There has been a lot discussion among Brafton’s marketers recently regarding repurposing content. In an effort to practice what we preach, our internal marketing team decided to take a deep dive into the data behind our larger assets to seek out a diamond in the rough in need of some polishing. And now we’re going to walk you through the approach we used to identify which asset should be repurposed.
The conception
Being that Brafton is America’s oldest and largest content marketing agency, you can imagine the number of assets that we had to choose from to repurpose. With seemingly limitless options, how does a marketing team narrow down which assets are ripe for repurposing?
We turned to the cold hard facts. More specifically, we sought out assets that:
- Have received consistent downloads since publication.
- Haven’t resulted in a high enough percentage of closed-won deals.
Looking through this lens would provide us with an asset that was about a subject our target audience needed information on but might not have struck the right chord with them. After much thought and research, we determined that our eBook about repurposing content (oddly apropos as that is) would be the best to tackle. In addition to needing a revamp in terms of graphic design, we determined that since the copy of the eBook largely focused on why you should repurpose content, it would serve better as a blog post. This meant that we would have to produce a new eBook that took things a step further, providing guidance on not why but how to build a repurposing strategy.
Since its publication date in May 2014, this eBook has been one of our most downloaded asset. It currently ranks fifth, which is fairly significant considering we’ve produced 11 new eBooks between May 2014 and today.
In total, this eBook accounts for 5 percent of our overall eBook downloads. But what stood out even more was that out of the historical eBooks that we have on our website, this eBook has only resulted in two closed deals. Seeing that insignificant of a number, we hypothesized that while the subject matter is interesting to our audience, as indicated by the consistent downloads, we were missing an opportunity to showcase our expertise within the copy itself. This became even more apparent as we reassessed the content itself.
The evolution
In order for our team to take this eBook and turn it into something great, we had to set our content marketing compasses to true north and find the direction we wanted to take.
We asked ourselves:
- “Why is our target audience interested in this topic?”
- “If we were a looking for more information on this topic, what would we find helpful?”
- “What unique insight do we have on this topic that would enlighten our audience?”
With these questions in the forefronts of our mind, we set out to get some answers.
We had inclinations as to what the answers should be for these questions, but in order to provide the maximum amount of value and demonstrate our thought leadership, we turned inward to our own content marketing experts for their two cents. By leveraging thought leaders within our own business, we will be able to provide our readers with a first-hand look at the breadth of knowledge our workforce possesses.
The promotion
What kind of marketers would we be if we did all this work without giving ourselves the self-congratulatory pat on the back and tell the world what we did? Piggybacking off the theme of the repurposed eBook project, we planned a series of blog posts centralized around the idea to support the launch of the new downloadable asset. We even decided to develop a secondary asset as a free downloadable tool for our readers.
This provided us with the opportunity to not only prime our audience to want to learn more about the topic but utilize the research that we had performed in the eBook development process a second time in these teaser and follow-up blog posts. Additionally, we have been able to leverage all of this content in our email marketing and social sharing efforts to generate interest in the new eBook.
The newly repurposed eBook, Reuse, Recycle, Repurpose: Reach Wider Without Creating More, is available for download, and we’ll be conducting a followup report near the end of the year to reveal if our campaign is as successful as we are projecting it to be.
