you might have every so often, there are headlines about stock market volatility. Stock markets rising, stock markets falling, by a significant amount over a short period of time. So, why not have some evergreen content that you can repurpose for those events? You’ve got the content, it’s on the shelf, you pull it down and use it when certain things happen. So you could, for example, have an evergreen blog about inflation. And, what’s the steps people should be taking, to mitigate the current levels of inflation. And today? You will have pulled that piece down off your electronic shelf and started posting about it, because about 8am this morning, there was the new inflation rate numbers announced. So, another way of repurposing content, is to have evergreen content that you use, you pull down from your digital shelf, as and when you need it, and events dictate it. As I say, stock market volatility, inflation, two that spring to mind right now. So hopefully, that gives you a good idea of which articles you should be looking to repurpose. But of course, you’ve got to get the articles in the first place, haven’t you. And you could write them yourself. You absolutely could write these yourself. The other thing you could do though, is you could outsource them. And this is the perfect moment for a 30 second commercial break. Explaining Yardstick Membership. I think this is probably the first time we’ve done this, this year. So Yardstick Membership is our newsletter and blogging service. There are two versions. Syndicated, where we write 22 articles in a month. And you, as the adviser or planner who’s taking Yardstick Membership chooses which six you want. And there’s bespoke, where we write three articles exclusively for you. Based on a brief we’d give you or a brief you give us, or a brief we collaboratively pull together. So two versions, syndicated and bespoke. We add the articles to your website. And then we build and send a newsletter. There’s a range of frequency options, we would always recommend monthly, simply because, if you’re adding value by sending your newsletter, why why not do it 12 times a year? Yeah, it just makes more sense to add value 12 times, than four times if you’re doing quarterly. We then provide you with actionable management information. And, that shows open rates, click to open rates, etc. And then we provide a monthly guide. And that guide is more in depth. It’s probably about 2,500 words long, and deals with a range of topics. Some are lifestyle. So this month, we did… What did we do, Dan? Was it Christmas markets? Was it five, ten Christmas markets in Europe?

Dan Campbell 26:03
So the European Christmas markets was previous, and the one that’s coming out early December is all about New Year’s resolutions, and have a link with your finances. So plenty of actionable tips within that one.

Phil Bray 26:15
Excellent, and we will occasionally get guest bloggers in as well. So I think it was October, we had Chris Budd, who is… someone described Chris the other day to me, as “the godfather of financial wellbeing”, and he’s certainly the founder of the Institute now of financial wellbeing. And we had him write a guest blog for us, about financial wellbeing. And obviously, that was made available as well. That was the most popular guide we’ve ever done. And then what we do with those guides, we ask you each month, if you want it, and then if you do, we brand it up, put your contact details on, put your colours on, add it onto your website, and put it into your newsletter, as well. So if you’re not producing your content yourself, and you would like to learn more about Yardstick Membership, just stick your email address in the chat. And we’ll follow up – Abi or I will follow up. Dan, did I see something come through on the chat, before we move on to our 13 ways?

Dan Campbell 27:18
Yeah, a comment from Rachel, who says, “Love the analogy of the digital shelf – shows the importance of working smarter, not harder.”

Phil Bray 27:26
Thanks, Rachel. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it’s about having an evergreen content, that as I say, you can pull down as and when you need it. So you’re not having to write it every time. is there a question in from Danny?

Dan Campbell 27:41
Yeah, great question from Danny, “How do syndicated articles affect SEO, if posted on multiple companies’ blog sections of websites?”

