Repurpose content

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s annual marketing trends survey, one of the constant top challenges for marketers over the past 5 years has been producing engaging content. In fact, 54% of marketers said that producing engaging content is a struggle, and 50% agree that producing content consistently is a major challenge. On top of that, marketers are always trying to reinvent the wheel – many have already produced a lot of great content that has since expired into the graveyard of old articles and new articles need to be created to replace them. What if I tell you that some of that content could be recycled and repurposed into new and equally engaging content?

Why Repurpose Content?

The idea behind repurposing content is efficiency. You worked hard to gather all that information, write the original piece of content, and then distribute it. Why not try to pull a little more life out of that content? Repurposing content has many different benefits:

Reaching a new and different audience. Everyone learns information differently. Some prospects may be more responsive to infographics, and some may like to listen to podcasts during their morning commute. Repurposing your content across mediums can extend your reach to a different audience. Basically, you’re just getting the content you already have in the hands of more people. Why wouldn’t you want to do that?
Testing out new products and learning what works. By using your content across distribution channels, you can learn specifically how your audience responds best so you know what content to continually use to reach your audience.
Convenience and nostalgia. Repurposing content can help relieve the “lack of consistent content” issue. If you’re at a loss of content, why not bring back an old favorite – a piece of content that really resonated with your audience.
Work smarter, not harder. You put in a lot of time, energy, and brain juice into that content. Why wouldn’t you want to promote it across platforms and mediums?
Gain authority. Creating multiple pieces of content around specific keywords can boost your SEO for that keyword and could help your Google search ranking. In addition, publishing content on a single topic in a variety of places will help raise your reputation as an industry expert.

What Content Should Be Repurposed?

As Game of Thrones did with Jon Snow, sometimes it’s necessary to resurrect the great characters of your story. Your great content deserves the same treatment.

The first content you should look at is your best performing content from an analytics standpoint. If your audience liked it, you should use it again. Next, look at your evergreen content. Usually, your evergreen blogs are traffic magnets – they’re timeless and relevant posts that never go out of style and continue to offer value – and you’re missing out on potential traffic by not reusing them. Another good option for repurposing is content that needs to be updated – did you have a blog on stats that just need a quick update? Give it a quick makeover by updating it and spreading it across mediums.

Ways to Repurpose Content:

Blogs: If you have a blog, repurposing content into a blog article is a no-brainer. Oftentimes, the original content is created just for the blog. Original blog posts can even be repurposed into shorter or longer posts for more usage. For example – take a blog that’s in a listicle format, and break it down into articles about each individual point. Flipping it around – you can take 5 of the greatest blogs that you have written about one theme, and gather them into an internally curated blog post. Voila – quick and easy blog content.
Advanced content: Guides, ebooks, whitepapers, and reports all fall under advanced content. This content is useful and interesting to people who want to dive deeper into a subject. While blogs are usually a little more casual, advanced content has a more business feel and tends to be more timeless, but less personal. If your company sees fit and the advanced content is valuable enough, you can put these pieces behind a lead generation form and ask readers to give you some information before downloading it.
Presentation/SlideShare: Creating a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation of your content gives it more of a visual presence, which reaches a new audience. In addition, creating a slideshow is the first step to simplifying your idea for visuals – you don’t want text heavy slides in your presentation. Presentations cater to visual learners because they are image heavy and have less verbiage.
Social: Repurpose your content into short, snackable pieces or visuals that can be shared on social media. Make sure to cater the content for the social platform that you are using – full form infographics would work well on Facebook, photos or a designed visual would work well for Twitter. You can even use your content on Snapchat – record a quick tip that you’ve pulled from your content and post it up for your followers to view.
Infographic – Repurpose your content into a visual outline of your story. Infographics especially come in handy when you have a lot of data because it creates a fun way to relate to the audience – people love visual content.
Video Tutorials/Graphics: Videos are a great way to tell your story again. Think of your Facebook feed—you’re scrolling along and a moving video catches your eye so you stop and watch. Why wouldn’t you want your content to be that video that someone stops to watch? Social media has made it very easy to view video content, which has made it a popular tool for storytelling.
Podcast: If your company has a regular podcast, this is a great way to repurpose your content. While videos make you stop and focus solely on what’s happening, podcasts don’t need all your attention. Audiences are drawn to podcasts because they cater to the listener – you can listen to whatever and whomever you want, whenever you want, and you don’t have to stop everything to do it. Even if you don’t have your own podcast, you can reach out to others in your industry to be featured on their podcasts and spread the word.
Webinars: With a camera and a good attitude, you can easily repurpose your presentation into a great educational webinar. The key to a great webinar is great content and great visuals – which you already have from previously repurposed content. Webinars help solidify your place as a thought leader in your industry.

Ready to put all that into action? Here’s how you do it:

Pick a topic – let’s say it’s “Creating Great Content”
Write a blog post on that topic – 10 Steps to Creating Great Content
Create an image with a quote or stat for each of the 10 steps and share each tip per day on social channels
Create short snippet videos around each step for digestible videos to be posted on social
Expand each image/step into 10 separate blog posts on each topic
Combine all the posts and add an introduction, conclusion, and some great artwork to turn it into an ebook – An Expert’s Guide to Creating Great Content
Take the ebook and make it into a slide presentation
Create a themed enewsletter highlighting 3 or 4 of the blog posts you’ve written and link to your website’s resource page where people could read more
Use the presentation as a guide while recording a podcast about the subject
Take the presentation and record a long form video – you now have a webinar

So from one content idea, you’ve created 11 blog posts, 10 social media visuals, 10 sharable videos, an ebook, an enewsletter, a presentation, a podcast, and a webinar – congrats, you’re a content star!

Takeaway:

You’ve done a lot of work to put your content together, so why not take the extra steps to continue resonating with your audiences and establishing your company as an industry leader. The beauty of repurposing your content is that you are catering to all the ways that your audiences are digesting content, without too much additional effort.

For additional tips and strategies on content creation, visit our content marketing resource page.