Content marketing doesn’t have to feel like running on a hamster wheel. It can be exciting, engaging, and fulfilling, and it should be! In this article, we’ll provide tips on effectively repurposing and refreshing existing content to add flare and reformat them in new ways that will excite your audience.
The Benefits of Repurposing Your Content
Content repurposing aims to utilize the content you already have and to scale your production and distribution, all while minimizing the resources required. This extends your content lifespan to maximize your investment while providing your old content with new meaning and significance.
By repurposing your content, you will reduce the following:
- The need to consistently create new content.
- Your content production time and cost.
- The effort needed to scale your content across multiple channels.
Why Refresh, Repurpose, and Reformat Your Content?
Utilizing your library of published blog posts, newsletters, or social media posts will save you time as a marketer. There may be helpful information that did not reach your intended audience or valuable content that needs some tweaking and modernization. In this case, you can quickly start repurposing this content to scale your content marketing without continuously investing in new content.
When budgets are tight and time is limited, there are more practical solutions than creating content from scratch every time. A way you can deliver a constant flow of content for all your media channels is to recycle what you have in one of three ways:
- Refresh and revise existing content to add relevancy.
- Repurpose existing content for different channels.
- Reformat content into entirely new content assets.
Tip #1 – Refreshing Your Content
The first thing you can do with your existing content is improve it. Looking at your published content from the past, you may find that it needs to be updated or needs revision.
A great way to do this is by refreshing valuable insights from previous content. Renovating an old blog post with updated statistics or recent developments is a great way to add helpful, accurate information. Your audience will appreciate your ability to provide accurate and timely information, and it can also bolster your search ranking on Google so that more people can see your content.
Before you dive headfirst into producing new content, consider doing this first:
- Audit your old content.
- Identify content that has become dated and needs revision.
- List the content to be updated and share it with your team.
- Allocate time every week/month to refresh your content as required.
Stay organized and record any new changes you make to your content to help you manage and keep track of what content you have and still need to refresh.
What Content Can You Refresh?
Written content is the simplest to refresh, and you can simply rewrite or add what is necessary. You can edit in new sections for mediums like video or audio, but creating a revised version might be required depending on how you have produced your content.
Here is a list of content you could refresh:
- Blog posts on your website
- Social media posts
- Videos on YouTube
- Podcast episodes
What Can Make Your Content Better?
A great way to enhance your content is by taking advantage of AI, the current marketing game-changer. AI is rapidly progressing in its advancements and becoming a go-to resource for many, and it doesn’t fall short with content marketing.
We suggest putting your existing content into ChatGPT, and with a few simple prompts, you can uncover a new perspective or phrasing that aligns with your topic. AI can process and analyze vast amounts of data faster than searching through various studies, websites, and other sources.
You can also ask yourself these four questions to freshen up your content:
- How can you make this content more relevant for your buyer?
- How can you make this content more actionable?
- How can you enhance the user experience?
- How can you focus more on the searcher’s intent?
Tip #2 – Repurposing Your Content
Whereas refreshing content focuses on existing content and updating it generally in the same format, repurposing content is taking content from one form and recycling it into another.
For example, repurpose a long-form blog post into multiple social media posts, which feed numerous social channels simultaneously. There are several AI tools you can harness to get you started. Great content never ends with AI. You want to use it as a starting point and provide your expertise and knowledge to craft the perfect message. This saves you time and resources, produces more content and engagement, and can help small teams achieve higher production and distribution velocity than would be impossible if you tried to create everything from scratch.
Repurpose Blog Posts Into Social Posts
At Vende Digital, we invest heavily in long-form blog content for two main reasons. It helps us educate our buyers on their journey to find their needed answers, and it allows us to create a highly-efficient content flywheel to drive our content production.
This is all a seamless process because of the ease of repurposing our blogs into smaller content for almost any channel. Whether you need short, concise Tweets for your Twitter account or longer form posts for LinkedIn, blog posts offer you the flexibility to create content for various social platforms with less effort.