Phil Bray 27:51
In our experience, they don’t Danny. They won’t have a positive impact, on your SEO. But, bespoke content will do. But in our experience, we don’t see – we’ve been doing it for six years now – we don’t see any issues there. And if you are worried about it, you can put certain tags on there. So Google disregards it as well. So there’s there’s an obvious way around if you are concerned, but we don’t see any issues with that. Right. So, 13 ways. 13 ways you can turn your blogs into other content. A few things to get out of the way up front. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. And therefore think strategically. I wouldn’t try and dive in, and do all these 13 things at the same time. Pick two, three ideas that you can do consistantly. Do them on a regular basis. And I’ve often said, the superpower of great marketers is consistency. Just doing it, time after time after time. Not getting distracted by shiny new things. Not getting put off when something doesn’t work. Just being consistent. It genuinely works. Monitor the results. We’ve talked about those three things that you can be monitoring: newsletter engagement, Google Analytics, and social engagement. And then make evidence led decisions, about the two or three of these tactics that you’ve chosen. So let’s dive in. Number one – newsletter. Content should be distributed in a newsletter. Email is the shortest communication… the shortest distance when it comes to communication, between your mouth and somebody’s ear. And, there are multiple stories about blogging being dead, newsletters being dead, etc. They come around with the frequency that pension tax relief is being cut, which normally happens around around now, autumn statement budget time. But, there’s no point just uploading a blog to your website, and then just sitting back and expecting people to show up – because they won’t. So really important, that your content is distributed electronically, in the newsletter, to clients, prospects and professional connection. As I say, we’ve written that blog about 10 ways to increase your newsletter audience, that’ll be out Friday. So again, if anybody’s not on our newsletter list, that wants that, just put your name in the chat, and we’ll sort that out for you as well. And then finally, send newsletters monthly, quarterly is just not enough. It looks as though you are starting again, every time you send it out. It becomes a bit of a surprise. Whereas sending monthly, the people receiving it get into a bit of a rhythm. They’re expecting to receive it. I would imagine – I’m not prepared to try it – but I would imagine if we didn’t send our newsletter at 0730 on one Friday morning, we’d get a few messages back saying where is it? I can think of a couple of advisers, where – they may be on this call – where I can set my clock for the time and day I will get their newsletter. Graham at GroWiser is a brilliant example of it. He sends his newsletter at 11am on a Friday morning. And it pings in, so consistently. Andrew Neligan at Neligan Financial, is another really good example. He’s sent his on a Monday, I’ve noticed he’s moved to a Saturday morning now, I think. But again, it comes in religiously. And that regularity, not only are you adding value more frequently, but that regularity, that consistency breeds confidence in clients. It really does. Just the fact that you’re doing on a regular basis, shows you’re the type of person who thinks that consistency and delivery, is important. So, first thing in terms of your content, and repurposing it and we’re talking about repurposing blogs, of course, don’t just put them on your website and expect people to find them. Get out there. Push it out in electronic newsletter. Number two – social posts. So, you’ve got your blog. And one of the things we’ll talk about quite a lot is listicle style blogs. So the blog we’ve got coming out this Friday about 10 ways to get more people to sign up to your newsletter, that’s a listicle style block. There’s an introduction. There’s a call to action at the end. And there’s a list: 10 points. This is a listicle style webinar, there’s 13 points. We did seven points earlier, five, then 13. So people love lists. And there are a lot easier to write as well, because you know when you’ve finished. But listicle style blogs, there’s all sorts of things you can do with them. You could chop them up into a series of posts. So that blog this Friday – 10 ways to get people to sign up to your newsletter, I could post it as one, go and read this. Or I could chop it up over the course of 10 days or 10 posts. Here’s idea number one – go and read the blog for the other nine. Here’s our idea number two – go and read the blog for the other nine. So, those listicle style blogs, an absolute gift for social posts. Because one 10 Point listicle is probably a dozen social posts. Creating a slideshow on LinkedIn. Abi, who’s on the call, our head of social media, does this brilliantly. And, you can just scroll through. I think they’re PDFs aren’t they, Abi? But you can just scroll, through and they look brilliant. And there were a few people using on the LinkedIn, but they’re still not massively popular. So creating a little slideshow on LinkedIn, which is a PDF. Again, another great way of repurposing a listicle style blog into social. And then if you’ve got a blog, which has got a lot of data or statistics, especially if you just made your blog around the cost of living and then inflation or interest rates. Creating graphics, I think is really important. Because we all know the images on social posts, help drive engagement. We all know