In the next two years, 83% of marketers expect the volume of content to continue to increase. That increase is triggering a big challenge – knowing how to quickly deliver engaging, compelling content, without compromising on quality or volume. One of the best strategies to deal with the challenge is repurposing content that’s already performing well.
Anastasia Vyshkvarkina
Marketing Specialist
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing is where you refresh and/or reuse content that’s already been published. Often the content is transformed: a long-form piece becomes several short-form pieces (ie. an ebook is broken into checklists, infographics, a 7-day email challenge) or changed from one format or medium into another (ie. the transcript of a podcast or video is transformed into multiple other text-based pieces).
The new, repurposed content is then used for marketing activities on different platforms and campaign support outreaches.
Constantly creating new pieces of content is time consuming. So it makes a lot of sense to revive, update and repurpose well written and performing blog posts. It’s a great content marketing hack and is a valuable part of a successful content strategy.
Why repurpose old content?
1. You save time
You’ve already done the research and know it’s a successful idea, so all you’ll need is to add new things to the same foundation.
2. You can connect with new audiences
Your brand and products may have evolved, opening a door to new audiences. Through repurposing, you can make sure your content resonates with a variety of audiences.
3. You can create multiple types of content formats
Certain content formats perform better on certain platforms. So when you reformat your content into a variety of formats such as infographics, images, charts, and smaller graphics, you can successfully publish your content across multiple platforms.
4. You can experiment
You already know that the core of the content piece is working. It gives a great platform for experiments – move the elements around, add interaction, add CTAs along the piece, add more visuales etc. You can try different types of content, for example, if you want to collect leads, you can turn content into a gated white paper.
How to repurpose successful blog content
There are various options and ways to freshen up your best performing but dated content. Of course, there’s lots of options to choose from, but the final decision should align with your brand strategy and presence. Be picky and master one option at a time.
1. Refresh and republish old posts
The easiest one is to review your blog content, find some truly stunning articles that are getting lots of traffic and check if there’s information that hasn’t aged so well. Update the out-dated data and republish.
2. Create new blog posts and articles
High-quality content can be a parent piece for more high-quality content. One of the most straightforward examples of this is converting a listicle into a series of individual pieces of content.
To do this, take the best performing post (easier to go for a long read) and break it into smaller topics. This gives you the opportunity to expand on different aspects of the original article, to flesh things out in more detail and add background information, tutorials, and examples.
Or, you can do the reverse – take a group of 5 to 7 related posts and collect them into a single summary post. For blogs that usually only publish short articles, this can be a great opportunity to easily create a comprehensive piece of content.
Note: a word of caution though on duplicate content. Google penalizes you for just copy-paste-publishing the same content word-for-word across multiple posts, so do some research on the ever-changing amount of content that they safely allow you to duplicate.
3. Write a guest post
Placing quality content on other sites/blogs can lead to new ideas, new business and industry notoriety. Writing content on other sites improves your own SEO (with relevant, high quality backlinks) and can drive readers and traffic back to you. However, successful guest posting cannot be done quickly or at a lower quality than you’d post on your own site. It’s often said that guest posts should be of an even higher quality than your own, so that people are enticed back to your site to read more of your work.
5. Create an infographic
Have you got content that’s full of statistics or data? Consider creating an infographic with a summary of the most hard-hitting statistics from your posts. It’s a great way to make your content more engaging. You can place these infographics within a blog post, but they can also be repurposed and posted on social media.
Tools like Piktochart and Visually provide the means for non-designers to create their own infographics.
6. Create a SlideShare
Converting posts into presentation form is one of the easiest ways to repurpose your content. Identify a piece of high-performing content, and reproduce it into a SlideShare. SlideShares are easily shareable, it introduces audiences to your words in a different way and provides additional opportunities for engagement.
You can pull out some interesting statistics, meaningful quotes, and actionable advice for effective slides.
Tools like Canva make it easy to start.
7. Create an ebook
Do you have long-form educational blog content? Creating an ebook is a great option for repurposing it. Ebooks (used as lead magnets) have a reputation for subscriber list growth and adding an additional revenue stream.
In your blog post, you can touch on specific key elements of your subject and offer the ebook as a more in-depth discussion of the content you’ve created.
If you decide to create an ebook based on your blog posts, take the time to supplement it with additional information and a great design – make it attractive and worth giving up your email address. You can choose to design it yourself with tools like Setka or outsource it to your design team.
8. Create a video
How-to posts are great to convert into visual guides on YouTube, especially with data-heavy pieces. The text of the article can become the foundation for the script, and you can present the topic in a master class style or with some added graphics and enhancements. Apart from YouTube, Wistia is one of many online tools to help with video content for your website.
9. Create a podcast episode
In the same logic as creating videos, consider creating podcasts out of these high-performing posts. You can use the copy as a script, invite thought leaders back for more in-depth discussions of the insight they’ve given for the posts, or simply discuss the blog post in its original form. Each podcast will make for a new post to your website, and you can always add in a transcript in order to appeal to those who have the time and space to listen or read, as well as making the content more accessible for those people using screen readers.
10. Host a webinar
The next step in audio-video content is a webinar, which lets you both present on a topic and engage your audience in a conversation. Your existing content can be a great jumping-off point for a webinar, or you can use a series of blogs as research for your final presentation.
11. Enhance engagement with design
Customers evaluate your content not only by its quality but also by design, so visual improvements might be a great repurposing option. Your content should load fast, engage readers and convert. Review if your posts are easy to understand and navigate.
Here are some ways to improve it:
- Optimal column width for effortless reading for main text columns is between 66 to 75 symbols
- Add logical structure and clear hierarchy
- Highlight the most important information or accentuate in the content layout
- Add “Read More” and “Learn More” links in margins and in the bottom of the article to encourage further exploration.
Make your content accessible and easy to read:
- Update the font styles, sizes, and spacing to ensure an enjoyable reading experience for every user
- Make all the elements mobile optimized
- Test and improve your loading times.
Make your posts interesting, engaging and conversion focused, by using visuals and animation:
- Add photos, illustrations, visualized data, citations or other images to break down the text and maintain high engagement
- Use embeds, pull quotes, data visualization to make a more interactive user experience
- Add scroll-activated or other animation to boost interactivity throughout the piece
- Add CTAs in margins, in-line, at the end of a piece of content to provide clear opportunities for conversion.
And last but not the least, make sure content has a unique and consistent style:
- Create a unified and recognizable style throughout your blog
- Add micro-branding and branded design patterns with recognizable styles for pull quotes, data highlights, side notes etc.
There are various ways to repurpose your text-heavy blog posts to give them new life and expose their content to different audiences. It can be a game changer considering almost 70% of marketing teams surveyed by the Content Marketing Institute say their team was asked to do more with the same resources. Repurposing content is a super hack with benefits like saving time, SEO enhancements, reaching different audiences, and much more.
With a little bit of creativity and focus on adding value to the original piece, you can ensure that each content you repurpose will live up to its full potential and help increase your content marketing ROI.
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