Earlier this month, I broke a long streak of emailing my subscribers weekly.
But while I wasn’t emailing them, I was texting other people.
Tens of thousands of people.
And by people, I mean fellow Democratic voters.
Yep, I was one of those people on the other end of those voting texts that were blowing up your phone if you’re a US voter. 🙃
And I’m sorry if those texts drained your phone’s battery, but I’m not sorry other volunteers and I needed to make sure you knew how to vote with it being so different this year.
The effort I put into that was one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had in this sh*tshow of 2020.
So of course, I found some marketing lessons in it. 🤓
(Side note: being a marketer also really primes you well to all the unsubscribe messages people text you as a text banking volunteer. 🤣)
How to Triple a Vote
The biggest thing that stuck with me was the concept that Get Out the Vote organizations call “tripling a vote.”
It’s simple, but when you break it down, there’s a lot of genius in it.
Here’s a short explainer:
To maximize the impact the GOTV effort has pre-election, they want volunteers to focus on talking to the people that will be most responsive to and in need of the message.
Better spend your energy and shift time talking to people actually considering your candidate, than arguing with someone who never will.
(That’s also a great branding lesson, btw.)
For example, since I was volunteering with a progressive organization with a focus on how COVID impacted voting, we didn’t even bother contacting people who weren’t BOTH:
- Registered Democrat or independent and likely to vote for progressive candidates
- In a group at high risk of COVID and therefore most in need of voting early or by mail
And then once you do get someone to engage with you and carry on a conversation, the idea is you want to keep it going as long as possible.
Keep ’em talking, and all that.
They’re planning on voting? Great!
Do they have a formal voting plan? No?
Want the link for more information? Sure?
Do you see a listed ballot dropbox near your home? Amazing!
We really talked them through getting as involved as possible.
Tripling their vote was the last part of it, once we’ve finished discussing someone’s own vote. We’d ask them to ask 3 friends what their voting plans are and sharing the information we sent over.
If the person does it (many were eager to), that’s amplified our message—our content—by another 300% without volunteers putting in more effort.
See where I’m going with this?
Our goal is to take someone when they’re already engaged and take 3 more actions to spread the message.
You can take the same approach with your own content for a more proactive approach to remixing and repurposing it.
How to Triple Your Content
One of the biggest reasons marketers tell me they don’t repurpose as much content as they want to, is because they forget or don’t have time once they’re done writing the piece.
That’s why all my work focuses on helping marketers build minimalist content marketing systems instead of just throwing out content repurposing tips people won’t know how to make time for.
The trick to a proactive approach is working on repurposing the content when you’re ALREADY engaged with it. For most marketers, that’s either when you’re writing or publishing the original piece.
For example, when you’re writing the copy for a blog post, write the copy for the social media posts you’ll use to promote and repurpose it too. And when you’re publishing or scheduling it in your blog management system, go and schedule the social posts too.
When you’re already engaged in the content for one reason, take 3 additional actions on it before you move on.
Three additional ways to amplify your message.
When you do this, again and again, and make it part of your regular writing process, remixing becomes something that happens automatically. 🙌
And of course, if you need a way to track and manage all of those proactive actions, the Content Remix Planner was literally built for you. 😉