that if you put an image on a post, the more people will see it, the more people will pause and look at it. So, if you could turn some of the data and stats that are in a blog, into that image, and then link back to the original post, again, I think that’s a good thing to be doing as well. So there’s a lot of things you can do, especially on LinkedIn with your blogs, to turn that blog into more engaging social posts. And it doesn’t stop out on social. We can, on Twitter – moving over to Twitter, which is beloved of many advisers. I’m not overly convinced about the benefits in a B2C world, I think Facebook and LinkedIn, potentially Instagram is a better place – is better hunting grounds. But a Twitter thread. Again, if you’ve got a blog, you could cut it down and turn it into a Twitter thread. So you’ve got 1,000 word blog, edited down into a shorter piece, and then upload it to Twitter as a thread. There’s all sorts of things you can do there. But threads are… who knows what’ll happen, Mr. Musk will do to Twitter, that he’s not done over the past couple of weeks, he could do anything, couldn’t he? But Twitter threads, again, you could turn blogs into threads. And that’s staying with social and looking at LinkedIn. Then, we could put the most popular blogs, all those timely blogs that you pull down from your digital shelf, on LinkedIn as articles. For me, we probably focus – I’m guilty of this – I focus a lot on posts on LinkedIn, and really try and post at least once a day. But I don’t really think about posting longer form articles, on LinkedIn. And that’s probably wrong of me. So, maybe something to look at and doing more of. But using a blog that’s on your website, and putting it up as an article on LinkedIn, I really think is a is an opportunity that I’m missing, and other people will do as well. And that’s a really good example, again, of maybe some of the evergreen stuff that you could do. It’s inflation numbers today. Right, here’s our article, our A to Z of how to combat the effects of inflation. And there’ll be an interest rate announcement soon, I’m sure as well. So here’s our blog on what interest rate rises mean for savers. And here’s our blog on what interest rate rises mean for mortgage holders. And you’re not re-writing every time, you might tweak one or two bits, but you’re not re-writing it every time, you’re repurposing content that you’ve already got. And then you put the post up, put the article up I should say, not the post, you might want to link back to the original blog on your website. And then of course, don’t forget, again, write posts to promote the article. So if you’ve used a blog, you put it on as an article on LinkedIn, you’ve still got to promote it, as well. But I do think articles on LinkedIn are overlooked, certainly by me, and potentially by other people as well. Number five – video. So we’ve all got a studio in our pocket. We’ve got this, I’ve got a ring light up here. We’ve all got these things. And it’s very easy to turn a blog into a script. So, you could turn, as I say, the blog into a script, and record it as a longer video. I would suggest that you probably… maybe 120-150 words is a minute of video, something like that? So if you’ve got 1,000 word blog, you’re turning that into a video of maybe eight minutes. And that’s okay, that’s fine. Some people will engage with that longer form video. But others won’t want to give you a full eight minutes of their life, it’s quite a long time. So, cut it up into shorter videos. And this is where listicle style blogs really come into their own. So again, you’ve got the 10 things. Record a short video for point number one, a short video for point number two, and so on, and then post those on social, over the course of 10 days. We’ll do one in the morning, one in the evening, over the course of five days, if you’ve got 10 things on your list, which apparently is the best number to have. So you could as I say, create a long video, you could create a short video. One of the things I would do though, is once you’ve created those videos, embed them into the original blog on your website. Because people will read the blog, but if you offer them the video at the top, or the video halfway down, or those shorter clips for each of the 10 bullet points on the list, they might engage with the videos, rather than the text, where they have might have jumped off the text because they’ve had enough of reading. They might prefer to move to the videos. So once you’ve created the videos, not only do you need to promote them, on social and in the newsletters, but put them on the original blog as well. Podcasts. So I don’t know if anybody has got a podcast on here. By all means just shout up in the chat if you’ve got a podcast, I’d be really interested to understand how that’s going. But one of the things that I think is really good about podcasts these days, is they don’t have to be infinite. You can do a series. So you could do a box set of podcasts, maybe half a dozen, maybe six. And take your six most popular blogs, and turn them into a podcast series. Again, take that listicle blog, and turn it into a podcast, or a series of podcasts. If you’ve got a listicle blog of, I don’t know, 10 points that’s been really popular. Then do a box set of 10 short podcasts, explaining each of those points in more detail. So you’re using your blog as inspiration there, for a script for a podcast. But the podcast is a boxset. And again, I think that could be incredibly popular as well. Podcasts might make people nervous, but they are more accessible than they used to be. Dan, did I see something come up in the chat?

