5 Insanely Actionable Ways to Repurpose Your Content
You create an amazing piece of content, then post it on your social media channels. With that done, you start the whole thing over again. And again…
Sound familiar? It feels like you’re on a constant rollercoaster of content creation, and you can’t get off the ride.
It’s not wrong to be passionate about creating quality content. But are you maximising the benefits of your hard work and creativity? And are you doing your content justice by making sure as many people see it as possible?
The solution to this endless cycle of create-publish-create is to write less and promote your existing content more. You need to use your marketing skills to leverage your content to its full potential; maximising your exposure and expanding the opportunities for getting eyeballs where you want them: on you, your product, your brand and your content.
If you’re having a hard time coming up with new content, especially for your social media channels, read on to learn:
- What exactly is content marketing
- Why is content repurposing important
- Five ways to efficiently repurpose your content
- What visual content repurposing is, and
- How visual repurposing works in practise
What is content marketing?
Perhaps one of the best examples of ‘content marketing’ is that of Net-a-Porter. More than merely an online clothes retailer, Net-a-Porter started to gain serious traction once they launched an online magazine to compliment their e-commerce store. The founder of the first luxury e-commerce site (Natalie Massenet) was originally a journalist, who – by creating shoppable content – revolutionised the online luxury experience and the way women shop today.
According to Ogilvy, 60% of people are influenced by digital content when shopping, and 55% bought something after discovering it on social media. With numbers like these, it is no wonder that companies are allocating more budget to content marketing in 2020, and shifting their paid advertising budget towards content marketing.
So, having established what content marketing is, and why it’s so valuable, then what do we mean by ‘content repurposing’?
Content repurposing is in essence the practice of reusing/recycling content that you already created by putting a new spin on it. This can be by changing the format – for instance, taking a blog post and creating a short video from it (where you take the research, theme or even words from the blog and use it as a base for a video or podcast).
Alternatively, it can mean taking the original piece of content and extracting smaller elements from it to create multiple posts that lead back to the original. In this case, that might mean posting extracts from a wider blog, or taking still images or clips from a video to filter audiences back to the original piece of content. The aim is to constantly maintain presence on social media platforms with ‘fresh’ posts that don’t appear repetitive, but which leverage the maximum value from the ‘deep’ content that underpins them.
Why is content repurposing important?
People tend to think that if you have promoted a piece of content once, you shouldn’t promote it again – they have this vision of clogging up someone’s newsfeed and annoying them with repetition. In reality, this is pretty unlikely. Chances are that due to most social media platforms’ algorithm rules (as mentioned in this article before) only about 2% of your Facebook followers will see your posts organically the first time round. This can be due to some of your followers being in different time zones, or just not being online when you post. That means that posting just once means you’re missing out on maximising your reach.
There are two additional reasons for repurposing:
- People consume content differently, so repackaging in a different format may catch the attention of different type of viewer. Somebody who wouldn’t necessarily take the time to read a blog post might eagerly consume the same ideas in video form.
- Trying to keep content fresh is time consuming, so repurposing your content – while making it look native to a specific channel – will maximise your efficiency.
Five ways of repurposing content
Content repurposing is personally my all-time favourite way of content marketing, because you can be creative with how you give new life to snippets of your content. These snippets then can be distributed throughout your social media channels.
Sadly, not all content is worth repurposing. If you’d like to get the most out of your marketing ROI, check your analytics to find your most popular posts to promote further. Nobody wants to share a post that isn’t amazing.
Here’s some repurposing inspiration for you:
- If your content is knowledge-based, why not lead your readership to it by testing them with a quiz? People often engage with quizzes because they feel would like to find out something about themselves (come on, admit it, how many times have you wanted to answer the ‘how many triangles’ question on Facebook!?). If/when they find out they don’t have all the answers, they are more tempted to click through to your article to find out more.
- Infographics are a great way for your content to be linked to by other websites. See our example in the visual repurposing section below on how valuable these can be.
- You can turn your customer comments on social media into testimonials, blog posts, interviews or even case studies – with this carrying the benefit that it acts as ‘social proof’ for your brand or product.
- Bundling your best content on the same subject and creating an e-book is a great way of making some passive income on the side. If you think that people won’t pay for it, think again. Lots of bloggers make some extra cash this way, because of the convenience this format offers.
- Generate backlinks by republishing your best content on platforms such as Medium or LinkedIn. SEO experts often disagree when it comes to duplicate content on the internet, but, according to Neil Patel, there is no evidence that Google punishes you for having duplicate content (although, you will get penalised for excessively copying content from other websites).
