When it comes to digital, we would argue that there’s nothing as universally important as content. You need it for your website. You need it for your marketing activities. You need it to build your brand. You even need it to fulfil functional communications. In short, your brand can’t be successful online without content, and lots of it!
The trouble with content, is that it’s typically time consuming and even challenging to produce. Not everyone loves writing to start with, and sometimes, getting the right words down on paper can take forever, especially when you’re trying to balance tone of voice, core brand messaging and search optimization requirements at the same time.
That’s why learning to effectively repurpose any content you do take the time to write, is the ideal way to get the maximum return on investment from your efforts. Not to mention reducing the number of content pieces you need to write from scratch. But what do we actually mean when we talk about repurposing content? Well, it’s essentially doing one of two things, you are either changing the format of your content, so turning a blog post into an email for example or you’re changing the purpose of your content, and this usually means adapting it for a different audience.
So how can you effectively repurpose content?
Here are our top tips:
1. Gather FAQs by recording a Q&A style interviews with your customer facing team members. Not only will the recording make an excellent addition to Vimeo or YouTube, but you can also share the resulting footage across your social media channels too. Then you can transcribe the audio into a dedicated blog post, you can add the FAQs as content to your website and you can share each question and answer as a text or image-based post to social media too. By taking this approach you’ve gained a video, a blog, a set of FAQs and a mix of text and video posts for social in one fell swoop – all you need is a phone!
2. Writing blog posts and then picking out key quotes, tips, facts, or questions is a great way to repurpose your blog content into a series of thematically related social media posts. One strategy we like to use, is pulling five snippets from every blog, this then supports a social post every day giving exposure to your latest blog for the whole working week – ideal for B2B businesses. For B2C you can stretch it out over the weekend too by stealing a couple of extra snippets.
3. Remember to go back and update blog posts every year. This can be as simple as updating any facts and figures you included to the latest ones, adding new trends, tips, or tools to “listicles” (list articles) or simply including relevant industry and news updates. For example, any previous blog content concerning Facebook can easily be updated and refreshed with information about their recent rebrand to Meta. Doing this is a relatively quick and easy way to breath new life into old content and to give you something fresh to share with your audiences. It also demonstrates that your business is up to date and on top of relevant news and information.
4. Use any content you produce to create email campaigns to send to your subscribed audiences. This can be as simple as creating a monthly round up of all the new content you created that month, as well as highlighting a few key services or products and industry news at the same time. By approaching email in this way, you’re practically reducing the amount of new content you need to write from scratch, down to almost zero.
5. Our final tip for effectively repurposing content is to maximise the input of your team. One easy way to gather material for blog posts, email campaigns and even social media, is to take a topic or an idea and simply ask your team what their thoughts are on it. This will not only give you multiple opinions which can each be shared in turn to social media, but it will also give you a multidisciplinary set of views on a topic. For example, here at Pixel, our team is a mix of designers, developers, marketeers, project managers and account managers, so the collective opinions we can collect reflect not just our individual team members, but also the core disciplines and skill set in our business. From here we can produce a designers take on a topic, versus a developers take on the same topic for example. This allows us to then repurpose the same content idea for audiences interested in the different aspects of what we do. If you think about your team, how many different departmental or disciplinary views could you collect and repurpose into content for all your brand audiences?
So, there you have it, our five top tips to help you repurpose your content effectively and maximise the ROI from your content creation efforts.
Happy writing.
