The most inefficient use of a marketer’s time is to spend several days researching, reporting, writing, editing and SEO-priming a single blog post, only for it to spend eternity collecting dust in the archives — and then repeat the process from scratch.
Every marketer has to make content repurposing part of their process — especially if they want to work smarter, not harder.
What Is Content Repurposing
What’s the Benefit of Repurposing Content?
Content repurposing allows marketers to squeeze every last drop out of the work they’ve already done. And because their time and resources are often limited, it helps them fill content calendars with maximum efficiency.
Repurposing also enables a marketer’s work to find new audiences — or meet existing ones in new places, reinforcing a company’s web presence and giving people additional chances to engage with the content.
Perhaps most importantly, content repurposing gives existing pieces of content a second chance to make an impact. Maybe they didn’t find an audience the first time around, or maybe they initially garnered high traffic, then petered out eventually. With a simple tune-up, content that doesn’t rank high on search engines can get the refresher it needs to get the algorithm to bump it to the first page.
How to Repurpose Content
Even though content repurposing is meant to make a marketer’s job easier, there’s much more to it than copying and pasting the same material from one medium to another.
One way to efficiently repurpose content is to begin with a core piece of content and spin it out into multiple formats.
Content Repurposing Ideas
- Start with a long-form interview.
- Publish it as a podcast.
- Upload it as a video to YouTube.
- Use video highlights for Facebook ads.
- Use audio snippets for Instagram Stories.
- Transcribe the interview and edit it into a blog post.
- Bundle multiple blog posts into an e-book.
- Use quotes from blog post to make social cards.
- Use stats from blog post to create infographics.
Create Your ‘Hero’ Content
The first thing to do is create your core piece of content. Think of it as a big slab of stone you’ll later hew down into multiple assets.
A prime example of hero content is a long-form interview with someone who’s an expert on whatever topic you’re writing about.
This is what Elise Dopson, a content writer and consultant, does for her membership community, Peak Freelance. Once a week she records an interview with an expert, which she distributes to her audience (with the expert’s permission). She uses that as “the foundation for everything else,” she said. From there, “it’s just a matter of tweaking things.”
Publish Audio as a Podcast
After you conduct the interview, edit the audio recording of it using a service such as GarageBand or Audacity. Publish the finished product to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and elsewhere.
Upload Video to YouTube
If the interview was conducted over a video-conferencing platform, edit it with a video editor — then upload it to YouTube.
Use Video for Facebook Ads
If your interview is conducted with a client or user for a case study, for example, you can take a short segment from it and repurpose it as a video to use for Facebook ads (assuming that’s a marketing channel your company uses). Make sure this use case is covered in the release form; clients shouldn’t be surprised when they see themselves in your ad.
Create Audio Snippets for Instagram Stories
Find the most memorable quote or the hottest take from your interview and chop it into a 10-second audio clip. Pair it with a background image (an audio visualizer and a headshot of the source work great) and publish it as an audiogram on Instagram Stories.
Turn the Transcript Into a Blog Post
Import the audio file of your interview into a transcription service, such as Descript, to produce a text version of it. Clean up the run-on sentences, add some section headers, and publish it as a Q&A on your company blog. (You may have to read over the transcript while listening to the interview to catch any discrepancies.)
...or a Series of Blog Posts
To get even more mileage out of the interview, make it into a series of blog posts. Identify the most salient points of the interview, and address each point with your own commentary in greater depth and detail in a separate blog post. Use your subject matter expert for key insights and quotes, but write the meat of each post yourself.
Cross-Post the Blog Post to Medium
To reach an even larger audience, you can publish a copy of the blog post to Medium. Make sure you set the original post as the canonical link. That way, search engines know which version of the post to prioritize in their rankings, and you will not be penalized for publishing duplicate content.
Turn Multiple Blog Posts Into an E-Book
If you have enough blog posts in your archive that address the same topic or share similar themes, you can bundle them together and publish the collection as an e-book. This works especially well for lead generation, whereby you offer the e-book for free in exchange for a prospect’s contact information.
Use Key Insights for Social Media Posts
Adapt your blog post into a Twitter thread. Make each tweet contain a single point. Remember: You only get 280 characters per tweet.
Another route: Pull out the snappiest quotes and most surprising statistics from your interview (or the blog post you’ve created from it) and create social cards with them. These engaging images can be created with services like Canva.
These social posts don’t have to promote your blog post either (though that works too); they can be standalone pieces of content that deliver bite-sized value to people scrolling down their feeds.
Adapt Surprising Facts and Stats Into an Infographic
Numbers are often most effective when presented visually, rather than through words on a page. That’s where infographics come in. Using tools like Canva, marketers can quickly pull out the most interesting statistics from their interviews and plug them into a shareable, social-friendly image. Copy from the text version can be included too, to help give the infographic a guiding narrative.
What Content Is Worth Repurposing?
Not sure where to begin with content repurposing?
Jason Bradwell, a marketing director and creator of the B2B Bite newsletter, suggests starting with the pieces on your website that already generate great traffic and click-through rates.
“Those are good indicators you’ve got a compelling story that people are interested in,” he said. “It’s worth evaluating to see if that story can be broken up and put back together in a different format.”
He also suggests asking your sales team: What content have they been sending their leads? What’s resonating with their prospects? Have their clients referenced any of our content?
“If you’ve got a good sense from your sales team that there’s some momentum behind a piece, and that it just needs to be repackaged so it can be consumed in a different way,” Bradwell said, “that’s an opportunity you want to pursue.”
Maybe there’s a whitepaper that’s well-received. Try turning it into an infographic or a short blog post tailored to give a busy executive some quick insights.
What Distribution Channels Should You Focus On?
Unless you have a large team and the budget to match, you’re going to have to be choosy about what marketing channels to focus your efforts on. You can’t be everywhere all the time, Bradwell said. That’s “one of the biggest mistakes that growing B2B companies can make.”
That’s why Bradwell suggests using a 60/20/20 rule as a guiding principle: Sixty percent of your focus should be on creating content for the channel you know works best — wherever your buyers do their research, hang out and convert. Pour the majority of your content creation efforts there.
The next 20 percent of your focus should be on repurposing that original piece of hero content across other channels. (See the “How to Repurpose Content” section above.)
And the final 20 percent of your efforts should be allocated toward what Bradwell terms “left-field channels” — places where you can test some ideas and meet your prospects where they’re not expecting to see you or your competitors (places like TikTok or Clubhouse).
“It’s good to be a big fish in a small pond,” Bradwell said.
