Work Smarter, Not Harder
In most colleges and universities it’s viewed as unethical to use your own work on more than one occasion. For example, if you write an essay for a World History class, you are not permitted to turn in that same essay in a Creative Writing class, even if the essay adequately satisfies all of the requirements for both assignments. They even have a fancy name for it: self plagiarism.
In the world of content marketing, this belief is turned on its head as it’s an expectation to recycle created content for more than one channel or purpose.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at the many reasons why this is such a widely used practice, and why if you’re currently not doing this, you should be.
But first…
What is Content Marketing?
Before diving into why repurposing content is important, let’s first define what content marketing is.
So a 10 Year Old Can Understand
Content marketing is a way for companies to tell people about their products by creating interesting and helpful things for them to read, watch or listen to. These companies create blogs, videos, and podcasts to teach people something new or help them solve a problem. By doing this, companies hope to build trust with their audience.
For example, let's say you really love playing baseball. A company that makes baseball equipment might create a video about how to best take care of the baseball gloves they make. By doing this, they're showing that they care about their customers and want to help them have the best baseball glove possible.
So a 30 Year Old Can Understand
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and sharing content that is valuable, relevant, and consistent. The goal is to build trust and establish a relationship with potential customers by providing them with information to help them solve problems, rather than just selling to them.
By building trust, credibility, and brand awareness, businesses can attract and retain a clearly defined audience, drive profitable customer action, and ultimately create brand/product evangelists.
What are the Benefits of Repurposing Content?
Not every blog post should be turned into a podcast “just because”. A good content repurposing strategy is one which produces benefits, not more work.
Increased Efficiency
Let’s say you spend two hours writing a piece of content. From there, you can either publish it and never use the information again, or... turn it into five or six video snippets, three or four social media posts, and a few infographics. This is content repurposing strategy 101. When you don’t constantly have to come up with brand new ideas for every post you make, blog you write, or video you create, you save time.
This also helps to reduce costs associated with creating new content, such as hiring a writer or graphic designer, and increase consistency in your brand messaging and voice.
Improves SEO
When it comes to SEO, both quality and quantity are important as search engines tend to favor websites with a lot of high-quality content. When you repurpose content, you can create more without starting from scratch, which can help increase the volume of content on your website.
The distribution of content to different channels also aids in boosting SEO as it helps to increase overall reach and visibility.
Generating Backlinks
Repurposed content is also crucial in building backlinks, which signal to search engines that other websites consider your content valuable. By repurposing content and promoting it on different platforms, you can increase the chances of other websites linking to it.
Also, updating/improving content for repurposing can attract more backlinks from authoritative websites, and repurposing old content into infographics can make it more visually appealing and shareable, leading to more backlinks.
Format Variety
If you want your content to truly be useful and informative, then it makes sense to provide the information you’re sharing in as many ways as possible, as, according to Avado, there are seven different learning styles.
For example:
Repurposing long-form blog content into an infographic can help you present complex information to visual learners.
Repurposing video content or a podcast will be most beneficial for aural/auditory learners.
Repurposing a whitepaper or case study into either a webinar or slide presentation can help you provide a more interactive experience for social learners.
Repurposing a blog post or white paper into an email newsletter can help you provide timely and relevant information directly to your audience's inbox for those who best learn from written words.
Repurposing a blog post or whitepaper into a series of social media posts can help you provide bite-sized pieces of information to those audience members who may lose interest with longer forms of content.
Bottom line: When you repurpose content in a variety of ways, it increases brand awareness by reaching a wider swath of people through their preferred medium.
Target Different Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
One thing that’s very difficult to control is when in the buyer’s journey someone will consume your content. That’s why repurposing it is so important.
Have an old blog post that’s not really doing much? Repurpose it as a social post to attract attention to your brand or turn that case study into a podcast to generate interest in your products or services. Repurposing old e-books as email newsletters or drip campaigns can help you nurture leads through the middle of the funnel. If you’re having trouble converting leads, repurpose customer testimonials into video or social media ads to help convert leads into paying customers. Want to delight your customers? Repurposing old FAQs into a chatbot or a customer support video can help you provide exceptional post-sale customer service.
Fill in Calendar Gaps
Releasing thirty blogs in a month isn't really practical. But having “Blogger Mondays”, “Podcast Tuesdays”, “Webinar Wednesdays”, “Newsletter Thursdays”, and “E-learning Course Fridays” is. Throw in a social post each day and you're golden. When you repurpose content in a strategic way, you keep the calendar full and help to make sure your content is always top of mind in a variety of channels.
See What Works Best
Last, but not least, repurposing old content allows you to A/B test different headlines, calls-to-action, and visuals to see which ones best resonate with your audience. When you're able to identify the types of content that generate the most engagement, traffic, and conversions you can improve your overall ROI.
Let’s Review
When you have information to share and problem-solving ideas to disseminate, don’t write just one blog or one social post and then move on! Reusing content across several different mediums is a great way to reach a more diverse audience, increase your efficiency, reduce costs, generate backlinks, improve your authority score, and stay top of mind with your audience.
