REPURPOSING CONTENT – THE HOW AND WHY

You’ve spent all evening writing a blog post and uploading it to your website.  Great, job done!  But what happens to it after that?  Blogs and articles take time to research and craft, so why not maximise that effort by ‘repurposing’ them?

Repurposing doesn’t only apply to blogs or news articles, though.  Tweets or Facebook posts might feel more throwaway, but they don’t have to be.  And what do you do with client feedback, testimonials or slide decks and notes you may have spent hours putting together for a presentation?

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every day!  Here are some repurposing ideas to try:

• Chop a blog post up into a series of tweets.
• Collate several tweets/posts and create a blog.
• Collate several articles and publish an e-book.
• Make an infographic to display facts & figures from your blog or presentation.
• Publish your article on LinkedIn or another industry-relevant platform.
• Make a video or podcast from client testimonials and share through your website and on social media.
• Email your customers with a few snippets from an article and a link to the whole thing on your website.
• Create a poll or quiz on social media and link to an article where you discuss the answers.
• Create a presentation or tutorial, which you can offer to subscribers of your page or upload to a platform such as SlideDeck.
• Update or refresh old articles with a new point of view or recent statistics.

There are many ways to reuse your content and there are no right or wrong answers; pick and choose the ones that best suit your business and your clients.

Here’s why it’s a good idea to repurpose content:

Reinforce your message

You can tailor your content to suit different stages of your customers’ journey – from the information gathering and problem-solving early stages, through the product comparison stages, to the decision-making final stages.

Gain authority & credibility and become a “thought leader”

If you are passionate and knowledgeable about your subject, people will be more likely to believe in you and buy from you.

Create opportunities for collaboration

Joining forces with another expert in your industry will increase your exposure and reach, as they will share your joint efforts with their own networks.  Or collaborate with your own colleagues, to help share the workload and add another perspective to your company’s content.

Boost Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Putting your content on several different platforms and adding good quality links should improve your search rankings.  Don’t copy and paste content through – try to write organically for each audience avoiding straight duplication.

Great content never gets forgotten

An algorithm change or broken URL might mean older content is no longer seen.  If it was good before, make it good again and experiment with SEO or using different platforms.  Don’t forget to change author details if necessary and add forward and back links to other relevant articles.

Build a new audience and reach more people

Different people interact with content in different ways – some like the snappiness of social media, others prefer longer blogs or news pieces that they will set time aside to read.  Your content can appear on several different platforms, each attracting its own audience.  Prospective clients and existing customers make great brand ambassadors, too, so make sharing your content easy for them.

Save time

When you have a busy day job to do, reusing content allows you to work more efficiently.  It’s a false economy to generate large volumes of new, but low quality, content!

Repurposing content can be part of any marketing plan.  We’d love to hear how you get on!

Cal Partners is an award-winning marketing agency and business development consultancy for the professional services sector.  We operate as an outsourced marketing department for busy firms, so they can concentrate on doing the ‘day job’.