In the fast-moving world of digital marketing, there is simply no getting around the fact that content is king these days. Regardless of what metric you want to use to measure it, the data supports the fact that the more content a business or brand can put out across its various media channels, the more engagement it will drive.
Recent research has characterised this relationship between the volume of content a brand can put out and their recognition among their audience as “brand equity”. Putting out content at an appropriate volume and frequency helps to increase this, as it helps to raise awareness of the brand with the target audience while also creating opportunities for engagement.
Although this might sound pretty intuitive, it certainly doesn’t make the life of a digital marketer or content creator any easier. By far, the biggest challenge facing marketing professionals these days is designing, creating and delivering high-quality content to be put out across the various social media platforms at a volume and frequency that will help to increase “brand equity”.
Repurposing content: what is it, and why should you do it?
One approach that many marketing professionals use to deal with this issue is to repurpose and adapt content to be deployed across different media channels or social media platforms.
There are several benefits to repurposing content in this way.
Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, it helps to cut down on the resources needed to keep your social media channels up to date. Creating content can be costly, and this is true regardless of whether you produce everything in house or have freelancers you outsource to. It takes a considerable amount of time to go from the idea generation stage to finally publishing it.
This process also involves several individuals, with everyone from the authors themselves, to copywriters, designers and potentially even web developers having to pitch in. For small companies, in particular, this can be pretty draining. This issue is only compounded if you have to put fresh content out across several different platforms.
Repurposing content allows you to extend the life of any content you create, which in turn cuts down on the workforce or financial resources needed to create and publish it.
A second benefit to repurposing content is that it allows you to catch the attention of your audience, who might have missed it the first time around. In the fast-moving world of social media, whether your target audience will have a particular piece of content displayed to them is a product both of the algorithms that decide what content gets served up to them and the time of day it is posted.
As such, there is a good chance that your target audience might miss the piece of content you have lovingly crafted simply because they logged on at the wrong time of day to catch it.
With that said, repurposing, reposting or adapting older content allows you to catch those you might have missed earlier on. This helps to extend the life-cycle of any content you create and connect with new audiences.
With the two main benefits of repurposing and recycling content set out, let’s look at some of the different approaches you can adopt.
Different approaches to content repurposing
When it comes to repurposing content, there are several different approaches this might take.
Firstly, they might just re-post an article that you previously published. This is a particularly popular strategy on Twitter, where brands will periodically re-Tweet links, Tweets or blog posts they previously published. Here, you aren’t necessarily adding anything new to the content you are reposting; you are simply hoping that it will gain more awareness or new audiences. This is a relatively low effort way of repurposing content that does not require significant resources. You can even schedule these posts weeks and months in advance.
On the other hand, a different approach to repurposing content involves taking the original piece of content you published and modifying it in some way so that it essentially becomes a new piece.
This is quite a common approach where you take a previously published long-form article and condense it into a shorter version or vice versa. The benefit of this approach is that you can either add more detail to a post or present it in a more digestible format — both of which add value to the piece in their own way.
The main difference between the two is the level of effort required. When you add to a shorter article, it will require more effort than simply condensing something.
The effect of both approaches is essentially the same, however. By repurposing content by recycling or adapting, you will be able to cut down on the resources required to keep your social media channels up to date and increase audience engagement.
Choosing what content to repurpose
With the benefits and justifications of repurposing content in mind, the next biggest issue you face is choosing what content to refresh and repurpose.
Although this might not seem like much of an issue, there are nevertheless some things you should keep in mind when you are choosing content to repurpose.
- Stick to evergreen content: Evergreen content is essentially any content that doesn’t go out of date. For example, a blog post about the 2016 Rio Olympics might not be of much use in 2022 when the information is over six years old! Always look for any time-sensitive topics or dates included in the posts you want to repurpose. This will allow your content to remain fresh.
- Flag long-form content: Long-form content — such as blog posts, articles, reports and whitepapers — are all perfect for repurposing. They offer many opportunities to be broken down into smaller pieces or condensed into one smaller item.
- Choose posts that perform well: A good strategy is to stick to posts that have performed well in the past when repurposing content. After all, if a post didn’t gain much traction six months ago, how likely is it that it will suddenly start to perform well six months later?
- Adapt content for different platforms: Another good approach is simply taking an existing piece like an article or blog post and adapting it for other platforms. For example, this might involve turning a blog post into a Twitter thread or LinkedIn post. Different platforms suit different content forms and writing styles. Use this as an opportunity to get creative and reinvigorate older content.
Five main benefits to repurposing
With all that said, the primary benefits to repurposing content are:
- It can boost your SEO by giving you more content to work with
- Helps to grow your presence online and expand your audience
- It allows you to keep up with consumer content demands
- The frequency and volume of posting help to increase your presence online
- Eases the burden on content production and distribution processes
Next steps
If you want some help putting these tips into action, feel free to reach out to a member of the PureContent team today. PureContent are content creation specialists who are well versed in creating exciting, engaging content that can be used across various media channels and social media platforms. Get in touch today to book a one-on-one consultation with one of our experts!
