In digital marketing, you may have heard the term ” content library”; you may think it’s pretty self-explanatory, but the content library approach to digital marketing is often underutilized and misunderstood. This misuse is costing far too many companies far too much time and money, making the missed potential palpable.
We at Bean Media Productions are digital marketing experts with more than 20 years of experience producing content and creating libraries for our clients. Today we are going to describe and demonstrate what a content library is and how we use it to create effective marketing campaigns.
Building Your Business’s Content Library
A business’s content library is every branded piece of content that they own, organized together into a viewable index in a way that is accessible to your marketing agency or internal marketing team.
You might be tempted to think of your content as your completed marketing materials, your advertisements, your social media posts, your edited videos, but those are only at the bottom of the funnel of your content library.
A company’s actual content library contains those finished works, unfinished work, web design, blog posts, messages, past work, branding, and most importantly, raw footage
Raw, unedited videos and photos make for the foundations of your content library pyramid. They, when combined with your unique messaging and brand elements, are the structure that lets more refined pieces of content build upon it and eventually be released.
In their digital marketing campaign, most businesses treat their content library completely wrong.
Effectively Utilizing a Content Library
The way we use a business content library is focused on results, longevity, and recyclability. In today’s marketing landscape, taking a single-faceted approach is often not financially viable for most businesses.
A Nightmare Content Scenario
Follow me through this example:
You want to produce a “Who we Are” style video for your company. You have meetings internally planning for the video. Then in pre-production, you will also have meetings with your video production company or freelance video producer to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Now you can go on to produce the video; this could be as simple as a single interview with one camera, or it could take several days of filming different shoots with multiple cameras all at different locations.
Finally, you got the footage, but now we hit post-production. Here, the video editor needs to piece together your footage, your audio, your music, and create a final product.
The final video is gorgeous and perfect, and you love it. You put it on YouTube, put it on your website, end the project, and wait for leads to start rolling in.
It only gets 100 views and only converts one lead.
The video is perfect, and it does its job, but you spent a lot of time on it, not to mention a lot of money. You probably wanted to see some more ROI from it, and are wondering why it’s not serving as a valuable asset.
This is a nightmare scenario in a digital marketing campaign, and unfortunately it happens too often. The entire point of marketing is to bring you results, even if they aren’t financial results. If you aren’t getting results out of your production, then it’s a failure, no matter how beautiful, helpful, or perfect it ends up being.
Let’s Fix It With A Content Library Approach
Luckily, if this happens to you, it’s not over. With the content library approach, you can take the nightmare scenario and turn it into the best-case scenario.
You’ve already made your video; it’s good, but it’s just one video. Looking at what you have done as a content library, though, you can see that you actually have a lot more than you thought.
You have lots of raw footage that can be repurposed into multiple videos. You have interviews that could serve as educational content for your audience; you have photos that you can put on your website, and you have so much more right at your fingertips.
That is the content library approach to digital marketing. Using every shoot, every graphic, and every asset in an ongoing marketing campaign rather than just a one-and-done project. If you go into a project with this mindset in mind, you can be even more diligent in ensuring you are growing your content library every time you press record.
How do we Approach Using a Content Library?
At Bean Media Productions, we can take footage from one shoot and turn it into social media videos, website elements, advertisements, and more that will achieve your results. That’s not even mentioning the “main” video.
Then we combine that footage with a client’s existing content library to create new graphics, new videos, new designs, and more that were never possible before building this library, all in creative, strategic ways. We aim to spread your brand out through multiple different channels to increase your brand’s awareness while still reaching your target audience.
This content library approach saves our clients time and money, minimizing the cost and maximizing the return. We’ve also taken this approach to clients’ videos even if they don’t have the raw footage, re-editing and reinventing the “main” production in new ways to provide new value to their marketing.
If you are looking to build your own, or re-imagine your content library, we’d love to talk to you. With our 20+ years of experience working with all sorts of clients with both big and small budgets, we can promise you there is value in marketing your business, even if it hasn’t done what you wished before. With our efficient, strategic content library approach, we can correct those issues and bring results back into your marketing meetings.
