Does your content strategy look less like a strategy and more like a bunch of blogs on random topics that your team occasionally shares on LinkedIn?

If so, know that you are in good company. We meet a lot of founders who know content is important but lack the time and resources to develop a strategy. That’s why we are such big fans of the content waterfall strategy for businesses that want a streamlined approach to content creation and marketing. 

What Is a Content Waterfall Strategy?

A content waterfall strategy starts with a fundamental piece of content, such as a white paper or lead magnet, that goes in-depth on an important topic for your audience. This is the top of the waterfall. Then, that piece of content can be repurposed into shorter types of content, such as blog posts, case studies, press releases, social media posts, LinkedIn thought leadership posts, infographics, and email snippets. This strategy flows content from top to bottom, just like a natural waterfall. 

The main reason to employ a content waterfall strategy is to get more mileage out of your content. We know all too well just how much time goes into researching, writing, editing, and publishing a piece of content. There’s no reason to let it just sit on your website once you hit “publish!” With a content waterfall approach, you can repurpose that great content to serve multiple audiences and platforms.

Benefits of Creating a Content Waterfall

So, why take a content waterfall approach instead of throwing darts at the wall and seeing what sticks? Here are a few reasons:

1. Stay focused on one key part of your business

The content waterfall approach lets you hone in on a particular aspect of your business that you want to market to your audience. It could be a new research development, the results of a longer-term project, a study analysis, or anything else that resonates with your audience. The longer piece of content (e.g., white paper) will give an overview, while the individual blog articles and LinkedIn posts take a narrower approach to a specific aspect.

2. Get more mileage out of your content

A key benefit of the content waterfall is that it allows you to get a lot of mileage out of your content. The bulk of the research, writing, and editing happens during the first phase of creating your white paper. Once that part’s over, it’s relatively easy to break it down into smaller parcels you can distribute on your website, social media, and email. 

3. Cost-effective

Budgets are always a concern when it comes to content creation, regardless of the industry. A content waterfall strategy lets you stretch your marketing budget to get the most value for your dollars. We can work faster when we are focused on a strategy, which means streamlined deliverables and a lower price for you!

4. Track what works

Not every piece of content you publish will be a banger. With a content waterfall strategy, you can better understand why certain pieces perform better than others to determine if it’s the topic or form of content that isn’t working. For example, maybe your audience responds better to short LinkedIn posts than longer white papers, regardless of the topic. When you employ this strategy a few times, you’ll have enough data to determine where you should focus the bulk of your marketing efforts. 

5. Works across industries

The content waterfall approach can work whether you are in tech, biotech, manufacturing, life sciences, data science, analytics, or any other type of industry. It’s ideal for industries that produce more technical-heavy content, which is great for longer-form content such as white papers and e-books. And while we focus on text content, this approach can also work for videos and podcasts. Turn one long video or podcast recording into several short snippets that can be shared across platforms. 

Let’s Build Your Content Waterfall

Are you ready to create valuable content for your audience? The team at People First Content is ready to help. Schedule a discovery call to learn more about our process and see how we can help you turn all those great ideas into a coherent marketing strategy.

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