Developing new materials for content marketing requires a great deal of effort, from coming up with an idea and researching the topic to content creation and promotion.The content creation that businesses have to do today requires thorough planning. Content needs to be planned and purposeful to build trust, credibility and SEO impact. Content should be developed with the intention that it can be used and reused in many ways. Every blog post, video or presentation should have additional uses. It’s simply too costly and time consuming to produce content without this view.
Content should be used in multiple mediums because the way people learn varies from person to person. Some people prefer audiobooks over hardcover books, some people prefer video over long form content. Some of your customers aren’t going to read all your blogs, but they might prefer you sent a digest by email every month. The key take-away is that you shouldn’t have to create fresh content for each, rather you should reuse content across mediums. This is a good point of leverage, because your content can be repurposed.
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing requires altering a piece of content to make it fresh by changing the angle or switching up the format. Integrating repurposing into your content marketing strategy can lower costs, advance production, expand audience reach, and provide other additional benefits
The process starts with questioning how to get the most out of your content:
- How could I expand this blog post as a series of posts?
- How could I rework this content into other formats?
- What would make this content worth paying for?
- How could this content be reworked for real-time consumption?
- What did I learn while creating this presentation?
- How could I package this content to share it with a different market?
- If I were writing a book would this content belong in that book?
- What content have I already written that could form the basis of an eBook?
- How can I share this content in a way that helps me learn?
Changing The Medium
Think about ways that content can be used for various types of mediums.You could reuse a blog post as a video, and a slideshow for Slideshare without spending much more time or performing additional work. While doing this may seem like you are just reusing the content in a different medium, it could be beneficial for people who prefer to learn through videos versus reading blogs.
Here are some examples:
Audio recording ➤ Transcription ➤ Blog Post
Audio recording ➤ Podcast
Video recording ➤ Youtube ➤ Transcription ➤ Blog Post
Powerpoint slide ➤ Slideshare ➤ Transcription ➤ Blog Post
Blog Post ➤ Email Newsletter
Top 5 Articles ➤ Email Automation (Drip campaign) series on Newsletter signup
5 Articles on one topic ➤ E-Book
Top 5 Article ➤ Infographic
Infographic ➤ Blog Post
Any new content ➤ Social Media Share
Blog Post with 3-5 key points ➤ Series of Social Media Posts
Blog Post with a list ➤ Series of Social Media Posts
Changing the Delivery
Some people may only read your newsletter, while others may have an RSS feed for your blog. By repurposing your content for both a blog and a newsletter, your content will reach both of these audiences.This can be done for social media as well. You can share pieces of information that you pick up while producing new content over social media before sharing the whole blog or video.
Bundling
Bundling your content is a great way to produce something valuable for people. Planning your blogs with the future goal of putting them into a an ebook is a great example of how you can reuse your free content, to package it into a premium product. People appreciate when they can get all of the content they are looking for in one place.
Additional Reading
Duct Tape Marketing gives 10 Ways to Use One Piece of Content in this blog post.