Every marketer has heard the phrase “content is king.” This is because good content increases brand awareness, generates new leads and keeps customers engaged.
Without great content, you’ll struggle to connect with your target audience, make lasting impressions and encourage sales.
However, creating new content can be very time-consuming, from coming up with new content ideas, to conducting research and the creative process itself.
For many businesses, part of the solution is to repurpose content. Companies of all sizes can make their content creation process more efficient by reworking existing content into different formats.
To maximize the return on content investment, businesses need to stop thinking of content as a one-time investment and start developing a repurposing mindset to increase the reach and value of content over time.
- Repurpose Blog Posts
- Repurpose Graphics
- Turn a Glossary Page into a Video
- Turn a Video into a Downloadable Ebook
- Turn an Ebook into Smaller Chunks
- Repackage Content in a Newsletter
- Turn Content into a Slide Presentation
- Turn a Slide Presentation into a GIF
- Turn a Checklist into a Quiz
- Turn Statistics into Twitter Posts
- Create a Round-Up Post
- Use Testimonials for Case Studies
- Repurpose Offline Material
- Update Old Content with New Information
- Republish Content on a Different Platform
The Benefits of Repurposing Content
Repurposing old content to become a better version of itself is a great way to boost your content without investing a lot of time or energy. In time, content formats can become outdated. Repurposing can instantly enhance old content, making it more engaging for existing customers and more relevant to a new audience – without the need to create content from scratch.
The benefits of repurposing content are clear:
- Content available in various formats means you can cater to different tastes. Not all people enjoy reading blog posts. Some people prefer visual content, while others don’t have the time to sit through a one-hour webinar.
- You can salvage less successful content. A whitepaper that failed to capture many leads might make an excellent blog series that increases web traffic.
- You’ll reinforce your message by having a diverse range of online content.
- It’s a more efficient use of time and resources, giving you a greater return on your initial investment.
- You can target prospects at different stages in the sales funnel. For example, a comparison post caters to people at the top of the sales funnel, whereas a more technical piece suits people close to making a purchase decision.
However, if you’re going to transform content into something truly valuable, you need to consider making changes based on the current tastes of your audience; there may be a reason a piece of content was unpopular the first time around.
Ask for feedback from your existing customers, email subscribers, and social media followers to get some real insights into your content strategies. Find out what people like and don’t like about your content. You’ll get to know what kinds of content could be improved, and which pieces – if any – need a new lease of life.
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How to Repurpose Content: 15 Effective Strategies
Many marketers create content, publish it, and then forget about it. But this is a huge wasted opportunity. Here are our top 15 tips for repurposing content and extending the reach of your brand online:
1. Repurpose Blog Posts
Blog posts are one of your most crucial lead generation tools. Adding fresh content to your business blog is not only good for SEO content writing strategy, it also helps to establish your position as a thought leader in your industry. Offering information that takes a reader from observer to customer or brand cheerleader can be woven into every post you add. However, blog posts don’t always get the most attention. If you’ve created a piece that isn’t getting a lot of views, consider reintroducing the information in a new way and use these repurposing techniques:
- Make social media graphics out of important points. Think GIFs, memes, and quote graphics for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ and Tumblr.
- Include a video or infographic to add visual appeal to your content. Sharing these visuals on social media can also attract new audience members.
- Create a SlideShare presentation of your blog post’s most compelling sentences.
- Create an infographic of important facts and figures from your post and submit your creation to infographic sharing sites.
- Screen capture portions of your post and post the graphics to your brand’s social media pages.
- If it aligns with your brand’s content strategy, consider syndicating your blog posts to sites like Medium or Business2Community. While reposting and/or syndicating content can spread the reach of your blog posts, you’ll want to consider whether reposting on a site with a higher page rank could mean your repost will outrank the original.
- Create a PDF of your top blog posts and offer the PDF as a download. This is an excellent way to expand your email list while furthering the potential of your posts.
- You can also consider creating an ebook of your top-performing blog posts.
- Create podcasts of popular blog posts and submit your creation to podcast directories.
