What is Content Atomization and How to Use it to Scale Up Your Marketing

Publishing content and distributing it on the most relevant platforms is one of the effective ways to win your audience’s attention and drive more traffic to your site. Without great content, inspiring your audience to act and drive engagement can be impossible. However, to get the most out of your content, you should have a consistent stream of quality assets that can successfully be used in different formats and platforms. This is what is called content atomization.

What is Content Atomization?

Content atomization involves breaking down a brand’s content into smaller pieces that give a small story of the broader story. For example, AlchemyLeads is a leading SEO marketing agency located in Denver. We can decide to tell our broader story about how our agency can help with your SEO efforts and increase the rankings of your site. However, we opt to atomize our content into customized stories that speak to specific audiences in specific industries and locations. This makes our content more effective and relatable to our target audience.

While you can rely on other forms of marketing, like influencer marketing, to promote your business, this will, in most cases, cost you more. Luckily, atomization will enable you to create a stream of content around specific products or services to drive engagement from specific audiences. The best part is that this will cost you only a fraction of the influencer campaigns and other paid marketing tactics.

Content atomization helps highlight the strengths of all your products and services to specific audiences to increase conversions.

Benefits of Content Atomization

Most marketers only think about paid advertising when marketing a product or service. While paid advertising is an effective marketing strategy, there are many free platforms that you can use to share your ideas and communicate to your target audience about your product or service.

Whether in B2B or B2C, blogging can help increase your site’s traffic. You can blog about different things, including industry trends and personal opinions about a product or service. Regardless of what you want to achieve through blogging, you can make your blogging more effective through content atomization. That said, here are the reasons bloggers opt to atomize content.

Reach a Larger Audience

The primary reason why marketers atomize their content is to spread out ideas to reach a larger audience. Different people engage with different content formats differently. For instance, some people interact best with audio content and other video content, while others prefer written content. That being the case, atomizing your content will help reach these audience segments in the most appropriate way.

For example, you can create:

• One long-form article
• A YouTube video
• Five social media posts
• An interactive quiz

Doing this ensures that different people can access the content on the format and platform of their choice. That means the person who sees the content on your blog might not be the one who likes YouTube videos.

Similarly, a person who likes podcasts but doesn’t like reading will consume the information from the link to a podcast you create on the same topic. You can also use memes to catch the attention of your audience that likes seeing memes.

As you can see, content atomization allows you to meet your target audience in different ways and at varying times but with the same content. It allows you to meet people using methods that resonate best with them.

Content Atomization is More Efficient

Breaking down your content into smaller pieces is a great and easy way to fill up your editorial calendar.

With content atomization, your content team will research information only once and get other pieces from the pillar content. This will save them much more time than when looking for information from unrelated topics.

Your marketing team can then share these small pieces of content on different platforms for several days without waiting to create and publish a new blog post. This tactic doesn’t only allow you to publish more frequently, but it helps ensure that your content gets seen by most of your target audience.

Enables You to Highlight Every Aspect of Your Product or Service

You may spend tens of thousands of dollars to have an influencer mention your product or service for a second in a 30-second video. With content atomization, you can dedicate each video to a specific product or service and design it to reach a specific audience to maximize engagement and appeal.

For instance, when marketing a product, you can focus one piece of content on the product’s benefits in relation to its price and dedicate it to a certain audience. You can then create another video talking about the product’s green credentials and the recyclability of its packaging.

This ensures that you not only focus on one aspect of your product or have different half-baked messaging in one video. Ideally, content atomization offers a cost-effective way to highlight your product’s benefits to ensure consumers have as much information about a product as they need to know.

Content Atomization Help Improve Search Engine Optimization

Content atomization will help enhance your search engine optimization efforts. With content atomization, you can target specific keywords and phrases to increase traffic to your blog. When you break down your content and share it on different channels, you increase the chances of your target keywords or phrases getting more hits.

This will give better results than if you relied on only one platform medium for your SEO keywords. The best part is that all the channels you use will point back to your site, which will help improve your rankings on the search engine results page for related searches.

Expert Impression

Marketing is all about trust. One way to make potential customers trust you is if you present yourself as an expert in your industry. If your audience views you as an expert, they will trust your brand and feel comfortable doing business with you.

One way to showcase your expertise is to ensure your content follows a specific pattern or theme. Showcasing a collection of ideas shows you have immense industry knowledge and that you’re an authority force in your industry.

The best way to achieve this is to cover a specific area in your industry in-depth and share your content on multiple channels. This will give you an edge against your competitors, generating more business for your brand.

More Data for Content Optimization

Content atomization creates more opportunities for getting valuable data to help optimize a brand’s marketing campaigns. It helps us know what content works, the best channels to post content and strategies that work for a particular audience. This will ensure that you provide your target audience with relatable content, which will help boost content views and increase conversions.

How to Atomize Your Content

Having seen the benefits of content atomization for your business, you likely want to try it. Effective content atomization can enhance your digital marketing strategy to produce better results.

Besides getting a higher return on investment (ROI) from your campaigns and efficient use of resources, content atomization will help customize your content for better engagement and conversion.

The primary goal of content atomization is to produce relevant units with clear messaging valuable to your audience. While you can take your existing content and atomize it, we recommend having this vision from the beginning for better outcomes. That said, here are steps to follow when atomizing your content:

Identify Atomizable Content

Before you publish new content, it’s best to look for existing content that you can atomize on your website. Think of this as an opportunity to rethink or rework your content to give it a different context.