Dan Campbell 41:01
Yeah, you certainly did. So Rachel asks a great question, “Is there an argument for the podcast based now being oversaturated, particularly post pandemic? I’m on the fence about starting one. And this is a concern of mine.”

Phil Bray 41:15
I genuinely don’t know. And what I do know is, more and more of us are listening to podcasts. I did some research on this, the actually the best audience that engages and listens podcast is clearly a younger audience. There’s still a significant bunch of people that are kinda of 55 plus, who are engaging with podcasts. And I suspect… my hypothesis would be, try it, and see how it goes. It’s relatively cost effective. I’m trying to avoid the word cheap, it’s really quite cheap to do a podcast. So, I would try it, maybe do a series of six, and see how that goes. But again, it’s about the balance between content production and content promotion. There is no point producing if you’re not going to promote. And then the last thing I’d say on this, is I get why there’s maybe a gut feeling that the market is saturated. And there are a lot of podcasts out there about money about fight personal finance, etc. And I think that’s because we’re in this bubble. All of us are in this bubble. And we see some really high profile advisers promoting their podcast. I think Matthew started this years ago. And I don’t necessarily think that that mean that it is oversaturated. It might feel like it’s oversaturated. Sorry, long winded and rambling answer, but hopefully that helps. Dan, anything else?

Dan Campbell 42:48
No, that’s it. And I think Paul agrees, as well. So Paul says, “It’s very busy, but quality matters.” And they’re considering it too. But just to give it some context. I mean, I listen to a lot of design podcasts, which – no surprise there. But… and it is a completely oversaturated space. But the minute a new design podcast gets published, that I’ve not heard of before, you know I’m gonna check that out, you know? And that might creep onto my most commonly listened to podcasts, and perhaps replace one that I’ve listened to for years. So yeah, zero people listening to the one that you didn’t make. So, give it a go.

Phil Bray 43:27
Design on a podcast? Which is what?

Dan Campbell 43:31
Yeah, there’s a big thing where designers are just interviewing each other, and talking about things and… yeah, you’d think it’d be a completely visual thing, but it translates surprisingly well.

Phil Bray 43:40
Interesting. So for me, I would dive in and give it a go. If you can find a different angle, great. Completely agree about Paul’s point. But I do think… and actually, to be fair, I agree with Paul’s point, and just to provide some evidence for that. You would probably think that the podcasts aimed at advisers and planners, are oversaturated. But, Alan Smith, Nick Lincoln, and a couple of others, have recently launched a new podcast, and that’s flying. So that shows, if you get the quality right, and you get a promotion right, actually, podcasts can really work well. Number seven, number seven – longer form content. So, if you’ve got a really popular blog, that’s maybe 1,000 words long, that’s got a read time of seven – eight minutes, and is the second or third most popular blog on your website, over a period of time. That’s telling you that people are interested in it. The read time is telling you that people are happy to commit time to reading it as well. So go deeper. Turn that blog into a longer white paper, or a guide, by expanding the text, going deeper and putting more detail in there. You could even get to the point where you combine blogs on a similar topic, into a book, whether that’s physical or electronic. And it’s easier than people think, to create this type of stuff, to create 10 blogs into white papers, guys turn into a longer format, even to the point of books. And if you can get to the point of releasing and promoting a book, it is incredibly powerful, at demonstrating your domain expertise, genuinely is. I don’t know if anybody had on here has produced a book? Noel, if you’re around, you’ve done a book, haven’t you? I saw your name on the list, I’d be really interested to see how that went. But if you’ve got the blog (or blogs) on a topic, then that’s a starting point. And it’s relatively straightforward, to take into longer form content. And then moving into the visual. As we said before, not everybody consumes content in the same way. Not everybody wants to read blogs. But your blog is obviously the starting point, for a lot of us. And we’ve talked about turning your blogs into videos, why not turn your blogs into infographics? And that’s because we all consume information in different ways. And that visual graphic, whether it’s on your website, or used on social, will capture the eye, and is something that’s a bit different. Infographics were incredibly popular a few years ago, you see fewer of them now. And therefore, you will stand out more by creating that sort of thing. And it works best, where you have blogs that are data heavy. Yeah? Because data works really well in infographics. Words, slightly less well. But consider if you’ve got data heavy blogs, consider turning them into infographics. Dan, did I see something come in the chat?

