Do you ever wonder how some marketers seem to have a never ending stream of content flowing from their websites like magic? Meanwhile, you slave away for weeks just to produce one blog post or marketing video.
Your content’s great, sure. But do you ever feel like you can’t keep up and you’re falling further and further behind?
Some marketers just have enormous budgets and can afford to hire teams of writers, designers and other content creators to constantly churn out amazing stuff. Or they constantly create new content and never do anything else. Or maybe they’ve “cracked the code” to increased levels of content creation.
In this post, we’ll discuss one of the best ways to up the quantity of your content — without depleting your life savings or working 20-hour days. It’s called repurposing content and it’s going to blow up your content marketing strategy. Ready?
Repurposing Content — What’s That?
“Repurposing content” is one of those phrases that gets tossed around a lot in marketing circles. We’ve all heard of it before and the experts keep telling us that we really should be doing it. There’s just one problem: what the heck is it?
It’s actually pretty simple:
Content repurposing is the art of “reimagining” old content in new ways.
For example, let’s say you’ve written a number of top-notch blog posts on email marketing. And these posts have each performed quite well — drawing in a lot of new visitors to your site and scoring multiple comments each.
You could take four or five of these posts and, with a little bit of editing, fashion them into an ebook or email marketing guide. This is repurposing content: taking something you’ve already created and breathing new life into it.
And there are MANY other ways to do it: Blogs can become video scripts or podcasts, Powerpoint presentations can become slide decks or infographics. You’re only limited by your imagination.
The only “rule” is that every piece of repurposed content must be outstanding in its own right. Recycling old blog posts just for the sake of it won’t get you very far. We’ll dive deeper into the strategy and process of content repurposing a little later in the post, but first…
The Value of Repurposing Content
You may be wondering, “Why should I repurpose my content? I’ve already made my point in the original piece. Do I really need to say it again?” It’s a fair question. The answer is a resounding yes.
Content repurposing can supercharge your content creation efforts in a couple of ways:
- First, it can save you time. As a marketer, this is incredibly valuable. In the “do more, work harder” world we live in, our time is our most valuable asset. And any time we can save a few hours, it’s definitely worth considering.
Repurposing content will saves time because the hard work is already done. You’ve studied the topic, organized your thoughts in a cohesive manner, and written the blog post or shot the video. Now you just need to repackage that information into a new format. - It can help you reach new audiences. Not every one of your potential customers enjoys reading blog posts. But they may love watching videos, listening to podcasts, or studying infographics. When you repurpose content, you give your brand the best opportunity to reach prospects where they want to be reached.
- Finally, repurposing content allows you to squeeze every last ounce of marketing juice out of the things you create. It just makes sense to continue to use content — the pieces you’ve already poured your blood, sweat and tears into — to continue to promote your business.
Your Step-by-Step Walkthrough
Okay, so can we agree that repurposing your content is a worthy endeavor? Good! Now let’s get down to the brass tacks of how to actually make it happen. As we alluded to earlier, there’s a little bit more to it than simply choose any random blog or marketing video to repurpose.
In this next section, we’ll walk you through the process step-by-step by using an older Robly post called, “Oops! How to Write a Correction Email” as an example.
Find the Right Content
Your first task is to find the right content to repurpose. You should not — we repeat, should NOT — repurpose every piece of content you create. Rather, you should only repurpose pieces that are evergreen and popular.
- Evergreen Content: Evergreen content is the kind of content that will always be relevant regardless of the amount of time that has passed. For example, a blog post on how to write better autoresponders would be considered evergreen, while a blog on Facebook’s algorithm update would not.
A year from now, people will still find value in learning about how to write a more effective autoresponder sequence. But once Facebook updates their algorithm again, an entirely new post will need to be written in order to stay relevant on the topic.
- Popular Content: The other factor you must consider when choosing content to repurpose is popularity. Only look to repurpose your best and most popular content. If a blog post underperformed the first time around, there’s a good chance it will also underperform in a different format.
In regard to our example post, it’s both evergreen and popular. Correction emails are (unfortunately) sent everyday and we don’t anticipate this changing anytime soon. We’re all human after all and mistakes happen.
And after crunching our Google Analytics data, we also discovered that this is our most popular post in 2018. As a result, we know that the topic is of interest to our audience.
Social Media
Now that you’ve chosen the perfect piece of content, it’s time to repurpose this puppy! Let’s start with the easiest and most obvious way: social media. You may, in fact, already employ this repurposing tactic.
When you post about your latest content creation on Twitter or Facebook, you are, in the most basic sense, repurposing. But don’t stop at one post! Tweet about your content multiple times with different headlines. And if your content is still succeeding and new website visitors are still finding your content months after it’s been published, post about it again on social media.
In the case of our “correction email” blog post, we could have fashioned and posted multiple tweets over the first few days after the blog post was released. Something like:
“Oops! How to Write a Correction Email” is live on our blog. Ever made a mistake when emailing your list? Check out this post: (insert link)”
“4 steps to an authentic ‘Oops’ email. What to say when your latest email campaign has a major mistake: (insert link)”
“Are you at risk of alienating your email list? Handle ‘Oops’ emails with class and professionalism in 4 easy steps: (insert link)”
And since this blog post is still performing at a high level today, we could craft a few more social media posts and send them out over the next few weeks.
Syndication
Syndication is one of the holy grails of content promotion. Basically, it’s the act of getting a piece of content you’ve already created and posted on your own site, republished on other sites as well. Doing so enables you to get your work and ideas in front of a new audience and (hopefully) drive traffic and links back to your own site.
