Repurposing Content The Right Way

We’ve all heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” How do we translate that pleasant-sounding cliché into concrete plans to improve digital marketing results? One way is by repurposing content.

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If you’ve been dutifully attentive to your website, you likely have a nice archive of content available to you. No doubt, it’s been appropriately keyword-researched and serves its proper purpose in your marketing funnel. But maybe you’re starting to run dry on ideas. Maybe your best writer just left the firm. Any number of reasons could explain why producing fresh content is going to be more difficult in the future than it was in the past.

That’s where repurposing comes in. We don’t mean simply finding an old piece of content from three years ago that’s still relevant today, putting a new “published date” on it in WordPress, and moving it to the top of your blog. That’s fine, but a true repurposing effort is comprehensive and opens up new audiences for your content.

Repurposing Ideas

Compile blog posts around a similar theme into an ebook
Turn the blog posts into a podcast
Create an infographic based on the content
Develop a video from the written content

Give Them A Choice

What all of these concepts do is bring your content in front of new audiences that would not have otherwise seen it. This is particularly true of the latter three ideas. Everyone consumes information differently, and in our rapidly changing technological world the means of getting information become increasingly varied.

The person who might not take time to read your blog post might download a podcast instead and listen to it on their commute. Others, particularly on social media, are quicker to grasp visual concepts, as presented in an infographic. The idea of doing a video could also involve creation of a YouTube channel and thereby open up a whole new audience that you missed previously.

Create New Revenue Channels

Ebook creation gives you a new tool to increase conversions as well. You can invite people to download it in exchange for their email address and expand your list. If you believe your ebook is more valuable, another option is to sell it for a modest price. If you’ve got a nice collection of 8-10 articles that are all independently valuable, your visitors should find it well worth a few dollars to simply download them all together rather than going and reading them separately online.

Cost Considerations

One area not to have any illusions pertains to cost. You might not be investing man-hours in writing new content, but graphic design will require larger investment. The same goes for an audio/video editor. Ebooks need to be edited to eliminate redundancies. Repurposing content is an excellent strategy in a lot of situations, but “excellent strategy” is not a synonym for “cheap.”

Work Smarter, Not Harder

As you find your stride in repurposing content, your workflow efficiency will improve. When you return to developing new content ideas, you’ll already have repurposing strategies in mind—gathering images, envisioning how something will come off in audio or video formats and how it fits into an overall ebook series. Enhanced efficiency is the very definition of working smarter and that’s what a good repurposing strategy can do for your business.

Is your content growing your business? Call (443) 475-0787 or Contact Us online to find out how.

Frequently Asked Questions About Repurposing Content

How Do You Repurpose Content For Social Media?

Repurposing your website content for social media is a smart idea, because the audience that’ll you’ll reach will likely be different from the visitors who currently visit your site. Repurposing your content for social media can be an effective strategy to boost traffic and engagement. You could simply summarize the content and share it with a link and a visually appealing image. Other suggestions are to turn your blog posts into an infographic, an interactive poll or quiz, or a how-to tutorial. Also, be sure to adapt your post for each platform (in terms of length, tone, post timing, hashtags, etc.).

What Are Some Content Repurposing Examples?

Repurposing content is a strategy that allows you to select your very best content and then amplify it to a larger audience. Here are some great examples for repurposing content:

Turn a blog post into a guide or how-to piece.
Turn a webinar into a video tutorial.
Compile the best nuggets of information from interviews into an eBook
Answer questions posed on forums such as Quora with a link to a relevant blog post.
Turn data from a published study into a case study or infographic.
Repurpose statistics or survey results and share on social media.
Turn blog posts into a newsletter.
Turn a client or conference presentation into a shared deck (e.g. slideshare, socialcast).
Publish follow-up articles to popular blog content and publish on LinkedIn.

What Is Repurposing Digital Content?

Repurposing digital content means to recycle or revamp content that has previously appeared on your website. By republishing the content with a different angle or in a different format (e.g. turn a blog post into a podcast or an infographic) you may be able to reach a different audience, update content so that it remains relevant, and also get more mileage from your prior hard work.