- Make portions of your blog posts embeddable by using tools like Embed.ly.
AdEspresso, a digital advertisement management platform, created a guide to social proof marketing for their blog which became one of their most popular posts. By repurposing it as a SlideShare presentation, they managed to secure two listings in the top four results for “social proof” on Google.
2. Repurpose Graphics
To maximize the potential of your graphics, consider the numerous ways you can expand the reach of each creation. Especially during the creation phase, consider your repurposing strategy. Ask yourself whether a graphic should include your website URL, your company logo, or even an embedded live link to quoted research. How many of the following graphics repurposing options are you currently using?
- Social media graphics: Each graphic can be posted to multiple platforms including Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook.
- Infographics: An infographic can be embedded alongside a blog post, posted to multiple social networks, submitted to directories, highlighted in a multi-media presentation on stage at a conference or tradeshow, or even integrated into a video or SlideShare presentation.
- Offer your most popular images for sale on a variety of products and in different formats such as coffee mugs, mouse pads and smartphone cases. You can even integrate these products into your own site as a banner ad.
- Webinars and live appearances (if you’re posting images of these events, you can consider them a graphic creation).
Images and graphics stand out on a web page and they can be created in minutes with a tool like Venngage.
In our blog post Content Marketing for Small Business: The End-to-End Guide, we included an infographic that highlighted several stats on content marketing. We then posted the image of the infographic to our Twitter feed and included a link to the original article.
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3. Turn a Glossary Page into a Video
If your content is informational, a video is a great way to bring it to life. You can either film yourself going through key points or you can get an animated video produced. Use this opportunity to include dynamic, visual examples that aren’t static.
If you have an in-depth post or a resource page – like a glossary – break down sections of the page into short videos and then publish on YouTube. For example, Instapage, a service helping businesses create landing pages, condensed a section from their resource page entitled “What is a Landing Page?” into a short two-minute YouTube video and embedded it on the page. The video currently has over 16,000 views on YouTube.
We wouldn’t suggest a tactic we wouldn’t try ourselves. Here is a an example of where we turned a blog post into a video.
4. Turn a Video into a Downloadable Ebook
Create an ebook that covers the same topic as a video and place it on your website as gated content. Unlike a free video available on YouTube, an ebook that requires a user’s email address for access will have more perceived value and will target a different kind of lead.
Digital marketing consultants Convince and Convert create short informational videos on a variety of topics. Each video is then repurposed into a variety of formats, including:
- A blog post for their website.
- A blog post for the Medium platform.
- An iTunes audio podcast.
- An iTunes video podcast.
- An article for LinkedIn Pulse.
- Several posts for various social media channels.
To make each format more effective, they rework headlines for each channel.
5. Turn an Ebook into Smaller Chunks
There’s a lot of content you can get out of a single ebook. For example, the ebooks in Marketo’s Definitive Guide Series are about 100 pages long and are therefore not accessible for most audiences. To resolve this, they take individual sections and create blog posts, infographics, webinars, videos, SlideShare presentations and cheat sheets to publish across a range of online channels.
You can also split the main sections of your ebook into a series of emails and send to your subscribers. This is a great way to keep your audience engaged without having to create unique email content.
Email marketing tools like Mailchimp make it very easy to repackage content into a newsletter format to send out to subscribers. Consider promoting every new piece of content in a weekly tips newsletter. It’s a simple way to make sure your content doesn’t go unnoticed.
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7. Turn Content into a Slide Presentation
If your content contains facts and figures, combine these key stats into a slide presentation. Use software such as Prezi or Canva to create your presentation and then simply upload your work to SlideShare. SlideShare allows you to be creative with visuals, which will help grab the attention of readers, and since Google indexes each SlideShare presentation, it improves the SEO of your content.
Presentations are often more engaging than regular articles and can reach a much wider audience, especially when published to SlideShare. For example, SmartBlogger’s Eugene Cheng gained over 10,000 new subscribers by turning his article “The Five Levels of Platform Growth” into a SlideShare presentation.
8. Turn a Slide Presentation into a GIF
What if you’ve published a presentation and want to promote it on other channels in a more engaging format? One simple way to do this is by turning the presentation into a GIF.