Dan Campbell 47:02
Yeah, so Alex mentioned that longer form video podcasts can also be repurposed into shorter clips to share on social, with potential for more shareability, which we’re absolutely in agreement with, especially Abi, on the call with the History Film Club podcast. So yeah, snip those longer videos up, and give people a teaser, to get them to listen to the whole thing.

Phil Bray 47:25
Again, great point. And there’s a lot of kind of virtuous circles going on here, isn’t there? You write the listicle blog, that becomes a series of social posts. Each of those social posts will have different engagement levels. That will tell you which of which of those 10 really resonated. The one that resonates the most, you could then turn into a podcast, there’s so many different trigger points and virtuous circles here, that we can take advantage of. Number nine – webinars. Now whenever I say webinars to advisers, there’s often a bit of an adviser-shaped hole in the wall, like a cartoon character from years ago. Whereas there seems to be a lot of enthusiasm for podcasts, less enthusiasm for webinars. And I’m not entirely sure why that is, maybe it’s because a webinar is live, and a podcast isn’t? But for me, webinars are an incredibly important rung on that value ladder. And two reasons really. It allows you to communicate with a relatively large audience. So we’ve had 128 people sign up for this webinar. And it lasts an hour. That’s a lot of time that I’ve been able to efficiently use, along with Dan, and Abi. So it works efficiently from you. It allows people who attend a webinar to hopefully get value, you’ll be the judge of that in this case, but it also acts as a filter. So you’ve got your audience, let’s say you’ve got 1,000 people on your database. And then let’s say, 30 people sign up for the webinar, and 20 people sign up, you’re slowly filtering that initial audience down into the people that are really serious. So if you run a webinar, and of course, the whole purpose of this is to use your blogs, to create the webinar. You’re filtering down your initial audience to those people who are interested, and those people who are interested enough to turn up. And then of course, those people who turn up, should be then getting a phone call from you, to try and move the relationship – if they’re not already a client, from prospect to clients. So as we’re saying here, those webinars should be used to inform existing clients, and engage and filter those prospects. And your blogs would be used to produce the invite, the presentation, and the scripts. Imagine you’ve got that blog, “10 things to do when interest rates rise”. Five for savers, five for mortgage holders. That’s a really easy webinar to write, once you’ve got the blog. So, tick. Really straightforward. Really easy to write the invite once you’ve got the blog, because you can explain what the webinar is about, the benefit of attending, etc. Then pull it down from a digital shelf. So, interest rates… Bank of England meets on Thursday. Interest rates rise. That evening, send out a mailer to your database, “Right, we’ll be online at 11am tomorrow morning.” You’ve already got your invite written, your email written, your script and your presentation. React really quickly. Because you’ve got that asset already. I’m just not seeing people do it. And I think that having that immediacy is really, really important. We’ve got the autumn statement tomorrow. The team are in the office tomorrow. I think it happens around lunchtime. Our aim (which we will hit) is to have all the updates out, on behalf of our clients, to their clients, by the 6am news, because that immediacy is so important. So webinars, turning blogs into scripts and presentations, I think is a really useful way of repurposing your blog content. It’s easier than you think, really low cost. And the other thing, we’ve got another one of these loops here as well, because the questions that people ask on the webinar, then become future content. So Danny, you asked a question earlier about the SEO impact on a syndicated content. Right, I can write a blog about that. I can write a social post about that. I can write a social post about that idea about the digital bookshelf that went down well, earlier. I can write a social post or blog about that. So those delegate questions are really, really important, because they are your future content. So we’ve got another one of these loops here. Right closing in, on number 13. So press releases. Journalists always want interesting stories. There’s two ways to get into the press. You can react. And something like Newspage from Dominic Hiatt, and his team is just brilliant for doing that. But journalists, once you got a relationship with them, if you can go to them with stories, even better. And they love well researched, data driven press releases, data driven information. Ideally it should be your own research, they’re not going to regurgitate someone else’s research on your behalf. But if you’ve written a really interesting blog, perhaps based on some research you’ve done with your clients, or research you’ve done with a wider audience, and you’ve written that into a blog, journalist will be