Last Updated on July 19, 2023 by Hanson Cheng
Welcome to our comprehensive guide on the importance and strategy of repurposing content in digital marketing. The blog post provides a detailed explanation of how to identify content that can be repurposed and strategies to successfully repurpose it, including how to adapt content for different platforms and optimizing it for SEO.
Introduction
Content creation is an essential process in the field of marketing. With the vast landscapes of online platforms offering a myriad of channels to broadcast message to your consumers, producing fresh and engaging content regularly is no small task. This is where the ingenious strategy of repurposing content comes into play. Repurposing content is essentially about taking existing content and remarketing it in various formats or through different platforms, thereby maximizing its value.
In this digital age where content is king, businesses are consistently looking for ways to make their brand visible and their message resonate with their audience. The task is to captivate a broad audience through effective marketing strategies without compromising on quality and relevance of information.
In this discussion, we will explore the concept of repurposing content, strategies to repurpose content, and the various types of content that can be repurposed. The article will delve into the countless benefits of repurposing content and illustrate these benefits with actual case studies, explaining how well-known businesses have successfully repurposed their content for maximum effect.
We will also discuss how to effectively repurpose various types of content including videos, images, infographics, blogs, and e-books. Additionally, the potential issues and limitations in content repurposing will be explored. The relevance of this topic extends to all businesses and marketers striving to make the most out of their marketing materials.
Embrace the powerful and versatile tool of content repurposing, as it opens up countless opportunities to uniquely broadcast your brand’s message to a vast audience. It’s not about reinventing the wheel, but rather repurposing the wheel for various uses, thereby maximizing its purpose and value.
Understanding the Concept of Repurposing Content
Definition
The phrase “repurposing content” describes a digital marketing strategy where existing content is adapted into a different format. This alteration can be applied to various types of content: blog posts, videos, podcasts, e-books, and infographics, to name a few.
Repurposing is not merely duplicating or retreading old ground. It involves reimagining and reconstructing the material from a new perspective, targeting a new audience, or presenting it on a different platform. This strategy is not a one-size-fits-all; it requires creativity, novel approaches, and a developed understanding of what your audience values.
Importance in the Digital Marketing World
In an era where content is the engine that drives digital visibility, staying innovative and versatile is vital. The digital marketing landscape is crowded and, at times, overwhelming for both marketers and consumers. Repurposing helps create fresh and engaging content without the need for constant brainstorming of new ideas.
By repurposing, businesses can enhance their outreach, tapping into different target groups who prefer various forms of content. For instance, someone may skip reading a long blog post, but they might listen to the same content if it’s converted into a podcast episode or embedded in a video.
Types of Repurposable Content
Not all content is equal regarding repurposing potential. Certain content types lend themselves more naturally to repurposing, either due to their richness of information or their popularity with audiences.
- Evergreen content: This refers to content that remains relevant over time, regardless of current trends or seasonality. Evergreen content is ideal for repurposing because its value doesn’t depreciate. A blog post on “How to Build a Business Plan,” for instance, can be updated and repurposed into an infographic, a webinar, or an e-book.
- Popular content: If a piece of content resonated strongly with your audience, bringing significant traffic or interaction, consider repurposing it. Transform a well-performing blog post into a podcast episode or a catchy infographic for social media. Popular content has already proven its appeal; therefore, pressing the same lever could bring similar or even better results.
- Data-heavy content: Content based on original research, surveys, or case studies works well for repurposing. For instance, a research report can yield several blog posts, infographics, social media quotes, and more. Such information-loaded content holds substantial value because of its unique insights and can be reformatted for several uses.
In sum, understanding the concept of repurposing content fundamentally means recognizing that every piece of content created holds potential for reshaping. By juggling content types, channels, and audience preferences, businesses can make the most out of their content, maximizing its lifespan and utility. As such, repurposing is an essential tool in a marketer’s arsenal to boost reputation, reach, and relevance in the digital sphere.
Strategies for Repurposing Content
In the process of repurposing content, there are a number of effective strategies you can use to ensure you’re maximizing the value of your marketing content.
Identify Repurposable Content
The first step in content repurposing is identifying which content can be repurposed. This can include blog posts, articles, white papers, reports, e-books, podcasts, webinars, or even social media posts. It’s crucial to evaluate your current content inventory to find materials that are evergreen, relevant, high-performing, or can be updated with new information. It’s also important to consider the content that can be broken down into smaller, digestible pieces or combined to create comprehensive guides or ebooks.
Create a Content Repurposing Plan
Once you’ve identified potential content for repurposing, develop a strategic content repurposing plan. This should map out how you will transform and disseminate your original content into new formats and which platforms to utilize. The goal is to make sure your repurposed content reaches as many potential customers as possible and fits their consumption preferences. Moreover, align this plan with your wider marketing strategy to ensure you’re consistently sending the same brand message across all platforms.