Using GIFDeck, HubSpot turned a SlideShare presentation into a GIF that was then added to their Pinterest board. As a sequence of images in a loop, a GIF is more noticeable, clickable and shareable.
9. Turn a Checklist into a Quiz
Quizzes are more popular than ever before, especially on social media. Tools like Qzzr enable marketers to create simple quizzes around any topic. Why not take the key facts from a list or blog post and turn them into a quiz? Of course, you can also include a link from the quiz to the original content.
To raise awareness on social media, the American Red Cross create educational quizzes based on checklists they’ve already published. For example, their fire safety quiz “Know the drill: find out how you would handle a home fire!” asks a series of questions on how prepared you would be for a fire.
10. Turn Statistics into Twitter Posts
Rather than posting the title of a new blog post to Twitter for promotion, consider using statistics from the article as the main message. Stats are more shareable and will help your content reach a wider audience.
For example, from their guide “The Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2018,” HubSpot created separate tweets for each of the different stats within the article. With over 100 stats in the post, that’s a lot of unique Twitter posts for just one article, and they all point to the same content.
11. Create a Round-Up Post
Simply gather your most popular posts from the previous year and describe each one in a round-up post, with a link to each article.
NONAGON.style, a digital magazine focused on architecture and interior design trends, produced a round-up post called “Top 10 Readers’ Picks from 2018,” featuring their most read articles of the year. Round-up posts are a great way to add internal links to your website, drive traffic to other web pages, and build your search engine authority around niche keywords.
12. Use Testimonials for Case Studies
Case studies are a great way to highlight real-life customer experiences of your business. Hopefully, readers will identify with the case study and see how your products and services could also solve their problems.
Sprout Social, a social media management and optimization platform, provides various case studies for potential customers, giving real-life examples of how their software suite can benefit clients. Each case study features direct quotes from clients.
13. Repurpose Offline Material
Offline content can be repurposed into online content and vice versa. For example:
- Convert a popular blog post into a printed pocket guide with a tracked email address or phone number and distribute it at your next trade show or in-person event.
- Create transcripts of live conference speeches, and turn them into a series of blog posts or PDFs.
- Edit a video of an event into a two-minute highlights video for YouTube.
Engineers Australia, Australia’s principal engineering association, hosted two roundtables featuring industry specialists. Afterwards, the highlights were turned into an eight-page feature for Engineers Australia’s print magazine, Create. Key takeaways from the conference also became infographics, blog posts and social media posts.
14. Update Old Content with New Information
You should regularly check older content for accuracy and relevance. Up-to-date content is not only important for your credibility, it’s also key to improving your search engine rankings.
In 2015, to show the impact that revamped content could have, Buffer announced their “No New Content” month-long challenge. This involved only repurposing a few pieces of content each week by updating older content with new information. During the challenge, their organic search traffic grew by more than four percent and their refreshed SlideShare presentations generated more than 100,000 views.
15. Republish Content on a Different Platform
Posting content to a new platform can give your existing content more marketing power with minimal effort. Bear in mind, you might need to adjust the headline and graphics for each new audience.
Matthew Woodward, a well-known SEO blogger, took a couple of his popular blog posts and tweaked them for LinkedIn Pulse, adding a new link to a landing page. The experiment brought him over 300 new subscribers.
A Single Piece of Content is More Valuable Than You Think
Done right, repurposing content can drive more web traffic, increase conversions, improve search engine rankings and build audience engagement across a range of online channels. It can also save you time and resources, improving your ROI.
Take a look at your existing content and think about how you could tweak each piece for different personas and mediums. This way, you’ll stop thinking about content as a one-time investment and more as an ongoing omnichannel strategy.
These are just some of the numerous ways you can consider repurposing the unique content you create or buy. You’ll be surprised at just how far you can extend your reach if you approach each piece of content with a repurposing mindset. If you’re making the initial investment in content creation, doesn’t it make sense to maximize your investment to its full potential?
How do you extend the lifetime of your content? Let us know in the comments.