Visual repurposing
Visual content is potentially endless, easy to generate, and easier for the brain to process. Moreover, it’s 40% more likely to get shared than any other type of content. It is the backbone of good storytelling, and has become a key tool for marketers to engage their audience: “51% of B2B marketers prioritise creating visual assets as part of their content marketing strategy.” (HubSpot, 2019)
When creating compelling visuals, extract content from your best performing posts, and list the most important take-aways in bullet points. Look out for:
- Facts
- Quotes
- Statistics
- Tips and hacks
- Step-by-step instructions
Creating visual content shouldn’t be that difficult; there are many tools today to make this process easy, even for those who are not graphic designers. Depending on your graphic design skills, there are several ways of using great templates in order to create a consistent visual style across your platforms.
For beginners and those lacking time I’d definitely recommend Canva. There is a free and a paid version; both include templates, colours and some fonts so that you can customise your message, but the Pro version allows for heavier customisation, therefore allowing you to create graphics that are consistent and 100% on brand.
Other great tools are Piktochart or Venngage: these allow users to create amazing infographics. Infographics aren’t just social media darlings that people like to share (especially on Pinterest), but they can also be referenced by other blog posts. Make sure you put your brand’s logo or name on these, and also ask those who want to share your content for a backlink which can help you in generating more traffic to your website.
For those with more advanced skills I would recommend sites such as Creative Market or Envato Elements. These have pre-designed templates by designers that can be modified with basic knowledge of Photoshop or Illustrator. Always check what software requirements these templates have before purchasing them.
Advanced designers can just create their own templates in Photoshop and Illustrator.
When you find something that works, rinse and repeat, create similar content on a consistent basis. Even though recycling content takes less effort than creating new content from scratch, there is still work and creativity involved.
How does visual repurposing work in practice?
The idea with visual repurposing is not to duplicate your content, but to link your content together.
By batch creating content, you’ll save time and find it’s easier to get more done once you already started working on it. Micro-commitments make light work!
But what might your visually repurposed content look like?
Let’s start with a basic blog post such as this one. I gathered different tips from the post (how to repurpose your content, and the five best tools to do this) to turn them into infographics, just like the ones below. Infographics are a perfect native content for Pinterest.
As you can see the two infographics look quite different, because I was focusing on different types of information found in this article.
If I then add the pins I made for this post, you’ll see that I just created four different graphics on the same subject (for the same platform), without having to worry that they’d look too much alike.
At Trendeavour, we love to talk to industry leaders to get their opinion and share those with our readers. One way of getting their amazingly valuable insights out to the world is by gathering some of the most important pieces from these interviews and repurposing them into quotes. These can then be distributed in a visual format on Instagram, or even as a Twitter card.
Carousels (a slideshow or box with continually changing visuals or information) have become increasingly popular across Instagram, but are gaining more popularity on LinkedIn as well. Use carousels as micro-contents, driving traffic back to your long form content. For Instagram, you just upload your jpgs (or pngs) one after another to create a carousel, whilst for LinkedIn you will have to turn it into a pdf. Whereas square format works best for Instagram, you might want to change your layout to a landscape format for LinkedIn.
You can create fun gifs or memes from your content using giphy.com
Checklists also work really well, especially offering them on Facebook (even as lead magnets).
What about some moving visual content!?
If a picture paints a thousand words, then a video paints… A million?
Video is having its renaissance at the moment. According to HubSpot, “video is the #1 form of media used in content strategy, overtaking blogs and infographics.” (HubSpot, 2020).
“With 69% of marketers using more video content, we can see brands are becoming increasingly more invested in the visual medium. Over 500 million consumers watch video content on Facebook every day, and video traffic is set to make up 82% of all internet traffic by 2021. Consumers want to see more video content, and brands are investing in providing it.” The Keenfolks.
You can easily create video content, as videos don’t have to be professionally produced to get you high ROI. Some of the best videos are created with a smartphone; it doesn’t have to be super-slick because it is the appeal of the fundamental content that is the driver. For example, think how low the production values are for some YouTube vloggers, and how massive their fan base remains.
TikTok is of course one of the most obvious short form video creation platforms, but there are quite a few nifty app-based editors that you can download for the basics of cutting, dubbing and adding titles. If you want to get a little bit more sophisticated, Davinci Resolve is used by professionals (think Game of Thrones…) but has a free version that still gives you access to basically every function (and more) you’re ever going to need at a marketing level.
However – a caveat: always use trends as guidelines. Just because most brands are increasing their video content, you don’t necessarily have to jump on the bandwagon if you don’t have the capacity to create consistent content, or if your audience doesn’t consume content that way.
Conclusion:
Constantly creating content is a challenging task – regardless of whether you have a marketing team or are working independently. This is where content repurposing comes into the picture.
Re-sharing your best content on social media periodically will help your content to be discovered by more people. Repurposing is a good way to reinforce your message and is a key part of multi-channel marketing, as well as making your entire marketing process more efficient – giving you time to focus on other components of your business.
And to end on – as if you haven’t already heard this from us enough: as always, make sure you track your results!
