Repurposing content is the solution to most of your content problems.
Do you find it difficult for you to come up with new content ideas every day? Reuse existing posts that performed well.
Are you short on time to keep up with content creation for multiple platforms? Recycle one of the older posts on a different platform.
This article will help you leverage this content marketing strategy to take your content game to the next level.
What is content repurposing?
Repurposing content means re-using all or parts of an existing content piece and presenting it differently to reach a wider audience. It makes your content accessible to a diverse audience with different learning styles.
For example, you can turn your blog post into a social media post to target people who like to consume quick content and are present on social media.
Plus, this content strategy keeps your content schedule busy with lesser effort.
Why should you repurpose content?
The most obvious benefit of repurposing content is saving time in the content creation process. You don’t need to create every video, blog post, or infographic from scratch.
You have an existing piece of content, which you can either take inspiration from (saving time in research) or use as is for another platform.
Apart from this, other key reasons to repurpose your content are:
1. Target a wider audience
To target different audiences, you need to create content for different platforms. For example, your Twitter followers might not be the same as your newsletter subscribers.
This is no easy task, especially when dealing with limited time and resources. That’s where content repurposing comes in.
You can use the same content piece and post it on a different platform, without sounding repetitive because a completely different set of audience is consuming the new content.
Here’s how Recipe30, a popular food channel, reuses the website blog posts into videos.
Recipe30 created an in-depth blog post on a soup recipe. This type of blog commonly targets people who learn best via reading. Recipe30 then transforms the blog post into a YouTube video, targeting visual and auditory learners.
Considering it’s a recipe, there are a lot of people who want to follow a video while cooking. While the blog content has more instructions than a video, both content pieces are created according to the platform.
And the YouTube video:
This helps them increase their audience, while also having a high publishing velocity. Instead of hiring a scriptwriter to create a new script, using an existing blog helps save time and money.
2. Get an SEO boost
When you share multiple pieces of content centered around a few main keywords, it signals the search engine crawlers that your site is an authority in that niche.
On top of that, you get an opportunity to link back to your main content source via different platforms. This boosts your rankings and generates more traffic.
Taking the same example of Recipe30: They interlink both the content pieces – YouTube videos and blogs to get more traffic from one to another. Here’s how they’ve linked the blog under the description of the YouTube video:
On the other hand, here’s how they linked the YouTube video to the blog:
3. Get the most out of your popular content
Content repurposing gives you a second chance at the content promotion of a well-established piece of content.
You might’ve published an article a few years back that got you a lot of engagement and leads. This is a qualifier for a content idea – it has worked in the past and is likely to work again.
The blog on the garlic soup recipe by Recipe30 is one of the top-ranking search results for that keyword. This acts as proof that the topic is relevant and people are searching for it. Because of this proof, they can be certain that the new video might get just as popular.
…And it did.
The YouTube video became one of the top-ranking videos, both on YouTube and other search engines.
And on YouTube:
4. Maintain your publishing frequency
With an average person spending around 7 hours consuming content daily, you need to stay on top of your audience’s minds and maintain a publishing frequency. Instead of spending time and money creating new content, you can add repurposing old content to your content schedule.
For example, with a lot of content published on their blog, Recipe30 is now able to post regularly, doing recipe roundups on their YouTube channel with over 800 videos:
Which content should you repurpose?
Instead of repurposing every content you have produced, you can get better results by following these four steps:
1. Audit existing content and shortlist high-performing content
Conduct a content audit to sort the best-performing content on your website. But before you start, set your goals for repurposing and define your high-performing content for repurposing.
Ask questions like: What does high-performing content mean for your business?
Is it the content that brings the most traffic? Or the one that brings the most conversions? Are you looking for high engagement, or do you want to filter the topics to include those that talk specifically about your business or product?
Depending on this, you can shortlist your metrics from reach, shares, number of mentions, organic visibility, higher rankings, linking structure, etc.
Once done, you can select the content based on these metrics.
2. Look for evergreen content
Topical content is great – but that requires you to keep editing the content to make it relevant with time. If you want content that’s one-and-done, while also bringing in consistent traffic, without frequent edits, evergreen content is the way to go.
For example, there’s always an influx of topical content during an event like the Super Bowl. But would people still search for such a topic after the event is over?
Content A: What to cook on a Super Bowl evening
Content B: What to cook when friends are coming over
While both are great topics right now, the first talks of an event that has already occurred and, thus, repurposing that would be of little use.
To find these evergreen posts, you can either do a manual check or use tools like Google Analytics to find the pages that are getting the most traffic consistently.
3. Review feedback on your posts
There’s a goldmine that businesses often miss out on. And it’s the comments on your posts or articles.
Audience feedback gives you insights into what your audience really wants.
This can help you refurbish and repurpose your content in the right way. Based on the feedback, you can analyze if you want to modify something and then repurpose it. For example, if someone points out that the topic “X” seems irrelevant or missing out on key details, you can add the details in the repurposed content.
Plus, if a content piece was particularly popular with your target audience, it qualifies the content piece for a good engagement rate.
8 examples of content repurposing
Here are eight ways to get started with content repurposing:
1. Turn blog posts into infographics
Infographics are the fourth-most popular content formats used by businesses and marketers today.
The reason is simple: People process visual content faster than all-text content.
Search engines also show images as part of the results for search queries. Your infographic can turn up in this query to get more traffic to your content. Here’s an example for the keyword “emotional intelligence”:
While choosing a blog post to create an infographic, select data-heavy ones or ones with a process that you can break down into steps for your infographic.
Here’s how ThinkPsych targets the same “emotional intelligence” keyword by repurposing an infographic from a blog post.
You can also post these infographics to Instagram and Pinterest to grow your reach there.
Here are some best practices to follow while creating infographics:
- Use the right visual type from timelines, bar charts, photos, scatter plots, Venn diagrams, and maps.
- Keep your target audience and platform in mind. For example, the infographics you create for Twitter (short to fit the platform’s image dimensions) would differ from the ones you create for you