Repurposing your blogs helps to create visibility for your existing content. As any content marketer knows, content distribution is the secret weapon for scaling your content marketing and reaping higher returns.
Repurpose Blog Posts Into Podcasts
As we have seen trending this year, podcasts have been steadily growing in popularity and have quickly become a preferred source by many for obtaining information. According to recent data, the percentage of consumers listening to podcasts has increased to 62% and continues to rise.
For B2B companies specifically, podcasts offer the perfect platform for sharing insights and interviewing subject matter experts or your target customers. You can even utilize podcasts when repurposing blog posts or videos into content your buyer can easily consume, and it doesn’t have to be too lengthy. They can be anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes long so that it is long enough to be valuable and short enough to be easy to consume.
Repurpose Video for Social Media
Video can be a powerful medium for educating your buyers when executed properly. 96% of video marketers state that using video in their content marketing has improved user understanding of their products or services.
You may already have an archive of videos explaining topics relating to your business. Taking these videos and cutting them down into short, punchy videos that you and your team can share across social media will help you produce new content without going back to square one.
Tip #3 – Reformatting Your Content
If you have content already uploaded to your website and social channels, it is easy to reformat them in a new, insightful way. The possibilities are endless regarding what formats you can use to reach your target audience, and we’ll discuss a few examples that are ideal for conversion.
Reformat a Blog Post as a Quick Guide
Everyone is in a rush, and so are your buyers. Offering a condensed version of your blog post as a quick guide makes consuming previously published information into a format that is easy to follow and gets the point across efficiently.
For example, we could reformat this blog into a short PDF covering the critical points of this post stemming from our key takeaways. This approach will help our customers get their heads around the topic faster and provide them with a downloadable resource that is readily accessible at any time. It can even double as a lead magnet for your services where appropriate and further build authority for your brand.
Reformat a PDF Into an Infographic
You may have a guide for your buyers that covers key points around a topic, as we mentioned above, and if you do, you could use that content to create an infographic that visually sums up the pertinent stats and information.
Utilizing a graphic designer to assist in the design and layout can be beneficial to ensure each resource starts with a consistent foundation that flows with your brand. By the end, you’ll have additional assets to share on social media, in presentations, or as PDF guides.
Reformat a Blog Post for Syndication
Reformatting by syndication involves republishing your blog posts on external platforms or websites, allowing you to tap into new audiences and gain more exposure for your content.
The challenge is picking the best-fit publications and reformatting your content to serve that specific publication’s audience best while aligning with its guidelines and requirements. You don’t want your content to sound like it’s simply selling your services; you want to share helpful and informative information that guides your buyer toward your solution.
Simply copying and pasting your blog post onto another platform may not yield the desired results, so it’s essential that you reformat it appropriately. A direct copy of content could also get your website in trouble from an SEO perspective, so adding some originality to the cross-post is best. Overall, this is an excellent strategy to build authority in your industry and build website backlinks, which could improve your SEO if done correctly.
Key Takeaways for The 3 Rs of Content Marketing
Starting from zero when creating content requires time, resources, and skills that most content marketing departments don’t have or can’t afford. Therefore, the only way to scale your content marketing sensibly is to leverage existing content differently.
Here are key points to remember when going through the steps to reprocess, alter, and enhance your content:
- Identify dated content and refresh where necessary, boosting your SEO and driving traffic.
- Repurposing content is the only practical strategy to scale your content production.
- Long-form content generates content for any channel or purpose.
- Repurposing content isn’t cut and paste, it’s about optimizing content for each channel.
- Reformatting content makes your content more accessible to different audiences.
How Can We Help?
Scaling your content marketing can be an uphill battle. At Vende Digital, we specialize in helping B2B organizations like yours to develop practical content marketing strategies you can execute.
Talk to Us
Schedule a complimentary discovery call with our team to see how we can help you build an efficient content marketing strategy to increase your visibility and attract more customers.