interested and potentially pick up on that. Number 11 – for engaging with professional connections, and by extension, their clients. So professional collections – accountants and solicitors, they’re generally really poor marketers, really poor. And again, they suffer with the same issues that advisers and planners do when it comes to content production and content promotion. So, why not offer some of your professional connections, blogs? Yeah, it’s very easy. If we’ve done that data driven research, you will know which are the most popular blogs, go to them and say we’ve done this research, most popular blogs on our website over the past 12 months were these three, how about we put those into your newsletter? Ideally, of course with a link back to your website. So just expand your audience again. Not just your audience, but piggyback other people’s audience as as well. And if they run podcasts or webinars, ask to go on as a guest, to discuss particular topics. And again, you can use the blogs as inspiration there. So, Mr. Accountant, Mrs. Solicitor, these are the three most popular blogs on our website, I can see you do a podcast, well how about doing a joint webinar together? Or can I come and speak at your event? Yeah, you’re not just putting your hand up and saying can I come and speak, you’re going to them with an idea. And it’s a data driven idea because you’ve shown them what’s popular. So, use your blogs to engage with professional connections, and as I say, by extension, with their clients. Number 12 – a welcome email after your newsletter signup. So if anybody signs up to the Yardstick newsletter, as 9,500 people have, they get a welcome email when they sign up. It’s an auto responder. So it happens automatically, we don’t have to think about it. And it includes a range of our most popular blogs. So combine idea number 12, with the blog that we’re going to send out on Friday. And, you’re on to a bit of a winner there. More people sign up to your newsletter. When they do, they get the auto responder with the most popular blogs. And then each month, they then get a further set of blogs from you, to go and read. And then number 13 – include your most popular blogs in nurturing sequences. So, lead magnets – where people download a guide, and in return, get that guide, you get their data. Put your most popular blogs in your nurturing sequences. So they shouldn’t just hear off you once, they should hear off you maybe once a week for the first four weeks, and then go into your newsletter system. Well, you know (if you’ve done the research) which are the most popular blogs, and therefore use those popular blogs in your nurturing sequence, after someone has downloaded a lead magnet. The same would apply to an online scorecard. Online scorecards are incredibly popular right now. I suspect that a bit of a shiny new thing, in some cases, that people leap into doing, spend all their time thinking about the scorecard, and no time thinking about promoting it. And we might do a webinar next year on how to promote scorecards. But, if someone’s completed a scorecard, then using those popular blogs to add more value, walk them up to the value ladder, really, really important. So, those are the 13, Baker’s Dozen or unlucky for some, depending on your point of view. Pick the ones though, that actually you can action, and you can do consistently. As I said before, just because you should, doesn’t mean that you… just because you could, doesn’t mean you should, go the right way around. So pick two or three that you can do consistently. And keep doing them. Hope that’s been useful. We’ll do some questions in a minute, because I’ve seen a couple come in. But that’s it, for our webinar series, for 2022. I hope you found them useful. We’ve done them every month. And we’ve added workshops in this year as well. So paid for workshops. And we’ll be back in January, with a webinar once a month, and then paid for workshops on a regular basis, because we’ve been trialling that this year, with our referral and recommendation workshop. That’s gone well. So we’re going to be doing more of that next year. We do need your help, though. So if there are topics you want us to cover, then please do let us know. We’re going to do a little survey in December. We did one in the middle of the year, we’re going to do another one in December, to try and understand what it is that you guys want us to be talking about on webinars. Where you’d like us to spend our time. So we’ll do that survey. In the meantime, if there is anything that you would like us to be doing, then drop me an email, phil@theyardstickagency.co.uk, or go onto LinkedIn, look me up, send me a connection request if we’re not already connected. And tell us what you would like to see us do more of, next year. Because we want to make sure that you get out of these sessions, exactly what you want to, and you leave with your questions answered. Which is a lovely segue into that! Dan, what questions have we got?

Dan Campbell 58:59
Okay, so first few questions are around the scorecard. So Danny asks, “Can you explain what a scorecard is?” And Chris says, “Have you got a generic guide on easy ways to create a scorecard?”

