Content is a valuable part of any marketing strategy. You use it to convey your expertise, express your brand voice, attract and keep website visitors resonate with your target audience, and much more. This is true for various forms of content, but did you know that one piece of content can serve multiple purposes? A piece of content that has one purpose now, can actually be used for another purpose down the line. In this post we’ll go over what content repurposing is and how your business can benefit from it.
Repurposing content is a way of taking content you’ve used for one purpose, and reusing it for another. Just as you can repurpose an old shoe into a flower vase, you can repurpose a blog post into an infographic, or an interview into a blog post. Content repurposing is a marketing strategy that comes in handy for many reasons. It can enhance your marketing, save you time, help with your online presence, and more.
As a small business owner, you’ve already got enough on your plate. Why not save yourself some time and effort by stretching your content a bit further? Below are twelve reasons why to start gathering up your existing content. From the old to the new, the top performing pieces to the flops, all content can be repurposed.
If you have a piece of content that is performing well in one area, there’s a chance it can perform well in other areas too. Maybe you have a blog post that is driving traffic to your website. Why not convert it into a printed pocket guide with a tracked phone number, that you can hand out at your next event?
Some of the content you publish is not going to perform as well as others. However it may not be that the content itself is poor. It may be the context in which it is presented. An eBook that didn’t capture many leads for your business might make a good series of blog posts that drive traffic to your website. Or, a series of blog posts that isn’t getting many visits might cumulatively make a great eBook that attracts a lot of consultation requests.
Whether it’s a blog article or social media post, something you published a year ago won’t reach the same people if you publish it now. New social media users are creating accounts every day. Plus, you build and refine your audience over time, so try sprucing up an old piece of content and re-publishing it to get it in front of your new and loyal followers.
Your target audience members may have a lot in common, but they are likely to range in their preferences and learning styles. Some are visual learners, others prefer audio. Some like to see numbers, others like to see examples. Repurposing content into different forms of media is a great way to expand your reach out to the various members of your target audience.
Consistency is key in marketing, but that doesn’t mean you should use the same medium for everything. Rather, you should convey the same message across different mediums and marketing channels. Repurposing the same content into various different forms will help you to achieve consistent messaging across diverse channels.
Not everyone in your target audience is at the same stage in the buyer journey. Those on the verge of making a purchase may be looking for longer pieces of content so they can make a decision. Those just getting familiar with your business may be looking for quicker, bite sized pieces of information. Rather than creating different pieces of content for each of these buyer stages, repurpose one piece.
When you repurpose your content, you can yield more output with the same amount of input, while maintaining quality. This saves you time so that you can work on new marketing ideas and attend to other aspects of your business.
Repurposing content leads to more content—quality content—and the more of that you have online, the greater your online presence will be. Having a strong online presence is important for raising brand awareness, building your audience, and ultimately getting more customers.
Another benefit of repurposing content is that having more content online helps to improve your SEO, or search engine optimization. Search engines like Google prefer websites they can trust, so the more pages of quality information you have, the easier they can recognize you as a credible source of information.
Related: Local SEO Pocket Guide
Online users love to share interesting and useful content, such as blog posts, images, and infographics. So, the more you put out there, the more opportunities you have to get your content shared, which creates backlinks for your site—another SEO perk.
You may think that it is redundant to take information in one form and convert into another. The truth is, this is a great repurposing strategy that can help strengthen your messaging. The more diverse ways you can convey your expertise and brand voice, the stronger it will be.
As your audience sees a common theme across each of your channels and mediums, they’ll really start to see that you’re an expert in X, or that you are passionate about Y.
You can never be too good at what you do. Repurposing content helps you to reinforce the knowledge you already have in your head, to add on to it, and to become even more well-versed in what you do. In addition, repurposing allows you to get familiar with diverse forms of content and various platforms, making you a more versatile marketer for your business.
Content holds a lot of value, but it may hold even more than you think. Take a look at your existing content and think about how you can repurpose it. Even better, create new content with this strategy in mind, so that it can be easier for you to repurpose down the line. Repurposing your content can make your life easy, but you can make repurposing even easier by thinking one step ahead.