Content is king. That’s a given. But how do you create good content at a rate that’s going to appease the search engine algorithm, as well as the attention span of your audience?
Creating a robust brand presence is key to standing out online — and leaving an impact on your potential customers. But creating enough content to sustain your brand can become tricky, as well as expensive, fast.
The solution? Repurposing your content and extending it past the initial blog, podcast, or eBook. Taking one sturdy piece of content and breaking it down into bite-size, digestible, and social-media friendly pieces is an affordable way to make your content library robust, dynamic, and valuable to those seeing it.
Where to begin? Here’s a quick and dirty guide to repurposing your brand’s content:
But First – Are Brands Really Repurposing, or Reusing, their Content?
Yes. At least, smart brands are.
Haven’t you heard the old adage, work smarter not harder? It’s the key to making your content work for you. After all, content is hard to create. Good content is even harder. You can make your content travel further, and have a greater impact, by knowing when to break it down, repurpose it, and redistribute it for different audiences, platforms, and objectives.
Let’s take a look at social media, specifically: it can take as many as eight touchpoints to encourage the casual viewer to take action in regards to your brand. Rather than promoting the same blog eight times on your LinkedIn feed, break it down into a single post about the blog, several infographics with information from the blog, and various calls to action to inspire, well, action.
How Do I Repurpose My Content?
There are a lot of different ways to repurpose content, but every iteration should be tailored based on the platform. For example, if you’re breaking down a blog to repurpose across social media, you should use social media best practices.
Social media is a versatile platform, so there are a lot of different options for spreading your content. If your blog has high-quality imagery within, you can repurpose those images to serve as the background for your social media graphic. Similarly, if your blog contains a video or audio clip, you can cut down a 15-second clip to highlight on social media.
Here are some other ideas for how to repurpose one piece of content across different platforms:
- Blogs → podcasts, infographics, social media posts, video content
- Internal data and metrics → case studies, infographics, paid media
- Website testimonials → social media posts, paid media
- Blog and eBook content → online courses, how-to and instructional guides
When looking at how to repurpose content, you should also make sure you’re updating old blogs, eBooks, and content pages. Let’s say you wrote an in-depth guide in 2016 about how to design a webpage. It’s a hearty, valuable piece of content with a lot of useful information — but it’s probably time for a refresh. Updating it with new advice and information, and then promoting it again for your audiences, will let them know that you’re invested in providing them with quality information. It will also go a long way when it comes to Google’s search algorithm.
What Kind of Content Should I Repurpose?
There are a couple of different ways to go about it.
To start, we recommend checking your website and blog analytics. Which pieces have performed well in the past? What blogs generated a lot of traffic? Additionally, check out your social media metrics. Which posts have gotten people to engage? Any hot topics that have garnered a ton of comments, shares, or reactions? That’s the best place to start.
Another idea is to repurpose content that’s evergreen. Evergreen content is content that’s continually relevant. Some examples might be lists, instructional videos or blogs, product reviews, or tutorials. Although the topic is evergreen, it’s still ripe for repurposing or refreshing if enough time has passed since it was originally published.
A third method would be to go through your content, blog, or YouTube channel and review each item line by line. Are there any topics that stand out to you as being good to repurpose? Look for cyclical trends and topics you’ve covered. For example, if you wrote a blog about how elections work, that’s something that could be updated and re-purposed every 2-4 years as it becomes a hot topic again.
Some trends are cyclical, and you should take advantage of it as much as possible.
One more idea is to see if you have any content that’s now outdated as new information or events have happened. This is a great way to refresh and repurpose your content — it also demonstrates to your audience that you’re a thought leader.
What are the Benefits to Repurposing Content?
Here’s a list:
- It reinforces your messaging and provide additional touchpoints to get viewers to engage with your brand
- It helps you reach a new audience online. Not everyone has the attention span to read a whole blog, but a catchy graphic on LinkedIn might be enough to leave an impression.
- It gives your audience additional touchpoints.
- Repurposing content = more touchpoints = more frequent website and social media updates = improved organic visibility.
Before You Can Repurpose, You Need to Create Good Content
In order to repurpose content, you need good content. Let Walk West make content for you, then help you break it down into the kind of bite-size pieces your audience is craving.
