If you have a website and/or social media presence for your business, you’ve likely heard the term repurposing content. But perhaps you are wondering what is repurposing content? What does it actually mean? And how do I actually repurpose content?
In this article, I’ll explain what repurposing content is and how to repurpose your content to increase your reach to help you be seen by new potential customers.
Repurposing content definition
Repurposing content is the exercise of reusing existing content in order to grow that content’s reach, to use it for a different purpose, or to target a new audience. Repurposed content is most often transformed into a new format, eg. turning a blog post into a series of social media posts or turning a well-performing how-to guide into an infographic.
Why repurposing content is good for your business
Whether you are a relatively new business or have been active online for a long time, you likely have lots of quality content across your website, social media and email list. Repurposing content is a way to use your existing content and revitalise it so it can work harder for your business. It means you do not have to always create brand new original content, instead, you can lean on well-performing older content and repurpose it to generate additional views.
Repurposing content may also help you reach a new audience. Some people prefer short bitesize quotes over blogposts, some prefer video over visual infographics, and some may prefer audio over ebooks. Reworking your content into different formats means you can appeal to more people and extend your reach, ultimately helping you attract more potential customers.
And last but not least, repurposing content means that you get to make the most of your efforts. I am sure that you put a lot of time and effort into your content (or someone on your team does) and you’re proud of the content that your business puts out. Repurposing your content means that more people have the chance to see what you have to say, it’s a second (or third or fourth) chance at content promotion.
Important: revamping and repurposing content are different
Whilst revamping old well-performing content is important, I want to make sure the distinction between revamping and repurposing content is clear.
You might review an old blog post and realise it needs updating so you add new statistics, update some images and re-word the first paragraph. This would be classed as revamping existing content, it’s a brilliant way to make sure the content remains relevant and interesting to your audience.
Repurposing content is different. When you decide to repurpose content, you are typically changing the format of the content. For example, taking your most popular blog posts and turning them into an ebook. You may sometimes also repurpose content by changing its target audience. For example, re-creating a blog post originally intended for coaches and re-working it to apply to all small business owners.
How to repurpose content
Not all content needs to be given a new lease of life so it’s important to be strategic with your content repurposing plan. Here are some things to consider when deciding what content you’re going to repurpose:
What’s popular?
Different content performs differently, and not all of your blogs, articles and emails will get the same reaction from your audience. Your most read blog posts and content have the greatest chance of resonating with your target audience further, so they’re a good place to start when considering what content to repurpose.
Head to Google Analytics to see what your most popular posts have been. If you’re not sure what to do, go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages, then sort the pages by page views. You’ll get a list of the most popular pages on your website from most popular to least popular.
It’s not just website content that can be repurposed, you can also look at how your content has performed on other channels – such as Instagram and email – and figure out how you can repurpose the top-performing content to bolster your repurposing strategy.
What’s evergreen?
Not every piece of content that is popular will be right for repurposing. Next, you need to consider if the content is evergreen, or if it was only relevant for a certain period of time. Focus your energy on content that is continually relevant and valuable for your ideal customers.
As an aside, if you have a piece of seasonal content that has performed exceptionally well you can consider how you can recreate this content for other seasons/time periods and then repurpose it to be used at the correct moment in time.
What’s most important for your business?
Whilst analytics are great at telling us what is most popular, only you know the content that is most important to your business strategy. Whilst engagement may not be high on some blog posts or social media posts, they may contain key sales or marketing information – so make sure to add these to your repurposing content stack.
A note on repurposing blog content for social media
A very effective way of getting more people to see your content is to repurpose your existing website, email and/or webinar content for social media. Depending on your marketing efforts to date, you’ll have a whole host of content to repurpose.
Even though your website may get a good number of users finding it every month, there are always more people to reach and tell about your business. New potential customers are hanging out online, and repurposing your content for social media is a great way to find them. If you can catch the attention of your ideal customers on social sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest or Linkedin, you can give your marketing a boost. And as I mentioned before, repurposing your existing content means you don’t have to create all your social media content from scratch.
Repurposing content ideas
Now you’re sold on repurposing your content, and hopefully have a list of popular and important content you want to repurpose, here are some repurposing content ideas to get you inspired.
1. Group themed blog posts into an eBook (or white paper if you have a business-to-business company).
If you have a series of blog posts around a certain theme, you can bundle these into an eBook. This eBook can be repackaged as a lead magnet for your email list or sold on your website as a low ticket item, creating a new income stream.
2. Post long-form evergreen blog content on Linkedin or Medium
When you have identified well-performing, relevant blog posts, you can extend their reach by posting them on LinkedIn (for business content) and/or Medium (for lifestyle and business content). Read this article I wrote for more ideas on sharing your blog posts.
3. Turn popular informative blog posts and social media posts into an email series
Turn your popular informative blogs or “how-to” posts into an email series. Creating an email series is a great way to engage subscribers, and add new people to your email list when you promote the series. “7-days of tips” or “learn how to …” are email series ideas that will enable you to add value to your audience through repurposed content.
4. Create a webinar or workshop based on one of your most popular blogs or social media series
As mentioned earlier, different people like their content delivered in different mediums. You can turn a popular blog post into a webinar to expand on the information provided and deepen your connection to your audience, and you might even attract new potential customers when you promote the webinar across your channels.
5. Use webinars to create short-video content for social media
If you have a library of previous webinars or have hosted the webinar based on one of your most popular blog posts mentioned above, you can review your webinars and pull out short clips where you delivered bitesize information to post on your social media channels. Add captions to make sure they are accessible. These can be used across all your social media channels to build your expertise and brand awareness.
6. Pull out insightful lines from blog posts to create “Instagrammable quotes”
Review your most popular, relevant blog posts for insightful or informative quotes and use these to create quote-based social media posts. The online world loves quotes and they are very popular across social media platforms. Repurposing your content in this way is a great way to get new eyes on your content, showcase your expertise and push traffic to the original content.
7. Turn long-form emails into blog posts
Send 1000+ word emails to nurture your email list? Consider turning some of your most popular emails from your email marketing into blog posts. The words are already written, so consider how you can optimise them to create valuable blog content and benefit from search traffic.
8. Use your audiences’ questions to create an FAQ post or page
No doubt you regularly answer your customer’s questions via email, your Facebook page, over the phone, or, if you have a bricks-and-mortar business, face-to-face. This means you’ll have a whole host of pre-made responses to your customer’s most important questions. Use the most-answered questions to create an FAQ blog post or page. You can also use the FAQ’s to create individual social media posts or stories.
9. Identify the best customer questions and use them to create individual blog posts
Another way to use your customers’ questions is to create individual blog posts from the most frequent queries. With 27% of search engine queries formulated as questions, repurposing content into questions is a great way to also improve your search engine traffic. In these blogs, you can include your answer to your customers’ questions as well as other pertinent information.
Repurposing content – conclusion
As you can see from the ideas above, your content doesn’t have to stay in its original form. It’s a good idea to add repurposing content into your marketing strategy and make repurposing content a regular business activity. Take one or more of these ideas and begin to repurpose your content, over a few months you should see how much value repurposing content can add to your business.
Want to learn more about repurposing content? I’m hosting a WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER – WAYS YOU CAN REPURPOSE CONTENT WORKSHOP in my Visibility Vault membership on June 25th at 1.30pm BST.
Click here to find out more and join The Visibility Vault today for just £1
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