The creation and sharing of online content – content marketing – is the lifeblood of any successful digital marketing strategy.
Not only does content marketing build trust and nurture customer loyalty, today’s customers expect and appreciate relevant, helpful content like how-to videos and knowledge archives.
As a business owner, content marketing can boost your overall marketing performance.
As the stats show, generating customer-focused content optimised for search can boost your web traffic, generate three times as many leads as traditional marketing and drive higher conversion rates, all adding to the bottom line.
Content creation does, however, require an enormous investment of time and that’s where savvy content marketers understand that ‘writing less and promoting content more’ is the key to online marketing success.
The smarter way to leveraging your content – and your time – involves repurposing, refreshing and repackaging existing content.
The 3R’s of repurposing, refreshing and repackaging
- Repurpose: Put a new spin on your content and distribute it on different platforms and channels.
- Refresh: Take old content, update and breathe new life into it – and then republish.
- Repackage: Format your content differently to reach new audiences.
Why you should repurpose, refresh and repackage content
Save time and effort
Content marketing offers a whole host of benefits for your business but creating content that’s relevant and appealing can be incredibly time consuming. It takes a lot of effort to research, interview subjects, write and proof content. Why reinvent the wheel by constantly creating new content when your existing content could be working harder for you?
Reach new audiences
Repurposing content across other channels and platforms, in different formats, extends the reach of your content. Your content may reach audiences who wouldn’t have discovered or consumed your content in its original form.
Most of us have a preferred media channel, so for example, if all your content sits on your blog, then you’re missing out on potential audiences who may only visit YouTube.
Likewise audiences generally have a preferred way of consuming content; some prefer to read articles, others watch videos, while others prefer to listen to podcasts. Repackaging your content to suit these preferences leverages your original content exponentially.
Choosing content to repurpose, refresh and repackage
Review your existing content and look for content that is:
- Popular: Which content received the most views? The most engagement?
- Evergreen: Which content is timeless? Or just needs a few references updated?
8 Ways to repurpose, refresh and repackage content
Think strategically and creatively and you’ll discover all sorts of ways to give your content a new life. Here are a few ideas to get you started.
1. Repurpose blog posts to podcasts
Usually a blog post makes a perfect script for a podcast. Think of potential audiences who don’t have time to read – but will listen to audio while they’re driving or exercising.
If you’re shy about voicing your podcast, a quick google search for voice-over artists will uncover people willing to narrate your script. Add intro and exit music and you’ve got a podcast ready to load to Soundcloud and to add to the iTunes podcast directory – ready to be discovered by a whole new audio-loving audience.
AND VISA VERSA: Have you transcribed your podcasts and added the script to a relevant section of your website?
2. Repackage blog posts for social media
Finding time to write fresh, innovative content for your site – as well as suitable content for various social media channels is a daunting task.
Repackaging content into a more social media-friendly – and shareable – format is likely to get it in front of a much bigger audience.
Extract a quote or a statistic from a blog post and add it to an image to create a visually appealing, shareable quote, ideal for Facebook or Twitter. (Tip: Tools like the Word Swag app make this process super easy). If you have a few statistics, using a tool like Canva, can help you make them into a stunning infographic.
AND VISA VERSA: If you use Twitter to link to interesting third party content, consider collating these tweets into a blog post.
3. Repurpose video to social media
Think like a filmmaker and make a trailer for your videos. If your videos are long, they won’t cut it with today’s short attention spans. Edit an interesting snippet and create a GIF to upload to social media.
PLUS: Make use of presentation slides. Turn them into a video, add a soundtrack and upload them to your video channel for more visibility.
4. Repurpose blog and social media content into a newsletter
Creating a client newsletter can be an overwhelming undertaking – but it can be as easy as collating your blog and social media content for the past month.
Even your most loyal fans wouldn’t have read all your blog and social media posts – so your newsletter is the ideal vehicle to group all that content you’ve created. Include short excerpts of your blog posts and link back to your site for the full article. Include your best social media posts from Twitter (and other platforms that suit) to encourage your database to follow your social media channels. Brighten up the newsletter with the quote graphics you’ve created.
PLUS: If you’re using an email marketing system like Mailchimp, you’ll be able to determine which articles and links were most popular from the newsletter analytics – so you can create more of those types of articles.
5. Republish and reinvent content to other sites
Syndicating or republishing your blog content on other sites is an easy option to reach a wider audience. Two popular sites for self-syndication (where you have an account and load your own content), are LinkedIn and Medium. Fear of getting hit by a duplicate content penalty by search engines puts some marketers off, so another option is to reinvent your blog content and offer it to sites who welcome guest posts.
If your content idea is current and newsworthy, reinvent it as a press release and upload to internet news sites like Scoop and Voxy. Mainstream media may pick up on the story and these popular sites help SEO.
6. Refresh old content
As well as bringing old posts up-to-date, consider combining a number of posts together for a ‘roundup’ or ‘list’ post. Or the opposite; take a ‘list’ post and use each point as an idea generator for a new post. Or break a long post into a series of posts.
7. Repackage old blog posts
If your blog archives are bulging with content, combine posts together and publish them as an e-book, or a downloadable guide, or even a course. Not only does this repackaging of content grow your database, it gives your customers and leads real value – and you didn’t have to start from scratch.
8. Repurpose with a purpose
It can be tempting to rush in and create blog posts, social media posts, videos and podcasts in an ad hoc way. The smarter, more efficient alternative is to create a content creation and repurposing plan before you create your content.
Start with your content idea and then map out ways you can;
- republish that content to other sites
- repackage the content into a different medium for other platforms.
Final Takeaway
Make your content work for you – repurposing, refreshing and repackaging content you’ve already created is an effective way of getting more eyeballs on your content for a lot less effort.
