What is the purpose of the content your business is producing?
There are a lot of ways to respond to this question, and many of them involve things like SEO, lead generation and driving conversions. While these answers are all correct, they don’t highlight the chief goal of content marketing: educating your prospects and customers.
By producing content that serves as a useful resource for the people who engage with your business, you can achieve all of the desired outcomes above and more. This is why it’s unfortunate when an organization fails to extract the full value from their content.
So the question is, how do we take our existing content and give it the momentum and reach required to produce serious results?
The Benefits Of Repurposing Your Content
Marketers that excel at creating and promoting rich content are an invaluable resource. Great content can help increase brand awareness and engagement, better your relationship with customers, and establish your business as a thought leader in your industry. And repurposing that content will help amplify these benefits.
Instead of allowing your investment of time, effort, and money to fade into the background, you can expand its reach and enhance its value by transforming it into different formats. A few of the key benefits include:
- Solving the all-too-common problem of running out of new content ideas
- Connecting with a whole new audience on a different platform
- Increasing the odds of having content rank well in the SERPs
- Tailoring your content to accommodate diverse learning styles
- Encouraging audience engagement and loyalty
Repurposing your existing content also makes it possible to take a resource that didn’t produce the results you were hoping for and give it a chance to connect with your audience in a different way.
As your content library begins to grow, you can continue to build on its established value and use it to create the ultimate collection of resources in your market.
What Types of Content Deserve to Be Repurposed?
Just about any type of content that you have in stock can be repurposed, but this isn’t necessarily the most effective strategy.
Content that does not contain much substance, or that is too outdated, is not ideal unless you plan to put some work into updating it and beefing it up into a stellar resource.
Another option is to combine several pieces of content and transform them into a different, more comprehensive offering. For example, a single webinar may not be enough to repurpose into a valuable eBook, but if you used the data from several related webinars, then you could combine them to create a pretty compelling eBook.
As far as types of content go, there are numerous options available. The formats and channels that work the best will depend on your industry and the audience that you are attempting to target.
Exploring Content Opportunities
Before you jump into repurposing, you may want to identify the channels and content types that have the highest likelihood of profitability. A few questions that can get you started include:
- What content formats is your business most proficient with?
How does your target audience interact with your content? - How much time do you have to dedicate to this task?
- How much of your marketing budget do you want to put toward enhancing your content performance?
- What goals do you hope to achieve?
Once you’ve figured out the direction that you’d like to take, you can begin to explore the different opportunities available. The following list outlines several popular and effective ways to branch out with content marketing.
SlideShare Presentations
This social platform has a giant online presence and contains a goldmine of content.
It is used by marketers to share snackable visual content and is especially lucrative for B2B organizations. With an average of 3 billion presentation views per month, this channel is a great way to connect with new prospects and drive traffic to your website.
Easy Content to Repurpose to SlideShare: Infographics, Instructographics, Webinars, and Podcasts.
Infographics
The easy-to-digest nature of infographics makes them an extremely popular content format.
A wide range of content types can be repurposed into an infographic to highlight useful information related to your business or industry. These visual resources are much more likely to get users to click through to your website and can significantly increase the number of inbound links pointing to your site.
Easy Content to Repurpose to Infographics: Blog Posts and SlideShares
Pinterest Instructographics
These assets are similar to infographics, but instead of simply outlining data, they are created with the intention of providing step-by-step instructions.
Instructographics are either solely image-based or contain instructional images paired with some text. While they tend to do really well on Pinterest, you can also add them to blog posts or the resource section of your website.
Easy Content to Repurpose to Instructographics: How-to Blog Posts, How-to Videos
Reviving Old Blog Posts
A regularly updated blog has proven to be an effective way to connect with prospects and drive traffic to your website.
However, it is common for old blog posts to contain outdated information and to get buried underneath newer content. Rather than writing a completely new post to compensate for aging content, bringing old blog posts back to life makes it possible to both save time and provide an even stronger resource.
eBooks
Turning traffic into leads and establishing yourself as an authority in your industry are two big benefits of eBooks.
This type of content is more in-depth and time-consuming than some of the other items on this list, but the ROI is worth it if you know how to incorporate them into your inbound marketing strategy.
Easy Content to Repurpose to eBooks: Long-form Blog Posts and Videos
White Papers
Educating your prospects on the more data-heavy or complex areas of your business is one of the most relevant use cases for a white paper.
They are basically in-depth reports that educate readers about a business, tool, industry news and may even contain proprietary research. This Ultimate Guide to Creating Effective White Papers is a good place to learn more about this type of content.
Easy Content to Repurpose to Whitepapers: How-to Blog Posts
Videos
When you consider that YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web, it can be a massive oversight to neglect this channel.
Although the idea of repurposing your content into video format can be intimidating, the wide assortment of online tools and resources make it a viable strategy for most businesses. If you want to drive 3x as many monthly visits to your website and increase both organic traffic and consumer confidence, then you should give video a shot.
Easy Content to Repurpose to Video: Infographics and SlideShares
Webinars
Hosting webinars can help you build relationships with influencers in your industry, attract new business and provide a resource that can be repurposed into a variety of formats.
This detailed guide is a good place to learn more about tapping into the benefits of this content medium.
Easy Content to Repurpose to Webinar: Slideshares and Long-form Blog Posts
Podcasts
Starting a podcast can be both a solid alternative to webinars or a complementary repurposed asset.
In the last five years, the number of unique podcast listeners has grown from 25 to 75 million. Extensive technical skills or a large budget are not required to start a podcast and the return can be considerable.
Easy Content to Re-purpose to Podcast: Blog Posts, Webinars, and Ebooks
Conclusion
Content repurposing is all about taking your current resources and presenting them in new and useful ways. Selectively choosing the content and channels that you want to use for repurposing can give you results that directly impact your bottom line.
Contact me today to learn how your business can benefit from Content Marketing.