Adapt Content for Different Platforms
Different platforms require different types of content. Not all content will work on every platform, and what works on one platform may not work on another. It’s pivotal to adapt the repurposed content to suit different platforms’ characteristics and audiences.
Optimize Repurposed Content for SEO
When repurposing content, SEO is an extremely important factor to consider. SEO is crucial in driving organic traffic to your website and reaching a larger audience. Optimizing your repurposed content for SEO involves using relevant keywords, optimizing images and videos, structuring your content for readability, linking to authoritative sources, and employing metadata effectively.
Revisiting SEO in your repurposed content allows you to target new keywords or double down on those you’re already ranking for. Include these keywords in strategic places like the title, header tags, body content, and meta description to help search engines understand and index your content. Also, remember to link back to the original piece of content where it makes sense to do so, as this can help build a network of interlinked content that boosts your overall SEO strategy.
Content repurposing is an effective way to extend the lifespan of your content, reach a larger audience, and maximize your marketing efforts. By following these strategies — identifying repurposable content, planning your content repurposing, adapting content for different platforms, and optimising your repurposed content for SEO — you can ensure that you’re getting the most out of the content you create.
Benefits of Repurposing Content
In the digital marketing landscape of today, an effective content marketing strategy involves more than just creating good content. It’s also about repurposing this content, a practice that offers numerous benefits. Listed below are chief among them.
Increased Reach and Visibility
The first significant benefit of repurposing content is the potential for a boosted reach and visibility. Let’s take a moment to consider repurposing a blog post as a podcast. While the blog post might reach your traditional audience, a podcast could tap into a new user base — listeners who prefer audio content over text.
Still on the topic of podcasts, let’s picture an established tech company in San Francisco known as “TechBay” that decided to convert some of their comprehensive blog articles into podcasts episodes. Through this strategy, the firm significantly increased the reach and visibility of their originally text-based content, thereby accessing a whole new market of podcast listeners and consumers. By stepping into this arena, TechBay exemplified the idea that repurposed content can tap into new audiences and platforms, thereby expanding reach.
Boosts SEO Ranking
Repurposing content can also contribute to a significant boost in search engine optimization (SEO) ranking. When you convert a single piece of content into different forms that suit blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics, and more, you create several opportunities to target specific, relevant keywords.
Emphasizes Key Messages
Repurposing content can reinforce key messages. Doling out the same central message across various content formats and platforms can resonate deeply with your audience due to the repetitive power. A case in point is the renowned messaging software company, Slack. They cleverly reused case studies across web pages, blog posts, and videos to assert their product’s effectiveness in enhancing team communication and collaboration.
Maximizes Marketing Investment
Finally, repurposing content allows you to extract the most out of your initial content investment. Given the time, effort, and resources that go into creating a single piece of high-quality content, repurposing the same into multiple content formats can offer increased return on investment.
A prime example is the globally recognized marketplace for freelancers: Upwork. They’ve managed to maximize their marketing investment by reproducing their popular blog topics into profound webinars and exhaustive e-books. This strategy bred value out of their premier articles and extended each blog post’s lifespan, reinforcing the value of repurposing content.
In short, repurposing content can overcome marketing noise and information saturation by reusing and refreshing existing content, thereby expanding reach, boosting SEO rankings, bolstering key messages, and maximizing return on investment.
Case Studies: Successful Examples of Repurposed Content
When it comes to repurposing content, showcasing success stories can provide valuable insight on how businesses can follow suit. Here are three case studies that demonstrate the power of repurposed content.
Posting Blogs as Long-form LinkedIn Posts
LinkedIn is a social media platform with a professional spin, making it an excellent platform to establish thought leadership. The popular international corporate training organization, Dale Carnegie, took advantage of this and began repurposing their dense, informative blog posts into long-form LinkedIn posts.
The result was a significant increase in engagements and website traffic. Not only did this provide Dale Carnegie with a larger and more diverse audience, but it also elevated their status as thought leaders in their field. The key success factor here was providing valuable content where their audience was already actively looking for it.
Transforming Informative Webinars into E-books
Webinars are an effective way to provide informative content to a live audience. However, they usually require a significant investment of time and resources to conduct. Buffer, a globally recognized social media management tool company, found a way to get more out of their webinar efforts by transforming them into e-books.
After conducting a successful webinar session on social media strategies, Buffer – instead of archiving the webinar content – repurposed the material into an e-book. They compiled the information discussed in the webinar, added relevant examples and statistics, and presented it in a downloadable e-book accessible from their website.