Phil Bray 59:14
Right. I don’t have a generic guide on easy ways to create a scorecard. But, I can recommend… so scorecard software kind of begins and ends with ScoreApp, which is a Daniel Priestley creation. So Daniel wrote Oversubscribed, sorry. Oversubscribed and a bunch of other stuff. And, ScoreApp is a business from Daniel Priestleys’ stable, so I’d go and have a look at that. And Daniel has written a book. It’s available free if you find the right landing page (or just send him a message on Twitter or LinkedIn) and it is the A to Z of writing scorecards. I got my copy delivered this week, I’ve not had a chance to read it yet. I had a flick through it last night, it looks incredibly comprehensive, and incredibly useful. So that’s what I would do there Chris. Danny, the scorecard is essentially online quiz. So scorecard is one of those marketing terms that I so described earlier. It’s an online quiz. And it might be, “15 questions to understand if you are retirement ready.” So you’d have groups of questions. Someone would answer those questions. Ideally, they’re really quick fire, you’re not having to go off and research and look at the information. And at the end of it, you get a score, hence the name scorecard. And you are, Dan you are 60% retirement ready, Abi’s 70% retirement ready, Abi’s better than you. But what you’re then doing so you’re giving somebody an idea of how ready they are, in this case, for retirement, but then you give them further reading. So, Dan, your shortfalls were understanding your State Pension, and estate planning. Here’s a blog about estate planning, here’s a blog about State Pension, and one about estate planning, where you can have further reading and start to learn more. And the idea is, of course Danny, you’re getting not only the contact information of the person who’s completed it, but a whole load of other information as well, that allows you to more effectively follow up with the prospect. So it’s a bit of fun, it’s a bit of value that engages people, you get data that you can then follow up.

Dan Campbell 1:01:37
Brilliant, and Chulpan very helpfully follows that up by recommending a recent Brett Davidson webinar that mentions that too, for the recent PFS stuff. So there’s plenty of things that you can get more info about the scorecards there. Okay, so a question in from Ronald who asks if we can provide a list of our paid for workshops for 2023?

Phil Bray 1:02:03
Ronald, we absolutely can… when we build that list! Yeah. So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to send out a little questionnaire over the next couple of weeks, just helping us understand, what actually people want. We will be reworking our paid for… all our workshops are paid for, webinars are free. And we’re going to rewrite, or are in the process of rewriting our recommendation workshops. That will definitely be something for next year. I think Abi and I would like to do a LinkedIn workshop as well, to help people with LinkedIn. So, there is a bunch of stuff that we will be doing on paid for workshops, and webinars. But we just want to take our cue from all the people that have attended webinars this year. And we’ll send out the quiz, the survey, and we’ll react to that, but it will be out soon, Ronald.

Dan Campbell 1:02:57
Brilliant, I believe that was… No, I spoke too soon. One final question. “Will workshops be for advisers, or marketeers?”

Phil Bray 1:03:08
Both, Danny. So, anybody… As we say on the invites, the workshops are generally aimed at (and as are the webinars), anybody who’s got a responsibility for marketing, within the business. Whether that’s advisers, planners, specialist marketing execs and managers, or anybody that just put their hand up and said, “I’ll do the marketing in the business” as quite often is. So, the more the merrier. But they’ll all be aimed at people, who have responsibility for their marketing.

Dan Campbell 1:03:41
Lovely. Well, all of the other comments, are people wishing us a Merry Christmas, for when it arrives. And also, it looks like you thought you might be able to get away with it… Someone’s wished you a happy birthday, Phil! So Aisha has said, they’ve spotted on LinkedIn that it’s your birthday. So there we go.

Phil Bray 1:04:00
Thank you, Aisha. It is. So next year is a really big one, this year, just… Yeah, but thank you, much appreciated. And thank you to everybody for your engagement over the past few months. We’ve really enjoyed doing these webinars. I hope they add value to you. If it’s not too early on the 16th to November to wish you a Merry Christmas, then Merry Christmas, and we’ll see you all in January. Cheers everybody. Bye bye.

Dan Campbell 1:04:22
Take care guys. Bye.