What is a waterfall content strategy, and why should I be using it?
A waterfall content strategy is a method of structuring your content strategy around one piece of substantial content. It helps you plan content for the short and long-term, create new content, analyse it’s effectiveness and get the most visibility and engagement for your hero content as possible.
Content marketing is a time-hungry beast. It needs to stay fresh, relevant and continuous to keep your audiences engaged, retained and loyal. It also needs consistency and relevancy to keep the various platform algorithms happy.
What is the waterfall content technique?
Just like a waterfall, the content approach starts at the top, with one source. It then flows downwards, growing and splashing into different streams – picture that when creating your content.
You have a piece of major content first; an ebook, podcast, or a video perhaps, and then a cascade of smaller content chunks coming from that.
These smaller pieces expand on the content within the major piece, picking it apart further, into deeper analysis, discussions around topics, blogs, social media content, imagery, video snippets, audio snippets, adverts.
The 3 steps of the waterfall process
1. The original storm – Creating that major content piece. This is where your research is done and the big first bit of content is created. The one you want everyone to see – the storm of content.
2. The big surge – Repurposing that content. Chunking it up into digestible bites of content that draw the audience in and make them want to learn more.
3. The major flood – Mass distribution. Creating a whole suite of smaller content pieces for distribution across social media, email, websites and perhaps even offline too.
An example of waterfall content
Let’s say you’re starting with an ebook. It’s brilliant, lots of helpful copy and some great designs, illustrations or diagrams in there. How do we turn this into a waterfall?
A series of blogs, taking one smaller topic from the ebook and giving an overview of them.
A series of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter stories which go out regularly pushing the ebook link out there – maybe capturing some user generated content (UGC) through polls or questions.
Social media content posts, taking quotes, stats or visuals from the ebook and pulling them out to draw in new audiences
A podcast discussing the ebook, or getting onto other people’s podcasts if you don’t want to create your own
An email marketing series, drawing on the themes of the ebook and continuing it into further thoughts and discussions through conversations with your audiences.
How can it be useful for businesses with their content marketing?
Using waterfall content marketing ensures that the content you’re putting so much effort and resource into, is getting the maximum exposure possible. It’s also about longevity, the waterfall doesn’t need to last just one week and then move on to something new. Keep it going long-term, bringing newer audiences into older, relevant content to them. Refresh the major content annually (or more often if possible) and then start the waterfall again.
The smaller chunks of content can be encouraging audiences to engage and create more user-generated content (UGC) which can then always lead to another e-book, and then that creates another waterfall – the water cycle of content marketing.
It’s a nice, clear structure that your content team can follow every time they have a new piece of hero content. Ensuring nothing gets lost and you routinely maximise your marketing potential.
Analyse the results often, so that you know which channels and content types are performing the best for your audiences. Different audiences may require different waterfall structures, but the process remains the same.
When creating or reviewing your hero content, make notes of any quotes, stats, facts or clips that would be great as stand-alone content. Create a bank of them to look back to whenever you need new content for social media.
