Many of our clients share their struggles in producing fresh content regularly. Coupled with industry changes or a shift in how audiences consume content, they can see their traffic fluctuating up and down, like an electric cardiogram.
Sometimes all you need is a little refresh to keep your audience interested and coming back.
Our advice is often to revisit existing material like an eBook or podcast that may be just sitting on your website, collecting digital dust. You can breathe new life into your old material and jump-start your business’s content strategy by reimagining, recycling and repurposing these into new content assets.
Simplifying the content creation process
At its core, content recycling is reusing existing material or its best portions to increase its reach. Typically, the repurposed content is updated into a new format (i.e., from a podcast to an original blog post).
Let’s face it, marketing today requires us to create high-quality content consistently. A recent survey found that 67 percent of content marketers produce content, such as podcasts or social posts, every day.
That’s all well and good, but what if you have a small marketing department with finite resources? Faced with these limitations, the situation may seem impossible. Fortunately, there is a solution.
In this blog post, we’ll run through the ABCs of repurposing content, how to incorporate it into your strategy as well as show you a real-life example from the team at webinar.net.
H2: Why is repurposing content good?
Repurposing, however, saves you a considerable amount of resource allocation, allows you to reiterate your message in new and creative ways, climb the organic SEO rankings (51 percent of all traffic is organic) and reach new audiences. Not to mention, it safeguards your team’s sanity, as you don’t have to start everything from scratch.
Not to mention, repetition is a key marketing tenet. According to the Rule of Seven, buyers need to hear your message at least seven times before they’re willing to engage with you.
How do you repurpose content?
So, how can you repurpose your materials and flesh out a strategy for your business?
Here at webinar.net, we practice what we preach – this blog post, is based on a video that we previously posted on our website and YouTube channel. That video was taped as part of our The Webinar: Lessons from the Front Line podcast, which itself was cut into bite-sized segments for social channels. That single podcast generated over a dozen short- and long-form pieces of audio, video and text-based content.
With a bit of preparation, there’s no reason why your business can’t do something similar. Here are six best practices to follow.
1) Find evergreen content pieces
To repurpose content, you need to find something worth repurposing. We recommend choosing evergreencontent – just like the trees that never lose their leaves, this is content that remains relevant no matter what year it is or the season. They never lose value, as people keep coming back to look at them.
There are a few ways to find evergreen content. You can scour through your metric reports (i.e., Google Analytics) to see which existing content brings in the most traffic and ranks high in organic search, linking structure as well as other key performance statistics.
Audit your site and go through your blog content one by one to discover which ones are still relevant. While you’re at it, conduct some keyword research to see what you’ll need to add to remain competitive in search engines.
2) Make the content fit the format
Transitioning a piece of content to a new format is all well and good, but you’ll need to tinker with it. Simply transplanting the information 1:1 will create a poor experience for the end-user and not provide you with the traffic you crave.
For example, blog articles shouldn’t be recited verbatim into a camera for a video or condensed word-for-word into an infographic. The same applies if you’re working with a slide deck, white paper or case study.
You need to approach everything in a case-by-case situation.
3) Provide bite-sized morsels
If you have a larger, detailed blog post, you can repurpose it by breaking it down into smaller, more digestible morsels before sharing it in social media posts.
Considering how people consume their content these days, this is the best way to go. People live busy lives and are bombarded by material on all fronts. They want short-form posts and YouTube video clips. Oblige them by featuring your best bits and pieces.
4) Use the power of visuals
One of the easiest ways to repurpose content is to take your existing material and make it a visual experience. If you’re like most businesses, your old content pieces are text-based blogs.
Take your high-quality content and work closely with the graphic designer or video production team to convert it into a more visual medium. Since you’re not starting from scratch, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of time.
5) Retreading old ground
Even if you’ve talked about something before, you can reiterate the point in the future across multiple pieces of content. Re-share that tip, tactic, strategy or mindset while adding a new spin with a fresh example.
Obviously, you don’t want to do this with everything you post, as it will turn off your audience. But what you use here and there can be a nice addition to your overall content marketing strategy.
You can also simply republish your content as-is on a different platform to further increase your reach. While not nearly as effective as posting something fresh, content syndication can help tap into a new audience.
6) Experiment with guest posts
Guest posting is a popular content marketing method to build backlinks from other sites, increasing brand exposure and attracting a new audience.
It can be difficult and time-consuming to develop fresh ideas for a guest post. So instead of starting from scratch, what if you found inspiration for your contribution by looking towards an existing blog post?
The key is reformatting your existing content so that it’s original enough to be posted somewhere else as a guest post. Duplicate content gets penalized and doesn’t rank very high in search engines.
For example, if your original blog post was “4 tips for setting up webinar hosting platforms before webinars,” the guest post version of that could be a list of successful webinars and what they did to prepare for the big day.
The webinar.net content strategy
Now that you know how and why you should be repurposing content, we’ll show you a real-life example from the team here at webinar.net. Using a PowerPoint deck that we developed for client pitches as a blueprint, we’ll give you a step-by-step rundown of what it takes to simplify your content marketing strategy.
