The benefits of content marketing are easy to see. What firm doesn’t want to position itself as a thought leader, dominate search engines, and flourish in social media groups?

In reality, however, content marketing has one major downside—it sucks up time. There are only so many hours in a day, and you’d like most of them to be billable. So when do you find time to write blog posts, shoot videos, present webinars, and compile ebooks?

For all of you who aspire to conquer the world of B2B content marketing, I have a little secret…

It’s called content efficiency.

Content efficiency is the practice of repurposing your educational content in various formats. In other words, it’s tripling or quadrupling the number of pieces you publish on your website without tripling the number of fresh ideas you have to come up with.

As an example, let’s take a look at two technology companies and the content they plan to publish in an upcoming month.

Company 1—No Content Efficiency

  • A blog post on business intelligence
  • A blog post on portals
  • A blog post on Cognos software
  • A blog post on video data analysis
  • A webinar on a new product that just came out
  • A short ebook on document management
  • A podcast about a Microsoft update

(Phew, that was a lot of work!)

Company 2—Great Content Efficiency

  • A four-part blog series on business intelligence
  • A webinar on business intelligence covering the points from the posts
  • A short ebook compiled from the four repurposed blog posts
  • A podcast of an interview with the ebook author

(OMG, that was so easy!)

You’ll notice that the number of pieces remains the same; however, Company 2 has to do a lot less mental legwork than Company 1. Establishing a monthly or quarterly theme can go a long way toward making B2B content marketing manageable.

Does every piece of content need to fit the theme? Of course not. Providing a bit of variety always helps keep things fresh. But by tying a many of your pieces to one topic area, you’ll find your content producers stressing far less about finding that next new topic.

So before you say “I can’t” to content marketing, try using the content efficiency. Your firm may just find that B2B content marketing is very achievable.

For more on the importance of B2B content marketing, download our free research study, Online Marketing for Professional Services Firms: How Digital Marketing Delivers Faster Growth and Higher Profits.