Repurposing Content: Maximize Your Messaging Mileage

How hard is your content working for you? If your content marketing strategy is to create a thoughtful, well-researched blog, publish it and never touch that material again, the answer is not hard enough.

Let’s dispel the idea that every piece of marketing content needs to be a completely fresh, never-seen-before original. It doesn’t. What it needs to be is clean, relevant and consistent with your brand’s voice.

When a strong piece of content hits all of those marks, the best thing to do is find a way to use it again. Done with intent, repurposing content isn’t lazy marketing. It’s not a shortcut. It’s just working smarter to extend the life cycle of quality information by making it available across a variety of platforms.

With content repurposing, you’re using every piece of your research so that nothing goes to waste. Below are several reasons to repurpose content, along with some ways to do it: 

Why: It Saves Time

Researching and interviewing are time- and labor-intensive processes. Using the information you gather for multiple purposes makes the most of the time you spent actually doing the gathering, leaving you free to focus on other tasks while your content does the work for you.

How: Plan Ahead

When you schedule an interview or set out to research a topic, think about different ways you can use the information you’re compiling. If your intention is to create a video tutorial, for example, streamline the content into an accompanying InfoGuide. This pulls double duty, strengthening your message through consistency and repetition while also engaging your audience on multiple levels with little extra effort.

Why: It Increases Site Traffic

You already know that good content drives search results. Repurposing quality content takes that original exposure and multiplies it, pulling in page views through different avenues. For example, Copyblogger adapted an original blog post about the journey of remarkable content into a SlideShare presentation that gained more than 57,000 views.

How: Study Analytics For Popular Content

Put your numbers to work. For example, take a look at past blog posts that performed well. Pull the main messages out of them and transform those into tip sheets, infographics or emails.

On the flip side, giving less popular content new context may completely transform its performance. If you spent a lot of time researching and writing something that didn’t perform as well as you expected, try a different format. What completely flopped as a blog post could resonate instead as a series of emails.

Why: It Reaches New Audiences

The best content in the world is useless if your target audience never sees it. Repurposing content creates more opportunities for people to engage with it.

Additionally, it’s a chance to appeal to people who prefer different formats. For example, a visual person will respond more positively to an infographic versus a text-heavy whitepaper.

Recycled content also allows you to target different stages of the buyer journey with the same information. As HubSpot notes, each stage comes with its own behaviors and needs.

How: Transform Your Quality Content

With so many platforms available to reach consumers, there’s no reason to limit your content to its original format. Take advantage of social media by promoting webinars on Instagram and pulling quick, bite-sized messages out of blogs onto Twitter. These easily digestible pieces of content appeal to prospects just starting to gather information, while the depth and detail of longer-form content fulfills the needs of those further along in their buyer journey.

Make the most out of the work you’re already doing by coming up with a repurposing strategy. Thinking a few steps ahead during the content creation process allows you to spread your message across multiple platforms, engage new customers and increase website traffic.

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