Buffer’s strategy proved successful as it provided a way for people who missed the live webinar to still access its valuable content. Additionally, the e-book format meant it could be referred to at any time, fostering further engagement and positive customer experiences.
Turning Popular Blog Posts into a Podcast Series
Finally, the impact of developing a podcast series out of successful blog posts can be seen through the digital marketing agency, TopRank Marketing. They noticed that some of their blog posts on content marketing, SEO, and influencer marketing were receiving significant attention.
In an effort to cater to their audience’s preference for audio content, TopRank Marketing started converting these popular blog posts into podcast episodes. The podcast, named “The TopRank Marketing Podcast”, allowed the company to reach new platforms and demographics that prefer auditory learning or want to learn on-the-go.
The success of this podcast series was apparent through the increase in new audiences and a subsequent increase in the number of leads. This case study demonstrates that understanding the diverse content consumption preferences of your audience can guide successful repurposing strategies.
Proper Ways to Repurpose Various Types of Content
Videos
With the rapidly increasing popularity of video content in today’s digital landscape, it only makes sense to leverage the power of your video content by repurposing them creatively. One common approach is to extract audio from videos and convert them into podcasts or audio blogs. This boasts an added advantage of reaching an audience that prefers audio content over video.
Another method of repurposing video content is by creating text-based content from video transcripts. Large businesses and industry leaders such as Google and Microsoft often transform their informative product and service videos into in-depth blog posts, offering a more detailed, textual explanation of the video content. It is also more SEO-friendly, improving visibility in search engine results.
Lastly, breaking down long form or series videos into small snippets also works wonders. It enables you to share bite-size content on different social media platforms, attracting a wider audience while reinforcing key messages.
Summary: For video content, consider creating podcasts, written blog posts, or shorter video snippets to increase its reach and visibility.
Images and Infographics
Images and infographics have always been powerful tools for communication in marketing due to their visual appeal and information-rich nature. They can be quickly and effectively repurposed by converting them into slideshows or presentations.
Many businesses have found great success by repurposing their popular infographics and images into slide decks on platforms like SlideShare, promoting them across multiple channels thereby enhancing online visibility. Another successful approach is turning infographics into video content. Amazon, for example, effectively restructures its detailed infographics on product stats into short, visually appealing videos, offering another engagement format to its customers.
Summary: You can repurpose images and infographics into slid decks for presentation platforms or re-visualize them into video content.
Blogs
The demand for quality written content in the form of blogs is immense. Once a blog is published and gets traction, it can be reused in various ways. Extracting key points from long-form blogs and turning them into infographics is one way to repurpose. This practice is quite common among popular blogs like Moz and HubSpot.
Another prominent way to breathe fresh life into blogs is to convert them into podcasts or videos. This approach appeals to the audience who prefer listening or watching over reading. Businesses like Zappos have made it a habit to transform their most-read blog posts into podcasts or video series, amplifying reach and engagement levels.
Summary: Blog contents offer great reuse potential; they can be transformed into infographics, podcasts, or videos.
E-books
E-books are often used to provide in-depth understanding on certain topics. However, they can also be segmented and repurposed as blog posts, white papers, and case studies. IBM, widely known for its comprehensive e-books, often repurposes them into a series of blog posts and case studies, driving significant traffic and generating numerous backlinks.
Another creative repurposing strategy could be turning the e-book into an online course or workshop. This not only creates an entirely new product but also attracts a different audience segment.
Summary: E-books can be broken down into blog posts, white papers, case studies, or transformed into online courses or workshops.
With these strategies, you can maximize the potential of your existing content, reach a wider audience, and optimize your marketing investment. Remember that the key to effective repurposing is always understanding your audience and where they spend their time online. Tailor your content to suit their preferred content format for maximum engagement.
Potential Issues and Limitations in Content Repurposing
Quality Degradation
Optimal utilization of content is crucial. However, repurposing should not come at the cost of the content quality. One significant issue faced during content repurposing is the potential degradation of content quality. The drive to disseminate existing content across various platforms can sometimes lead to a hurried repurposing process, which can result in poor quality delivery.
Poorly replicated content not only downplays the value proposition of the initial content piece but may also undermine the credibility of the content creator or the brand in the eyes of its audience. Imagine a business infographic about market trends being haphazardly reformatted into a textual blog post, where the visual information is inadequately interpreted. This decrease in quality would likely result in less engaging content, and potentially a loss of audience interest.
For the avoidance of quality degradation, it is principal to ensure careful attention to detail during the repurposing process. Careful planning and thorough execution are essential to maintain the quality of the original content, while also making it engaging and suitable for different platforms.
