How to repurpose content to reduce your marketing costs and increase your audience reach
Creating a high-quality piece of content takes a huge amount of time and effort. Creating a content outline, researching facts and figures, drafting, proof-reading, formatting and publishing. So, if there was a way to get more mileage out of the content you create, wouldn’t you like to do just that? Well, I have good news my friends. There is a way, and it’s called content repurposing.
What is content repurposing?
Repurposing content is when you take a piece of content created for one medium, audience or context and reuse it in a new medium or format. For example, you might take a blog post, and extract snippets of text to use as Twitter posts. Or you might take a report and extract the key data points to make a really shareable infographic. Using this approach in your content strategy can save you a lot of time, while also increasing your audience reach and engagement. In other words, it helps you scale your marketing, and for small businesses, this is usually a huge plus.
The benefits of repurposing content
You might be wondering why repurposing content is important. We’ve all heard the phrase ‘work smart, not hard’, right? Repurposing your content is a prime example of working smart. Instead of putting a huge amount of effort into a piece of content that only gets used one time or on one channel, you are maximising the value you get by using it across different channels, and in different formats to help you engage with the largest possible number of people.
Some of your audience might like nothing more than pouring a cup of coffee and spending 15 minutes reading your latest blog post. Others will prefer to read a snappy soundbite on Twitter. Still others might prefer a gorgeous infographic to Pin in Pinterest. By presenting your content in a variety of formats and on a variety of channels you:
Maximise its reach – presenting your content across different channels will help you reach a wider audience. Someone who didn’t clock your new blog post, may read your email newsletter. Someone who’s not on Facebook, may be drawn to that snappy Insta post.
Improve your engagement by serving content to your followers on their channel of choice and in a format they wish to consume, and you will get more likes, comments and shares.
Save yourself a massive amount of time. Constantly having to come up with new content ideas is not easy. Creating original, high-value content is hard work. Getting more mileage from each piece of content is a no-brainer that will save you time and effort.
Extend the life cycle of your content. Reusing content across channels extends the useful life of that content as well as its reach. Obviously for this to be effective, you need to focus on your evergreen content (evergreen content is anything that remains relevant and useful over time – so anything seasonal or news-related would not be considered evergreen, but an article on how to do keyword research is perfectly evergreen).
Which content should you repurpose?
As alluded to above, the best content for repurposing is your evergreen content. Anything that covers a topic that remains relevant, true and as valuable to your audience now as when you first created it. You might need to update a few of the details, but if the content overall is still useful – it’s a candidate to be repurposed.
As well as looking for evergreen content – hone in on your best work. There’s not much point in repurposing content no-one appreciated the first time around. Have a look in your website analytics to see which content has performed best over time. Which blog posts consistently draw traffic to the site. Which pages do people spend most time reading? These are the crown jewels of your content. Show those babies off.
How to repurpose your content
Repurposing your content is about presenting your topics in new formats to new audiences and on new channels. If you’ve gone to the trouble of creating it, why in the world wouldn’t you want to use it in as many places as possible. In the age of algorithms and seemingly a new social media channel every year, it also just makes sense to not put all your eggs in one basket.
The possibilities are endless, but below are a few ideas to get started:
✔️ Turn a blog post into an ebook
Take a detailed blog post (or even a series of posts on a single topic) and turn it or them into an ebook. In its new format, it will make a perfect lead magnet you can use to grow your email marketing list.
✔️ Recycle your blogs or articles as newsletters
Have an email marketing list? Push your best blogs and articles out to your subscribers. You can publish a summary and link back to your website or blog for the rest, in the process driving up your website traffic.
✔️ Take highlights from your blog and turn them into social media posts
If your blog includes important insights, interesting or hot takes or useful data points – use these to your advantage. Take snippets of content that are short and snappy and use them on Facebook, Insta and Twitter to stop the scroll. You won’t always get this audience to link back to your website, but if the highlight is interesting enough, they just might bite, and either way you’re providing engaging content across your channels.
✔️ Repurpose a YouTube video for Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram
Extract the main themes or top tips from your YouTube video and turn them into Facebook posts, pull the snappiest quotes and repurpose them for Insta, and combine snippets of information with an eye-catching (on-brand) design for a series of Pinterest pins.
✔️ Condense your 1-hour webinar into a blog post
Let’s face it, not everyone has an hour to spend listening to a webinar, and post-pandemic, we might even be suffering from a bit of webinar fatigue (can we please just go to an IRL event, pleeeeease?). But all is not lost if you condense that content down into an article or blog post.
✔️ Turn your detailed guide into a webinar or YouTube video
OK – we cheated a bit here because this idea basically just takes the one above and flips it. But you get the idea. If you already have the content in all its juicy detail, repurpose it as a video script and get recording.
✔️ Turn a report into an infographic
Take the most interesting insights, data points and trends from any report and repurpose them into a super user-friendly format for people who prefer to consume visual content. Infographics are fun to create (use a tool like Canva) and super-shareable – just be sure to include a link back to the original long-form report, or to your website.
✔️ Split a long-form video into short segments for social
If it provides educational, interesting or entertaining content, people will be more than happy to watch a long video on YouTube. On TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook – not so much. Take short clips from your original video and use them as social posts with a link to the longer-form version for anyone who wants to dive in.
✔️ Turn your client success stories into case studies
Have you helped a client make a step change in their business, hit a growth target or reach a goal they thought was beyond them? Tell that story in a case study on your website. This is a great way to demonstrate how you add value and increase your own client conversion.
✔️ Turn interesting stats into Twitter posts.
Make sharing a no-brainer to increase your audience and reach. If you have an article or post that includes key facts and figures relevant to your industry or audience, make it easy for your audience to promote and share specific stats with their followers by adding a click to tweet link.
And there you have it. Apparently only 33% of marketers say they have a system in place for repurposing content. Why not create a plan for making the most of your content and put yourself ahead of the pack, while saving yourself a ton of time and energy.
