In this video, Dan from the WebFX Marketing team discusses how to repurpose content so you save time and money for your business.

https://youtu.be/vtrSITa9cgM

Transcript:

A blog post doesn’t have to stay a blog post, and a video can be much more than just one singular video.

If you learn how to repurpose content, you can stretch something as simple as a blog post into a whole series of things for people to enjoy and you to expand your reach. I’ll tell you how.

What is repurposing content?

When you repurpose content, what you’re doing is taking one valuable resource — that I’m sure you’ve put a lot of effort into — and modifying it so that it can be re-shared and redistributed in different formats or on different platforms.

You might even say you’re recycling your content marketing.

However you want to put it, there are three main things you can do when repurposing content:

1. Update outdated content
2. Experiment with new formats
3. Share your content on your available channels

I’m sure you have more questions, too. How do you choose which content to repurpose? Why should you repurpose content instead of creating some fresher stuff?

Let’s start with the “why.”

Why should you repurpose content?

Well, first of all, creating something new takes a lot of time and effort. I mean, you have to research an idea, see if what you want to do has already been done, create the content, and then promote it.

I’m sure you have a bunch of other things you can be doing instead of always creating something new. That’s why we repurpose: to save time and energy and maximize the impact of every piece of content.

Second of all, people have different preferences when it comes to how they consume media. Repurposing your content helps you meet the needs of a larger audience.

A portion of your audience may prefer the traditional blog post. But some people would rather watch a video or look at a fancy graphic.

And thirdly, if that’s a word, you can add value to something that is already getting results.

So if you created a wildly popular YouTube video, you can add it to your blog and use the video transcript as the text. If the video is long enough, you can share snippets of it on social media.

You know your audience likes the original video, so you can use that to your advantage and attract more attention through different channels.

What content should you repurpose?

There’s not really a specific formula for recycling content marketing.

You can start by looking at your content library to see if you have something that lends itself to repurposing.

A great example of easily repurposed content would be a case study or compilation of data. If you have original research or a comprehensive list of statistics presented in, say, a blog post, you have many opportunities to stretch that one piece of writing into many other forms of content marketing.

Statistics make for great infographics. Or you can explain your research in a video. Then, you can share all of this on social media. Or in an email newsletter. Or…you get the point.

Another great approach to repurposing content is to look at what your audience loves. Maybe you have a page on your website that gets a lot of traffic, or you notice that whenever you make videos about a certain topic, they explode.

Ultimately, you can repurpose whatever content you want to. It’s your business. But choosing something easy to update or something you know people will love might make recycling content a bit easier.

And now. What I hope you have all been waiting for…

How to repurpose content in 3 different ways

1. Update your outdated content

There’s this term that we marketers like to use when referring to content that’s meant to be timeless: Evergreen. Yes, like the trees.

Essentially, evergreen content doesn’t rely on trends, answers common industry questions, and provides a valuable, in-depth look at a certain topic.

But just as the evergreen trees need TLC to stay healthy, your evergreen content needs your attention to stay relevant.

The Internet is a pretty competitive place. In fact, over half of all businesses create content for their marketing efforts.

That means right now, there’s a chance one of your competitors is writing or updating their content so that it’s better and more comprehensive than yours.

So if you have a list of statistics from a few years ago that still gets a decent amount of traffic, go through it and update it with new information.

If there are certain topics you’ve created content for, but you just aren’t seeing high rankings in search engines, look at the top results.

You might see that your content addresses the topic but doesn’t go in-depth enough to give readers what they need.

One thing’s for sure: Editing what you already have will take a lot less time than writing something from scratch.

2. Experiment with new formats

Just because you created something in a certain format doesn’t mean the information has to stay in that same format.

If you’ve written a blog post about how to take care of trees, you can take that information and put it into a shareable infographic.

Maybe you notice a rival business has put together a thorough guide for tree care, while all you have is a bunch of shorter website pages covering related topics.

You can group those pages together and create a downloadable guide for tree care. All you may have to do is tweak some of the copy so all of the pages flow together. On top of that, you can ask for people’s emails in order for them to download your guide, so now you can send them additional emails and possibly serve them personalized ads.

Whether you turn a video into a podcast, a blog post into an in-depth guide, or a large infographic into more bite-size graphics, you can use your creativity to maximize the amount of reach you get with your existing content.

3. Share your content on your available channels

Don’t publish your content once and forget about it. Give it the promotion it deserves.

Sharing blog posts is a great place to start. You can definitely link to the post on social media and hope that people will bite. But don’t give up there.

Share it again, but in a different format. Put a great quote from the post into a quick graphic and send it to your followers. If you’ve made a video, don’t forget to share that, too.

Write a quick summary of your post and send that, along with a link, to your email subscribers.

Repurposing content doesn’t have to be this huge effort. It can be as simple as sharing a snippet of something you’ve created and asking people to read, watch, or listen to the full version on your website or wherever it’s hosted.

Again, be creative with your content when thinking of how you can recycle it.

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Thanks for watching!