To syndicate “Oops! How to Write a Correction Email,” we would need to reach out to other websites who publish this kind of content and begin building a relationship with them. There are bound to be other brands willing to post our article on their own site given how popular the piece has been.
But there’s also an even easier way to syndicate content — one that doesn’t require any networking. We can republish this blog on sites like Medium and LinkedIn. Platforms like these will allow us to reach new potential audience members and get the most out of our top blog post.
Slide Decks
A slide deck is simply a group of slides, usually assembled for presentation purposes. And SlideShare is the world’s largest slide deck community at 80 million monthly website visitors and counting.
So what does this have to do with content repurposing? You guessed it, certain pieces of content can be turned into slide decks and promoted on SlideShare. Wouldn’t you love a piece of that massive audience checking out your content? We definitely would!
With a little bit of effort and creativity, our “correction email” blog can be turned into a stunning SlideShare presentation. In the post, we mention 4 steps to take when you need to send a correction email. Each of these steps can be turned into a slide or two, containing the main points and any interesting facts or metrics.
For more information on how to quickly turn your blogs into slideshares, read this post.
Infographics
Infographics have taken the marketing world by storm over the last few years; they’re everywhere. And that means they’re a great option to keep in mind for your content repurposing strategy.
Since we’ve already distilled our blog post down to the main points and interesting facts of the article for our SlideShare presentation, we’re in a prime position to now repackage these details into a highly visual and engaging infographic.
If you’re not a designer or don’t happen to have one on your team, there are many companies that offer high-quality infographic templates for free, such as Canva, HubSpot, and Visme.
Want to learn how to quickly create amazing infographics for free? This post will give you all the details.
Video
Ah yes, video. You had to know this was coming right? It seems like no marketing conversation is complete without some mention of this visual platform. But there’s good reason for it — people love watching videos! And this makes them a great platform for our marketing efforts.
There are many ways we could repurpose our blog post into a video format:
- We could record (audio) ourselves as we read the original blog post (after some minor edits to make it work better in the audio format) and pair it with the slides we’ve already created for SlideShare. Together, we’d have an informational tutorial with high quality visuals we could post to social media sites like YouTube and Facebook.
- Speaking of Facebook, we could use our blog post as the outline for a Facebook Live video. According to Livestream, 80% of people would rather watch a live video from a brand than read their blog posts.
- We may even be able to use our “correction email” blog post as the basis for a free webinar. Webinars are another popular marketing tactic and can be incredibly effective ways to reach new prospects and turn then from complete strangers to satisfied customers — all in just a couple of hours or less.
Video opens up a whole new world of content repurposing possibilities.
Since we already know that our blog post, “Oops! How to Write a Correction Email” has been a hit on our site, we would be wise to consider adding this post — or at least the information it contains — to one of our autoresponder sequences.
For example, let’s say someone just subscribed to our email list. We obviously want to keep them engaged and turn them into raving fans of our business. And a great way to do this is to use our autoresponder to direct them to our best pieces of content. We can easily add an email to the sequence that informs new subscribers of this blog post.
We could also use the information contained in the blog as the basis for, say, a free email course on email marketing. Mistakes while sending emails are bound to happen. So it makes sense to include a special lesson in our (hypothetical) new, free course about how to handle these situations when they arise.
Content Upgrades
Finally, let’s talk about content upgrades — bonus pieces of content our audience can get access to in exchange for their email address. Content upgrades are an amazing way to build an email list and, when executed properly, aren’t necessarily that difficult to create. Just do what we’ve been talking about this entire post: repurpose!
For our “corrections email” blog, we could create a downloadable checklist. This checklist would contain the four steps mentioned in the post and specific action items to be completed for each.
For example, step one is “Identify.” We ask the reader to first determine what their email mistake actually was in order to choose the best strategy to correct it. The specific checklist items would include:
- Links or webpages aren’t working
- Social media feed isn’t loading
- The content or copy is incorrect or has errors
- You’ve sent to the wrong recipients
- Addressed the recipient incorrectly
- Sensitive or secure information was leaked
And those who opted in for the content upgrade would be able to check off the mistakes they’ve made. This would make finding the solution even easier.
If the piece of content you’re hoping to repurpose doesn’t lend itself to the checklist format, you can always offer a downloadable PDF of the details. People enjoy this type of upgrade because it gives them more control over the information. They could download it to their phone and read it anywhere, print it out and have it on their desk for easy recall, etc.
Additional Content Repurposing Ideas
- Podcasts: If Robly used podcasts as part of our marketing strategy, we could turn our best blog posts into podcasts.
To do this, we’d first need to edit each blog for an audio format. Then, we’d need to decide if we want to produce the podcast ourselves or hire a professional for the task. There are podcasting companies like Podfly that will do this for us or we could do a lot of the production work ourselves and just hire a quality voice over artist on Fiverr or Upwork.
- Ebooks, Manuals, and Guides: Like we mentioned at the very beginning of this post, multiple, well-performing blogs can be combined to create a more complete and comprehensive guide, manual, or ebook.
“Oops! How to Write a Correction Email” could easily be combined with a few of our other top posts on email marketing to create the first ever Robly ebook!
Marketing With (Re)Purpose
You work hard on every piece of content you create. So doesn’t it make sense to try and get as much out of each blog, video and presentation as humanly possible? We think so.
Use this post as a guide. Begin searching through your best pieces of content and look for ways you could repurpose them to better promote your business. With a little creativity, we know you’ll be a repurposing rockstar in no time.
Have you tried repurposing any of your content yet? Share your experience in the comments!
Jacob Thomas is a freelance copywriter and content marketer based in Bend, OR. His professional writing approach has helped numerous businesses gain more traffic, leads, and sales. To contact Jacob, visit www.jtcopywriting.com.
