In today’s digital landscape, creating fresh, engaging content on a consistent basis is a must for brands looking to effectively reach and resonate with their target audience. However, the costs and efforts involved in producing new content from scratch can be prohibitive, especially for smaller teams and budgets. This is where repurposing existing content comes in – allowing you to expand the life of your assets, reach new audiences, and maximize return on investment.
Why Repurpose Content?
There are several strategic reasons why repurposing should be an integral part of your content marketing strategy:
Save Time and Resources
Repurposing saves time and effort as you don’t have to create new content from absolute scratch. You can build upon, adapt and update existing assets. This allows you to maintain a steady content output without overtaxing your team.
Reach New Audiences
Repurposing content into new formats allows you to cater to different content consumption preferences. An ebook can be summarized into a blog post while a video can be converted into a podcast. This multi-format approach helps you appeal to a wider target audience.
Reinforce Core Messaging
Repurposing gives you an opportunity to repeatedly highlight your core brand messages from new angles. This reinforcement strengthens retention and recall among your audience.
Improve SEO
Search engines like Google favor websites that regularly publish fresh, high-quality content. Repurposing helps update old content, keeping it relevant while also signaling to search bots that your site is active.
Enhance Brand Authority
Showcasing content across multiple platforms establishes thought leadership and strengthens your brand as an authority in your niche.
Boost ROI
Getting increased mileage out of assets improves content marketing ROI as you lower costs while expanding reach.
How to Repurpose Content
Now let’s explore some smart repurposing strategies to maximize results:
1. Turn Blog Posts into Visual Content
Transform your in-depth blog articles into engaging visual content formats like infographics, videos or slidedecks. These tend to grab attention on social media and can communicate your message through vivid imagery. Ensure the visuals stay on-brand.
2. Compile Blog Series into eBooks
Curate blog post series covering a specific theme into a comprehensive eBook. This provides readers with an in-depth resource while allowing you to promote the eBook. Offer it as a lead magnet in exchange for email sign-ups.
3. Webinars into Podcasts
Convert pre-recorded webinars and events into podcast episodes. Break them down into smaller audio segments if needed. Podcasts offer convenience as audiences can tune in during commute or while multi-tasking.
4. Social Media Snippets into Blog Posts
Aggregate your scattershot social media updates, stats and quotes into cohesive long-form blog posts. Add examples, context and data to flesh them out into valuable articles.
5. Website Content into Videos
Produce engaging videos based on popular website content. An explainer video can vividly communicate a complex product or service. Videos help cement ideas through dynamic visual storytelling.
6. Testimonials into Case Studies
Turn positive client testimonials into in-depth branded case studies. Provide details on the client, challenges faced, and quantified results achieved. Case studies are powerful social proof assets.
7. Refresh Evergreen Content
Take evergreen performing content and give it new life. Update stats, add recent examples and trends, integrate multimedia and optimize it for SEO. Republishing refreshed content keeps it relevant.
8. Reformat for Different Channels
Adapt content formats to aligned channels, like turning a blog post into a LinkedIn long-form post or whitepaper into a SlideShare deck. Channel-specific content performs better.
9. Compile Related Resources
Combine various media assets around a topic into a comprehensive resource guide or toolkit. For instance, compile webinars, ebooks, blogs and videos about a product into a toolkit.
10. User-Generated Content
Repurpose and promote user-generated content like social media posts, reviews and testimonials. UGC adds diversity and authenticity. Ensure you have permission.
Optimizing Your Repurposing Strategy
To maximize results from content repurposing, keep these best practices in mind:
Maintain Brand Consistency
While repurposing content across different formats and platforms, ensure your core messaging and visual identity remain aligned. This strengthens brand recognition.
Prioritize High-Performing Assets
Analyze performance data to identify your best-performing content assets. Focus repurposing efforts on these as they have already resonated with your audience.
Modularize Content
Break down content into reusable modules and snippets that can be rearranged and integrated seamlessly into new formats. This modular approach boosts flexibility.
Optimize Formats for Each Channel
Understand key user behavior and preferences on each channel, and adapt content accordingly. Optimize content length, visuals, calls-to-action, etc. for each platform.
Promote Across Multiple Channels
Amplify reach by promoting repurposed content extensively across channels. For example, promote videos on social media, email newsletters, and embed them on webpages.
Monitor Performance
Analyze important metrics like views, engagement, conversions and sales driven by repurposed content. Double down on formats and channels delivering results.
Keep Experimenting
Continually test out innovative ways to develop fresh content by repurposing existing materials. There are endless creative possibilities.
Driving ROI with Repurposing
Here are some tips to help maximize your return on investment from content repurposing:
- Set specific goals for each repurposed content piece, whether it’s increased social reach, email subscribers, or sales. This gives you metrics to track success.
- Leverage analytics to identify your best-performing content. Focus on repurposing these rather than lower-performing assets.
- Use multi-format content like videos and infographics that tend to drive higher engagement on social media and websites. Popularity here can boost interest in your other content.
- Gate access to certain repurposed content like toolkits or ebooks by collecting user information. Their details help retarget and gauge conversion.
- Promote across channels to increase visibility. For example, promote videos on email, social media, and integrate them into blogs.
- Reduce production costs by maximizing reuse value from content through modular and iterative repurposing. This improves profit margins.
- Build targeted audiences by creating channel-specific content that serves niche users. For example, a LinkedIn post for lead gen and Twitter threads for brand building.
- Revitalize old evergreen content with new examples, trends, and multimedia. This makes it more engaging and shareable.
- Cultivate user-generated content like social posts and reviews. UGC is cost-effective and builds brand trust.
Key Takeaways
- Repurposing content allows you to cost-effectively expand the lifespan and mileage of existing assets.
- It helps reinforce messaging, reach new audiences, improve SEO, and boost overall content marketing ROI.
- Transform content into various formats like visual, long-form, short-form, video, audio, etc aligned to different channels.
- Modularize content for easy repurposing. Continually analyze performance to identify what’s working.
- Maintain brand consistency and optimize content for each channel while repurposing.
- Leverage multi-format content, promotions, UGC, and analytics to maximize ROI.
In conclusion, repurposing should be an integral plank of your content marketing strategy rather than an afterthought. With the right execution, it can significantly amplify your reach and returns from content, making it a highly lucrative approach.