As I go about preparing content production schedules for my clients, I often make a point of advising them to design and craft contents that have long-tail value built-in from the get-go.
By “long-tail value,” I’m referring to the ability to re-use contents at other stages in your marketing rollout(s), such that the piece you’re designing today can last long beyond just the single session on the day you draft it. You don’t want to be spending all that time churning out content only not to be able to use somewhere down the line when things become that much more busy for you. By busy, I mean when you’re engaged with your festival run, when you’re too tied down managing relationships with your distributors and suppliers, or when you’re perhaps too preoccupied running around searching that make-it-or-break it completion financing for your picture at the proverbial “five minutes to twelve.”
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn – incidentally, and as luck would have it – “like” this sort of content repurposing and award high algorithm scores to this sort of thing.
Crossposting to your own content from right within your post is great for Google Juice and also draws attention to the full slew of contents you offer, as part of your massive archive.
It grants “second life” to contents which didn’t make its rounds on the first occasion and reveals to your readers the full web of potential posts and ideas that you’ve been generating for the past several weeks or months. I call this the “Dan Brown Effect.” It means, few people knew about his first mediocre sales effort of a novel “Angels and Demons” until his subsequent “Da Vinci Code” benefitted from all of that international stardom.
Here’s a quick mental (or formalized, if this dovetails better for your production goals) checklist to run through each and every time you rear back and design content for your indie film or doc:
- is the post bound by a specific date or time? If it isn’t news-y, chances are higher that you should be able to rehash it at a later date and give it a bit of a second life.
- is the content universal? Or does it apply strictly to your specific vertical, and hence only – like that baby blue button-down in your summer closet! – good for just a single wear over the course of a single season? Note: if you’re laying out more universal themes, however, you risk also becoming slightly irrelevant to your specific vertical – in this case, indie film and doc fans who search for targeted, specific information about the project you’re working on and general indie film industry developments. In other words, general marketing content isn’t going to work and you might alienate the people who put you in the pole position in the first place. You’re going to need to drill down to something more particular and abandon universalism if this defines your particular case.
- is the content well-liked? Was the previous piece (be it a blog or a videoblog) was resoundingly popular – objectively evidenced by views, Twitter RTs, Facebook “likes,” StumbleUpon shares, LinkedIn shares, or what-have-you’s? Chances are then that it will become even more popular once you re-release. Keep a running collection of the “winner” posts and the “digital tumbleweeds” (thanks Mitch Joel, I knew I’d have a chance to use that expression somewhere!), so you know to stay as far away as possible from the latter.
What are some examples of contents that can benefit from second and third lives over the course of your entire production schedule?
- blogs which aren’t commemorative of specific milestones in your schedule: the key here is to keep this in mind from inception you’ll be re-releasing them somewhere down the line, so leave some room open for interpretation or expandability. Don’t pin yourself into a corner by chronicling an event which has an ultra-short shelf life. That’s not wise content production strategy.
- videoblogs bearing an uplifting message: there are certain videos which stand the test of time and are valid in any language, country, culture, or season. If you can develop the skill to shoot and cut videos of this kind, you will have discovered the equivalent of spun gold: viral hits benefitting from tremendous pass-through rates.
- behind-the-scenes clips which are educational nature: rather than highlighting features exclusive to the production in question, some directors and producers might introduce film concepts or ideas that carry a tremendous educational payload, lessons which transcend the production under discussion that cineastes can benefit tremendously from.
It’s important to remind ourselves as to the why we’re doing this.
The idea is to:
- maximize the time spent designing and crafting contents such that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel on messages having a long-tail/robust message.
- demonstrate to readers that you care about the information you’re imparting to them. That it’s not all about you and your project’s agenda, but that there are elements of Derek Sivers’ “share economy” in full-effect.
- that the path to contents that logically link to one another in your marketing plan are laced together, making the process of sharing these contents and “liking” them as a package easier for your audience.
So what are we waiting for? Let’s get cracking!
Adam Daniel Mezei, PMD | Producer of Marketing and Distribution
http://pmdforhire.com
Marketing and Distribution Services for Indie Films and Documentaries
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