How to Repurpose Content in Your Marketing Strategy
Today digital marketers are tasked with getting the attention of audiences under extremely challenging circumstances. The competition is fierce. The digital landscape is noisy. And marketers must create more content to stake a claim in the marketplace amidst the cacophony of content.
While the competition for attention is intense, the good news is that marketers have more tools to connect with people than ever before. Social media, email, blogs, magazines, books, eCourses, podcasts, and video, are all tools in the marketer arsenal. But one resource remains finite: time. There is more to create, more opportunity to connect, and more ways to reach an intended audience, but there is not more time.
So how can marketers maximize the potential of the content created?
With the right strategy and tools in place, one piece of content can be repurposed and repackaged to meet varied needs and consumption preferences. There is no need to multiply content creators or come up with fresh new content on a daily basis if you adopt the strategy of repurposing content. In fact, if you are only using a piece of content once, you’re doing it wrong.
Here are three tips on how to strategically repurpose content in order to better serve your audience, maximize the content you have, and save time.
How to Repurpose Content in Your Marketing Strategy
- Get clear on your “why” for repurposing content.
Before the repurposing process can even begin, get clarity on your goals for the endeavor. Are you looking for ways to simplify the creation process? Are you in desperate need of new revenue streams? Are you looking to increase value for subscribers? Get clear on why you need to repurpose content and what you aim to accomplish. This will help inform how and what to repurpose.
Get clarity by first determining what the biggest problems are that your content program is trying to solve. What keeps you up at night? What keeps executive leadership up at night? Perhaps it is that you are short on time or manpower. Then, determine if you already have content to repurpose or if you need to create the initial piece of content that will serve as your cornerstone content piece.
- Select or Create Your Cornerstone Content Carefully.
When strategically repurposing content, you will most often begin with a substantial piece of content. Perhaps it is a series of audio recordings of speakers from your annual conference. It may be an annual report or research series that speaks to a variety of topics. This cornerstone piece of content should be a long-form piece that will help you reach your content goals for the entire calendar year. It should be prioritized in your content creation annual budget. If you need supporting arguments for this investment, calculate the time it would take to create all of this content from scratch as opposed to starting with a cornerstone piece. The content cornerstone should be one that has proven to resonate with your audience or is a content pillar for your organization. Consult analytics to determine the content that performs best. When fleshing out your content strategy for the upcoming year, begin by determining what this cornerstone content piece will be.
- Determine if you will reformat or expand.
You also have multiple options when it comes to repurposing content. You can take a given topic or piece of content and reformat it into a different medium or you can take a topic that resonates and expound on it, taking a deeper dive. For example, if an article on a new topic performs extremely well on your website, perhaps you should expand that into a podcast series or a conference theme. Reformatting existing content and expanding content that resonates are two strategies content creators should employ when appropriate.
Repurposing content gives you the opportunity to strategically serve your audience by giving them the topics they want in the formats they will consume. The next time you need content, look at your past content with fresh eyes. You may be able to reformat or expand on a piece of content you have already created without starting from scratch.