Irrelevance
Content irrelevance is another glaring drawback in content repurposing. All platforms are unique in how they engage with audiences and in the type of content that fares well on them. A piece of content that soars on one platform may not necessarily do well on another due to differences in audience preferences, the implied intent of users, and the overall platform environment.
The failure to consider such nuances can render repurposed content inappropriate, out-of-context, or irrelevant on the new platform. For instance, a long-form research article may work well on a blog, but may not hold the same impact when uploaded as a LinkedIn post where users prefer concise, professional, and impactful content.
To overcome the risk of irrelevance, it becomes essential to have a profound understanding of platform-specific content requirements and audience behaviors. This understanding aids in making sound decisions on how to adapt the existing content to suit the platform and create a meaningful impact.
Redundancy
Redundancy in content can adversely affect audience engagement. With an overload of information available at the click of a button, audiences today seek novelty and uniqueness in the content they consume. If your content is merely rehashed from one platform to another without significant value addition, it could come across as repetitive or redundant to your audience, leading to disinterest and potential attrition.
For example, a podcast episode that is merely transcribed into text without any addition or enhancement may seem uninteresting to an audience member who has already listened to the podcast episode.
To tackle redundancy, marketers need to bring in creativity and versatility in how they adapt their existing content for different platforms. It’s not just about replicating; it’s about repurposing with a fresh perspective and formatting that draws in the audience.
The Power of Content Repurposing
Repurposing content is indeed an influential approach that maximizes marketing efforts. Essentially, it means presenting the same content in different formats. This can significantly enhance its reach and visibility. Not only does repurposing refresh and breathe new life into underutilized materials, but it also multiplies their value by adapting them to numerous channels and platforms. As a result, businesses can communicate their brand messages more effectively to their respective audiences.
Reiterating Key Insights
Reflecting on the journey we’ve taken on the topic of repurposing content in this article, several important points stand out. First, repurposing content is a powerful strategy that enables businesses to capitalize on the value of their marketing materials. It offers several benefits, including increasing reach and visibility, boosting SEO ranking, emphasizing key messages, and maximizing marketing investment.
Notably, the process of repurposing content involves identifying applicable content, creating a content repurposing plan, adapting content for different platforms, and optimizing the content for SEO. The approach works across a variety of content types, including videos, images, blogs, and e-books.
Intriguingly, numerous examples exist highlighting how various companies managed to increase visibility and drive engagement with their repurposed content, showing its effectiveness and impact. For instance, companies have successfully turned blogs into LinkedIn posts, webinars into e-books, and popular blog content into podcast series.
However, the strategy does come with its potential issues and limitations. These may include quality degradation, redundancy, and irrelevance if not carried out systematically and thoughtfully.
Ending Remarks
Ultimately, the key to effective content repurposing lies in understanding the needs of the audience and adapting to meet those needs. By repackaging material into different mediums and formats, businesses can extend value and ensure their marketing materials resonate with various facets of their audience.
The notion of turning one piece of content into multiple, ensuring each is uniquely tailored to suit various platforms, is nothing short of a game-changer in marketing strategy. Savvy businesses recognize the power and efficacy of this approach, transforming their once static assets into dynamic tools that consistently deliver valuable information to their audiences.
While the strategy of repurposing content may not be without challenges, with careful planning and implementation, it promises to maximize the value of marketing materials, amplifying the company’s messages and reaching a wider audience in the process. Therefore, it is a strategy worth considering and integrating into an effective, holistic marketing approach.
Repurposing Content: FAQs
1. What Is the Concept of Repurposing Content?
Repurposing content involves taking an existing piece of content and adjusting it to extend its reach and usability. By transforming its format or updating its information, marketers can maximize value and engagement.
2. Can Repurposing Content Improve SEO Rankings?
Yes, repurposing content tends to improve SEO rankings. Reusing high-value content in different formats, such as blog posts, videos, and social media updates, helps increase inbound links and overall visibility.
3. What Are Some Effective Strategies For Repurposing Content?
Effective strategies include transforming blog articles into podcasts or videos, creating infographics from research data, and using snippets of longer form content for social media updates or email newsletters.
4. How Does Repurposing Benefit Content Marketing Efforts?
Repurposing content benefits marketing efforts by increasing brand reach, enhancing SEO, offering content in varied formats to appeal to different audience preferences, and maximizing the return on time and resources invested in content creation.
5. Can Any Type of Content be Repurposed?
In theory, any content can be repurposed. However, marketers should focus on repurposing high-quality, evergreen content that provides value to their audience, remaining relevant and informative over time.
6. Are There Any Potential Pitfalls in Repurposing Content?
Yes, potential pitfalls include seeming repetitive or losing original content context. Additionally, repurposing content also requires a significant time investment and creativity to ensure each iteration offers unique value.