Review and evaluate the existing content while looking for content atomization opportunities. Take note of the high-value and best-performing content and break it down into smaller subtopics that you’ll publish in a sequence. Here’s the criteria to use when selecting content with potential:

• Social listening: You need to know what platforms your users are using and the type of content they consume. One way to know this is through surveys on your site and checking browsing reports.
• Analyze audience profile: Next, you should find out the motivations and interests of your target audience. One way to achieve this is by segmenting your audience according to their content pod.
• Consider your business objectives: Ensure that your performance indicators align with your business objectives and prioritize content that focuses on these objectives.

These steps will work if you already have atomizable content on your site. If not, focus on this next step.

Find a Broad Topic

If you don’t have existing potential content, you will need to find an overall topic to cover. The topic should fit into your general niche and have the potential to be broken down into smaller sub-topics.

That means you need to think on a macro level when talking about an important issue in your industry. Ideally, your topic should be broad enough when covering things in your industry and wide enough to allow room for atomization.

The best approach is to find things that matter most in your industry and create content around them. For example, you can find a problem in your industry and create content on it. After that, create a few smaller pieces providing the solutions to the issue. You can also create a section about frequently asked questions (FAQs) to ensure you answer as many questions as possible regarding the issue.

Conduct Research

Now that you have your overall topic, the next step is researching the information.

One way you can go around this is to create an umbrella topic and research other smaller topics. However, for better results, treat each sub-topic as a standalone topic but ensure they meet at some point. This approach will make things easier for you when producing the content.

Create the First Blog Post

Atomized content is based on your first blog posts. Think of it as the foundation where you’ll base all the other subtopics to create one seamless package.

Of course, you can mention the subtopics you’ll cover in the future in your first blog post but don’t delve into details because that’s what you’ll do in your other posts. Also, remember to keep a higher word count (1000 – 7500) for your first blog post to make it easier to create atomized pieces.

Atomize Content According to Your Audience

After identifying relevant content (from your existing content) or creating the first blog post with atomization in mind, it’s time to think about how you’ll create smaller content pieces to reach different segments of your audience.

Typically, a 1500 initial blog post could produce three to five smaller pieces, while a 2500-word blog post could give up to ten pieces. Whatever pieces you get, ensure they are more detailed in what they cover.

When creating the smaller pieces, your goal should be to provide additional information to your first blog to give a more in-depth viewpoint. However, for better reach, you should consider the demands of your target audience and the type of content they prefer.

Consider each audience segment and how they relate to the content on different channels. That brings us to the next step.

Decide on the Content Format

Different audience segments interact with different types of content differently. While some would prefer written content, others would prefer infographics, while others video content—the list is endless. Your content should be usable in as many channels as possible for better reach and engagement. The best part about atomizing content from the written form is that you can repurpose content from your existing blog into video, audio, or interactive content. That said, here are the common content formats and styles to consider depending on your target audience segment.

• Audio parts: Create a podcast and broadcast short segments of your first blog post. Audio platforms like iTunes or SoundCloud can help share content pieces.
• Videos: Another way you can reach a larger audience and increase engagement is by creating audiovisual content formats. Different platforms you can use for this approach include live broadcasts on YouTube, Facebook live, or Periscope. You can also post your videos for your audience to view on their own time on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and your website, or even send them to your email list.
• Blogs: Post the short content segments on your blog or guest post on a third-party site to get a backlink to boost your search engine optimization efforts.
• Graphic pieces: Here, you have various options, including infographics, social media photo galleries, Instagram posts, memes, Pinterest posts, etc.
• Messaging: Turn your longer content pieces into email messages, SMS, or WhatsApp messages to send to your target audience.

Each of the above strategies is effective when done right. However, it’s best to consider your audience segment to determine the best way to atomize your content.

Share Your Atomized Content on Social Media

Take advantage of your social media presence to increase a more direct relationship with your audience. However, remember to use the right tone for each network. For instance, branded content on Facebook should differ from one on LinkedIn.

When choosing the channels to use, prioritize those your target audience uses the most. The best part is that social media platforms allow you to participate in groups to reach a wider audience.

Analyze and Adjust

We cannot overstate the importance of measurements in any digital campaign, including content atomization. Once you have developed your content plan, you should evaluate it continuously to see how your pieces perform regarding your objectives.

If you notice any loopholes, initiate the necessary changes immediately. When analyzing your content performance, pay attention to the preferences regarding platforms, formats, and messaging. This will help you better understand your audience, which is key when atomizing your content.

Get the Most from Your Marketing with Content Atomization

Content is a critical component of your brand’s marketing. It helps build and sustain relationships with prospects, customers, and the public. Content atomization is an excellent way to maximize your content reach and position your brand as a true leader in your industry. Additionally, it offers a great way to reach different audiences with more in-depth content that meets their needs.

Of course, content atomization alone isn’t enough to keep your content funnel full; you should also create new blog posts with fresh ideas to keep your audience in the loop. The best approach is to find a balance between when to create new content from fresh ideas and content atomization. Whichever the case, AlchemyLeads is here to help.

With many years of content marketing experience, we have what it takes to enhance your marketing efforts with our content services. We have a dedicated writer’s team that goes out of their way to provide exceptional content that resonates with your client’s needs and target audience. Contact us today for high-quality content that your target audience will find helpful and optimized for search engines for better visibility.