Shaking off the dust and repurposing content you already have affords you new opportunities to extract more value from the work you’ve done. Too many marketers – in the ballpark of 61 percent, according to Conductor – are creating their content from scratch every time. This allows you to align every piece with current objectives and audience needs, but it’s also a somewhat inefficient use of your resources unless you’re just starting out..
“We’ve seen B2B enterprises so focused on creating ‘more’ that they’ve forgotten to focus on content as a real asset,” Joe Pulizzi said in Conductor’s B2B Content Marketing report. “They are usually creating a piece of content for one specific goal – say, demand generation – and then they are on to the next piece of content. Savvy B2B marketers can look at a content asset, and then look across the whole enterprise to figure out how that asset can be deployed.”
Not only does this save your time and resources, allowing you to create more with less effort, but those repurposed assets add inherent SEO value and give your new routes to establishing brand awareness and thought leadership for a much larger audience.
With each piece of content you create, you’re building a library of valuable information. The first time you hit publish, you see a surge of engagement, but as the content sits on your site, page visits ebb and the information starts to collect dust. The primary approach to keep your content alive is to keep it visible through regular social promotion. A retweet, for instance, will still perform 86 percent as well as the original, according to HubSpot, which gives you some residual value on your content. But if you go a step further and create something new out of that asset, you now have another piece to share with your audience and deepen their experience.
By extracting the value of the original piece and reusing it in a new asset, you can boost your content marketing ROI with topics that have already proven to resonate with your audience. With a large portion of your research already done, you will of course be able to create effective content faster, but time is far from the biggest benefit of repurposing content.
1. Pack an SEO punch
When you repurpose your existing content, the creation of additional, related assets strengthens your SEO footprint. One blog article on a particular subject, no matter how well-written it is, won’t be as important to search engines as a full palette of related assets. If you’ve got an eBook, a webinar, a handful of blog posts and a video that all discuss various aspects of the topic, Google is going to consider you to be far more of an expert than the site that only wrote about it once.
2. Lay your knowledge on the table
Repurposing content extends beyond simply taking information from one asset and shaping it into a new format, such as turning a whitepaper into an infographic. You don’t simply copy and paste key points from one into the other – you position them so the two assets support and complement one another. In doing so, you establish a larger collection of information on a given topic that shows off your thought leadership.
Take B2B marketing, for example: If you’re selling electronic health record software, and you create a successful post that demonstrates how your product can mitigate risk for hospital administrators, you should not stop there. Using that piece as your jumping off point, you can repurpose the topic of risk to create additional blogs that discuss how your EHR system also addresses concerns for doctors and patients to appeal to all your personas. Then you’re still not done, because you can combine all of those blogs into one large whitepaper that outlines every concern a high-level decision maker might have before making a purchase.
3. Boost your brand identity
A single resource on a given topic is not enough to establish your company’s identity. Creating a bevvy of content, especially when it includes a solid cross section of content types, drives home certain value propositions that will resonate with your readers and help them to internalize your brand image. Reusable content makes it much easier to cover your bases without having to build a slew of blogs and other assets from scratch.
4. Reach your audience
Different buyer personas desire different things. Some will be visual learners who respond to infographics, while others learn best by reading detailed collateral. Repurposing ensures that nuggets of wisdom and important insights aren’t lost on segments of customers simply because they weren’t in the right format or published on the right channel. If a video only resonates with one segment of your audience, an eBook might be the best way to convey your message to the rest. When you provide your audience with the information they want, in the way they want to receive it you’re going to reach more of them.
Bonus: What about repurposing content that tanked?
When marketers talk about repurposing content, the focus is primarily on the pieces that have already performed well. While the logic there is solid, that’s not the only tack to take.
Let’s look at the opposite end of the spectrum: an asset that flopped. Minimal pageviews, no social shares, high bounce rates and, of course, no conversions. All around, this piece is a failure. But that doesn’t mean you should throw all your hard work down the drain.
It might simply be that your content was misaligned with your audience’s needs, whether in its presentation or in the persona you targeted. A blog might not go deep enough, or an infographic might not appeal to the segment of your audience you wanted to reach, but an eBook or whitepaper that dives deeper or a video that provides a different way to deliver a message could be better approaches to resonate with them.
Building out regular campaigns around repurposing content, congruent with the new assets you’re publishing, can help solidify a holistic content marketing strategy. To get started repurposing content today, we actually repurposed our eBook from an older, stale version – you can read more about how and why we did it here.
