At some time or the other, businesses struggle to produce enough content. After all, constantly building fresh content can take a lot of time and make you run short of ideas. Content repurposing can be a lifesaver in such instances!
If you’re wondering what is repurposing and how it works, we hope this article gives you some answers.
In our guide to repurposing content, we’ll walk you through:
- What it means
- Why you should do it
- What to consider when repurposing your content
- Which content to repurpose
- How to repurpose your content
- The key to repurposing content
What does repurposing content mean?
People make the mistake of considering repurposing to mean revamping. There’s a difference here. Revamping your content is more along the lines of updating it. Say for instance you’ve written an article about the top tools for digital marketing. Perhaps a year later, you make a list of the new and improved tools that have entered the market, and update your content accordingly with this information. This helps your content stay relevant, current and meaningful to your audience.
Repurposing (also called content recycling) involves one of two actions:
- Changing the format of your content: For instance, compiling a series of blog posts addressing a similar topic into an eBook. Or converting an eBook into a webinar series.
- Changing the target audience: For instance, making appropriate changes in the structure or content of an eBook written on a topic pertaining to a particular industry, such that it serves a different industry.
Why should you repurpose your content?
- Save time and money
Creating new content takes time and effort. Repurposing content allows you to create new content on the foundation of pre-existing content. This way, you won’t have to create a new blog post, video or infographic from scratch. You refresh your old content and put it in front of new audiences/on different platforms – within much less time.
- Boost your SEO
Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you determine which of your blog posts are getting the most traffic and discover the search terms people use to find your blogs respectively. If you change the keyword in these articles to one that is currently more popular, it’s possible to attract more traffic to these posts.
- Extend your reach
When you reformat your existing content and share it on various platforms, there is a whole new audience that you reach.
- Getting your message across
The Rule of Seven is one of the oldest marketing concepts, stating that your audience needs to hear your message at least 7 times before they buy from you. When you write multiple blog posts about a certain topic, you are not repeating yourself – you are reinforcing your message. It is much more effective, however, to diversify the way in which you deliver your message – best accomplished by repurposing your content. Also, if your audience is not connected on day 1 and you use the same piece of content on a different medium on Day 10, you have a better chance of them seeing it.
What to consider when repurposing your content
Next, you are faced with the decision of choosing the content to repurpose. You can simplify this decision by breaking it down to:
- Identifying your purpose: You may have created content initially with the idea of drawing subscribers, but your purpose now is to attract qualified leads to sell your product/service. Define your purpose.
- Auditing your existing content: Sift your content to see what matches your current goal. These will have a better chance of achieving your purpose.
- Researching your competitors: Search for the top-performing content on the same topics as yours. Then create your own version of it.
Which content should you repurpose?
- High-performing content
Google Analytics can show you which of your blog articles rank best in terms of their reach, shares, linking structures, and organic visibility.
- Favorites that have not performed well
This is a good chance to give the content another try in a different, more creative form.
- Evergreen content
This is content that will remain relevant for the foreseeable future, as will the SEO for it. For instance, content marketing.
How to repurpose your content?
Here are the different ways by which you can repurpose your content. In each case, you will be adding value to the original content.
- Blog posts
You can use earlier, well-performing blog posts to create associated blog posts. For instance, if you have an earlier post, ‘5 key components for a successful inbound marketing strategy’, which enumerates points 1-5 as SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, and so on, you can create a new blog post for each of these points. You have the additional advantage of creating links between the original article and the new ones.
The reverse also holds true. If you have a number of posts about a particular parent topic, you can create a comprehensive, single summary blog post. You will still have the opportunity for linking. You can refer to our tips for writing an effective blog post.
- Infographics
You can summarize an entire blog post in a visual outline. Infographics can cut through the volume of a blog post and bring out only the key concepts as helpful visuals.
- Social media posts
You can condense the main points of your blog posts to captions for your social media, and accompany your text with an appropriate image. Testimonials and case studies are also great ideas for social media posts. Statistics are especially suited to Twitter, and attractive images, to Pinterest.
- Presentations
Your content will probably have interesting quotes, statistics, actionable points, etc. which can be used to create effective slides that build an interesting and informative presentation on your main topics.
- Videos
This is a great chance to reach a new audience that prefers to watch a short video rather than read a long blog post. You can present an engaging script based on your existing content as video tutorials.
- Online courses
If you’ve already written a number of how-tos, then you could consider compiling them in one place and presenting it as an online course, guided by an industry expert.
- eBooks
This could be considered as a detailed and in-depth blog article. In fact, if you have several blogs on a particular topic, you can put them together, add the relevant content, and deliver it to your audience as an eBook through your website or email.
- Newsletters
This is especially handy when you have newsletters to churn out each month, and are struggling to think of what to have in them. You can summarize your content and urge readers to visit your website to read more.
- Podcasts
This is a great way to ‘speak’ to people while on their commute, or other times. An audio discussion of a particular topic may be better welcomed by some people than spending time reading text.
- Guest posts
When republishing your repurposed content, guest posting is very valuable as it gives you the chance to build backlinks as well as introduce your content to the readers of the blog you have posted on.
- Posting on popular platforms
Repurposing blog posts to suit popular platforms such as LinkedIn Pulse, Medium and Flipboard are especially advantageous to companies looking to increase their readership and reach.
- webinars
If you’re an industry leader, you’ve probably conducted a webinar on related topics. Repurpose your webinar material into a blog post series or upload your slides to SlideShare. You could even convert your webinar material into an eBook. Your webinar Q&A would be perfect for an FAQ page on your website. Turn quotes, stats and key takeaways into social media posts.
Whatever the format, you will need to adapt your content to it. For instance, if you have a long tutorial on video format, you could make short clips that feature one tip from the video. This could be used for social media. Also, if you have a lot of text-based content, you’re sitting on a potential goldmine of repurposed visual content.
The key to content repurposing
No matter how you repurpose your content, the key lies in promoting it. Creating valuable content is only the first step. The important next step is getting it in front of your target audience. So, think of sharing your presentations on LinkedIn, embed your videos on your blog, share infographics and video clips on social media, share motivational images on Facebook, handy hints on Instagram, and so on. This will help:
- Increase your reach
- Provide greater visibility
- Increase the possibility of your content being viewed on various devices
The best thing about repurposing content is that you can do it not just once, but creatively, many times.
How do you repurpose your content? What has worked best for you? Do share your thoughts; we’d love to hear from you.
At Them You & Me, we help in the digital transformation of businesses. If you have any questions about content repurposing or would like our help with content marketing and SEO, do get in touch with us.
Please visit our website to know about what we do and the services we offer.
*Please consider our content as recommendations and not concepts to apply as is, without questioning it. Every business is unique, so find the solution and strategy that works especially for you. You may keep what you need and disregard what you don’t.
