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Creating a solid, engaging piece of content is not an easy feat. There’s the brainstorming, research, writing, re-writing and editing that goes into it. Not to mention the fact that this creation process involves multiple team members. From copywriters to your design team, good content takes a lot of time and effort. So, how do you keep producing awesome content for multiple channels and different audiences without going crazy? By repurposing a piece of content for different channels and audiences! In this blog, we’re going to break down why repurposing content is beneficial to your bottom line AND walk you through how we took a single blog and spun it off into 7 different pieces of repurposed content.

Repurposing vs revamping content

Before we dig into the why and how of repurposing content, let’s clarify that it is different than refreshing your current content. Repurposing content is tailoring the format of the content based on a new channel and audience. Refreshing your content is updating old content to make it more relevant and enticing. For example, we wrote a blog in 2013 about the best way to test your email and then revamped it this year so it was current, updated and accurate for testing email in 2015. If you click on the links you’ll see it’s still in the format of a blog, but it was simply refreshed and republished. Now we understand what repurposed content is (and isn’t), let's dig into why we should use this tactic.

Save time and money

First and foremost, repurposing content saves you time and money. You already spent time brainstorming, researching, writing and creating visuals for a particular piece of content. Now you can turn around and apply your images and copy to create new/re-worked pieces of content that will be used on different platforms.

Reach more audiences

Repurposing content also allows you to reach a broader audience. People learn in different ways. Think back to your days in school (perhaps some of you lucky folks are still in school!). Some people learn visually, some audibly, some by putting the lessons into action, the list goes on. That’s why a webinar could entice individuals who learn audibly whereas your infographic could speak to the visual learners.

Give your content longevity

Publishing repurposed content over a period of time and across multiple channels allows your content to live beyond a single blog post or promoted tweet. We are inundated with information so if someone missed your new blog post in their RSS feed, you have the opportunity to get in front of them a week later with a retargeting ad, created from that same blog post.

Allow cross-promotional marketing

Finally, repurposed content allows you to maximize your efforts through cross promotion. For example, in a paid post on Facebook you can link to the full blog or to an optimized landing page to optimize conversions and increase traffic to your website.

How EOA used content repurposing to its advantage

Now that you understand the “what” and “why,” let’s talk about how we repurposed one blog into 7 other pieces across multiple channels. It all started with our blog on 8 Ways to Segment Your Email List to Maximize ROI. We decided that this piece of content was worth repurposing due to the amount of traffic we could see it was generating in Google Analytics. We also saw that people were specifically signing up for our 7 day trial after reading this post. Once we made a decision to repurpose this, our next piece of content was an infographic.

Infographic

As this blog was formatted using a list, it was a natural progression to turn this into an infographic. Our graphic designer was able to leverage the pre-existing text to make eight blurbs and custom images for each of the tips. Check out the infographic below! Once we finished our infographic we incorporated it into our blog to provide more value. While we needed custom images for this infographic, the idea, research and text were already written to allow a quick turn-around. Also, this allowed us to reach our visual learners that preferred images to text. Win-win.

Whitepaper

The original blog post was already a lengthy piece coming in at 1,856 words, so transitioning it into a whitepaper was a breeze. We were able to use the same text and supporting images. The only additional things we needed to create were a whitepaper cover and we tweaked the intro and the conclusion. Turning this into a whitepaper allowed us to gate the content and require an email address to download it. This supported our lead generation efforts to build our list while also bringing us into our next steps of the repurposing process.

Retargeting ads

Now that we were able to capture addresses through the whitepaper version of this content, we moved onto paid advertising online. We set up a retargeting campaign to show a horizontal ad to people who had previously visited the blog. Below is a horizontal ad we made for this guide. For this piece of repurposed content, we had to figure out the budget for this ad along with crafting a headline, sub-header and CTA. We already had an image made to use in the ad itself. This was a great way to use re-use this piece of content because it was able to capture leads and target people who had already shown an interest in us.

Email campaign.

In our mailing strategy, it’s pertinent that some of our emails have the goal to strictly provide value. If you’re only sending promotional material, your email metrics (and results) will greatly suffer. Since we had already created a whitepaper, we decided to send out an email campaign with a direct link to it. There is no need to make your reader jump through hoops on a landing page if you already have their email address! All we had to do to create the text for this email was slice and dice some pre-existing copy from our whitepaper. The rest was a piece of cake.

Facebook newsfeed advertisement

Let’s face it, your organic posts on Facebook aren’t likely to be seen by many people. In fact, organic reach hovers around 12-16%. To put forth your best efforts to get your ads seen, it’s helpful to invest in paid and targeted advertising on this platform. For the Facebook newsfeed ad, we set up the campaign in our Ads manager, decided on spend, who we would target, etc. Then, we just needed an image, blurb, headline and sub-header. Once we set it live, we made sure we were checking its performance daily and adjusting our budget as necessary. With Facebook newsfeed ads, you can ensure you get eyeballs on your post, while growing your email list and driving traffic to your website.

Organic tweets

While it can be hard to get your voice heard organically on Facebook, we’ve found that isn’t the case for all our social channels. We have a large and engaged audience on Twitter and want to make sure that we continue to feed them valuable content, too. Below is one of the many tweets I’ve sent out to our Twitter audience that points them back to our original blog post on list segmentation to provide value and up engagement. On average, 6,000 tweets are posted to Twitter every second, so don’t be afraid to send a tweet about a new blog multiple times a day. Just make sure the text varies a little so people don’t get déjà vu.

Webinar

After we hammered out ways to turn the blog into ads, to emails, to whitepapers, we decided it was time to breakdown these 8 list segmentation tips into a webinar. The first step in going about this was breaking down the whitepaper into a PowerPoint presentation. We did have to leverage our graphic designer to make sure the slides were nice and pretty. Some additional research went into the presentation to ensure it flowed well in a presentation format, but most of the information in the webinar was taken directly from the guide. Not only were we able to engage audience members who prefer a more visual breakdown of our information with this webinar, we also added it to our resource center to provide value to our community.

Other creative ways of repurposing solid content

While we did give a multitude of ways to repurpose content, the list is by no means exhaustive. Other ways you could convert a piece of content are to make Slideshare presentations, case studies or podcasts… and that’s just a few additional ideas.

Did we miss anything?

We’re always looking for more ways to work smarter and not harder, so be sure and share ways you’ve repurposed content in the comments sections below. Remember, it’s hard to create solid content from scratch, so get more out of your investment by being strategic about the many ways you can repurpose your original work!