Written by: Sophie Brown
Atomisation to a financial services content marketer is the art and science of breaking down larger pieces of content (think: research report, white paper, webinar etc) into smaller, more digestible formats aka atoms. You want to do this because it’s the atoms that will drive eyeballs back to your landmark content pieces.
Think about the hours, days and weeks researching, drafting and perfecting a meaty piece of content, only to have it sit on your website and stagnate. It’s just depressing.
And by disseminating your atoms through your various channels, you’re effectively stretching your larger pieces of content out over what could be an entire content calendar. This saves you time in content creation while also increasing visibility and drawing interest back to your original piece.
Fortunately you don’t need a PhD in chemistry to achieve great results with your content.
Principles of atomising content for financial services brands
Atomising content involves analysing the content you have produced, pulling it apart into different sections and repurposing it for use across a variety of channels . Here’s how:
Zoom in –Extract a single topic or point and make it the subject of a separate blog. For example, an interesting piece of research from a whitepaper, or a particularly salient chapter in an e-book could stand alone as a shorter blog. Morph – Can your content be reworked for different platforms? For example, an interesting statistic from your research could be turned into an infographic. Complement – After you have selected your topic, think about how you could produce further material off the back of a landmark piece. For example, break down a high level whitepaper into a webinar or video to make it more digestible. Connect – Group relevant content together to make it easier for your audience to explore Cross-promote – Maximise exposure and facilitate traffic between pieces by promoting related articles. This could be done at the end, or even within, your content pieces. Atomise - Recognize noteworthy sections that could be repackaged for different channels. More on this later.
Five top tips to maximize your content lifecycle
Identify your message – Be clear on what you are aiming to achieve and the message you are trying to deliver. For the most part, your message should be to communicate your brand’s thought leadership on a particular topic. It should align with your brand messaging, be of interest to your target audience, be optimised for search engines and most importantly, be creative Create a comprehensive piece of content – Creating a rich piece of content that zooms in on a certain topic provides more opportunity for atomisation. It needs to be useful, contain actionable insights for your target audience and differentiate your brand from the competitors. Example formats include white papers, research reports, webinars and e-books Atomise and repurpose content – Think creatively about how you can take different sections of your content and reshape it into a variety of formats. For example, you could take a white paper, turn it into a series of blog posts and refine key points into infographics to be shared on social networks Publish content – Generate greater reach by pushing your content out through a combination of owned and earned channels. Track your traffic and engagement analytics and back the winners i.e. promote the pieces of content driving high quality traffic or enquiries or sign-ups (or whatever your call-to-action objective is) through use of paid channels Measure and learn – Tracking your content performance is integral to ensuring you are using the appropriate channels and helps when refining your approach for the next campaign
Choosing the right content formats
Webinars, videos, blog posts and interactive quizzes are a few examples of highly promotable, high impact content formats that will keep your audience awake and interested. These different content formats can also be customised to align with your audience’s needs depending on where on the buyer journey they are and the channel through which you are reaching them. For example, a longer-form article would be appropriate to post on LinkedIn, while an attention-grabbing image may be more appropriate for Facebook. For a table on choosing the right formats for your channels, refer to page 18 in BlueChip’s playbook A Complete Guide to Content Distribution for Financial Services .
Optimising your content for search
Beyond amplification techniques, how do you increase your chances of reaching your target audience? SEO, of course!
Use target keywords to help achieve a higher ranking in search engine results, and therefore be found by your target audience. Follow the best practices and you’ll be well on your way to SEO stardom:
Pinpoint the most salient themes and topics in your content and ensure the appropriate keywords are used accordingly Create content that is sharable to encourage backlinks Make your content available across multiple devices to avoid getting penalised by Google
