Drum sample case study – repurposing content for SEO

Every job has its pearls. The things that make you really happy and excited.

For me, it’s finding high quality content that’s hidden away. It’s like finding a treasure chest of potential. In this case study it’s a pack of drum samples. 

“Hidden” content represents lots of hard work by content creators and subject matter experts. Sometimes it also represents a budget investment, especially if the content is video.

No doubt you’ll have this in your business. Presentations created by sales teams that win clients, but only a few prospects get to see them. Training that only gets delivered once to an internal team.  

Without a content strategist involved in the project, content is often:

1. created 
2. used in a single format or location
3. added to a content bank. 

And that’s understandable, marketing teams are often over stretched and have multiple priorities. In a larger organisation it’s not their job to be content experts.

Sure, the content may be used the following year in the same marketing communication – if it hasn’t been forgotten about by then – but it won’t receive the full amount of traffic that it deserves. 

What’s needed is 

• a content strategy
• a restructure (to make it accessible for the target audience) 
• promoting

Could the sales presentation be repurposed into a series of blog articles so more people get to see it (and maybe become clients)?

Could the training be turned into an online course?

In this drum sample case study 

I’m using a pack of drum samples that were created by an academic in collaboration with the marketing team. I’ll use it to show how an amazing piece of content can be repurposed to reach a wider audience.

I became involved with the drum samples when I was asked for advice on tracking the success of the campaign they had been created for. Part of my job is to analyse the website’s performance and offer support to other marketers in this area. So this was quite a normal request. 

But I’m also a percussionist, so this stood out to me as an area of interest. Plus, the samples and training video were high quality. I saw an opportunity to repurpose the samples for an audience beyond the initial campaign, so I put a proposal together and took it through the required consultations.

When you’re looking to repurpose your content or create something from scratch it’s not necessary to have an interest in the subject, but it sure helps.

The result is this drum sample landing page, part of the music technology subject area: 

Results

This page is now ranking on the first page for many of the target keywords we set out to rank for. It receives thousands of visits a month who also download the sample packs. That’s thousands of people, each month, who see the University brand and interact with a tool created by the academic staff who wouldn’t otherwise see us.

In November 2020 the page received x4 my initial target for traffic and in December 2020 it was x7.