Finding our foundational content
First things first, you need to find or produce a foundational piece. In marketing circles, this is called your “rock” content – a substantial piece of content from which you will chip other pieces of content; this serves as a definitive guide to a conversation you want to control.
Many companies like to have a dedicated blog post, but it’s ultimately your decision. Here at webinar.net, that larger piece of content was our Return on Investment (ROI) presentation.
Why did we create it? During a data-driven research phase and needs analysis, we saw an opportunity: If businesses were to invest in robust virtual events and webinar software packages (such as what webinar.net offers), they needed to determine its ROI before committing.
Do your keyword research and find out what challenges your target market is dealing with related to your products or services; this will help you determine the direction of your rock content.
Like any other piece of thought leadership content, though, your foundational piece will have a shelf-life – in our experience, roughly two years. But depending on your industry, it can vary. In our situation, we were able to repurpose content for longer because it was the perfect evergreen topic.
Once you’ve squeezed all the juice out of your foundational piece, instead of letting it wilt away, you’ll want to slice it up and turn it into further assets – digital, written or interactive.
Taking further action
After creating the ROI presentation, we received some great customer stories about getting ROI, after incorporating the data and best practices we had provided them the year before. We knew we had something that we could build upon going forward.
Enter the ROI webinar. We decided to wrap up our presentation and relate it to our key customers. We benchmarked their companies against the index and brought forth stories, linking them to how big businesses were getting ROI.
We had to pull out the correlation between having a webinar program and revenue with this webinar, as it is not necessarily a straight line like sales. Among other things, we highlighted the importance of running virtual events more than once throughout the year since new people are always searching for your topic.
We created three different intros for three different webinars, each focusing on targeting a specific audience. Clips from the webinar were posted on our website and YouTube page.
This inadvertently sparked another content opportunity. An outside marketer saw our webinar and wrote about it in his blog post; he reached out to us about posting it and wanted us to review it.
We converted our ROI presentation into several more blog posts, taking inspiration from this. If you have the resources at your company to create them, we highly recommend these as content pieces.
At that point, we realized we had enough blog content to repurpose it into an eBook, “The Smart Marketer’s Guide to ROI,” a how-to guide that included videos and pictures from our initial ROI presentation. Without going out of our way, we managed to repurpose our original rock content into several valuable content assets, building upon each one. It’s also been the source material for several podcasts.
Interactivity can be the difference
One of our top-performing pieces to this day is the interactive Webinar Survival Guide, which builds upon the success of our ROI presentation.
The guide is a business’s one-stop shop for everything it needs to create a comprehensive webinar program specific its goals and objectives. It tests the maturity of people’s webinar programs and asks for specific numbers – conversions, engagements, etc. Based on where they are on the benchmark, we provide them with suggestions as well as video content from our ROI webinar and pointers from our eBook.
Repurposing content doesn’t have to be complicated. These interactive content pieces are a great way to keep the marketing channels flowing and drive leads to your business.
Content that works for you
While the specifics will vary from vertical to vertical and business to business, repurposing content remains an excellent method for boosting your overall content strategy.
The key thing to remember is that you don’t have to create new content all the time.
Content repurposing is an art. Make use of the different content formats, lock in on evergreen material, leverage interactivity, use the power of visuals and don’t be afraid to republish old content from time to time.
And if you’re still struggling for ideas, try getting inspiration from the people on the front lines, such as your sales team. It’s safe to assume they have a good sense of what people want to know. We’ve discussed this recently in our best practices for virtual event planning in 2022, but it is just as applicable here.
FAQ
What is content repurposing?
Repurposing content simply means taking one asset (such as a blog post) and reusing it somewhere else. That sounds simple enough in theory, but it can get tricky in execution. To make it work, it helps to produce content with repurposing in mind, so you can easily slice and dice it into different formats.
Should I repurpose content?
With content repurposing the important thing to remember is that you don’t always need to publish new content. Through repurposing, you’ll save time, reach a wider audience, and get the most value out of every new piece of content you produce. Not to mention, repurposed content safeguards your team’s sanity since you don’t have to start everything from scratch every time.
How do I repurpose existing content?
There are many different methods for repurposing content. If you need a few ideas, these are some (but not all) of the possibilities:
- Turning blog content into featured podcasts.
- Gather information on client successes & turn them into case studies.
- Compile video content from your blog posts.
- Put together an eBook from related blog content.
- Leverage testimonials and statistics in your social media posts.
- Rewrite old blog posts with new information.
- Offer guest contributions for topics you’ve already covered.
If you need more help with your next webinar or virtual event, whether it be setting it up or producing content, reach out to an expert at webinar.net today!
And don’t forget to check out our state-of-the-art webinar platform by booking a live demo or subscribing for a free trial. When you switch to the best online webinar software platform on the planet, you’ll be engaging your target audience like never before!
