SPROUTWORTH

How to Repurpose Content to Drive Business Growth

how to repurpose content to drive business growth

About this episode

In this episode Amy Wood, founder of Content10x shares insights on how to repurpose content to drive business growth. Insights she shares include:

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Why repurpose content?

Repurposing your content is not about reusing content again and again, but rather making it fresh and appealing for new audiences. Having said here are a few reasons why it would be worth taking the time and investment to repurpose content:

  • Repurpose content to save time
  • Extend the lifetime of your content that would otherwise be relegated to the archives and not as visible
  • Expose your content to a new audience
  • Increase the ROI on your content investment
  • Builds your brand reputation as a subject matter expert
  • Let’s you publish regularly

The reason most businesses struggle with effective content marketing and repurposing content

  1. A mindset issue of not being able to get off the hamster wheel of everyday busyness and ensuring consistency and quality are more important than quantity.
  2. Time and resources to invest in consistency and quality content
  3. The skill sets to repurpose content effectively
  4. Allocating time and resources to cover the creation of new content and repurposing of content by changing up your frequency. 

How to repurpose content so it engages your audience and reaches new audiences

When you repurpose content, it can be really effective in terms of trying to get people to consume the core piece of content. So for example, if you repurpose a podcast, you could create audiograms, like the short little teaser videos that you see on Instagram and Facebook, Twitter, more often than not what we try to do is find a really good soundbite, but that’s really a tease to get people to go and listen to the full podcast episode.

You can also repurpose the content in such a way that it can stand alone in a different format. An evergreen blog post based off say a podcast episode is a good way to do that. 

And there’s absolutely no call-to-action to go and listen to the podcast episode because it stands on its own as a blog post, that can go on your website, could go on LinkedIn or wherever you may be, or a guest contributor or medium or other places, but it’s standalone quality content.

Perhaps there could also be an infographic that could come out of that podcast episode. (You need to assess whether people get enough value out of this additional piece of content that they don’t need to consume any more content.)

How to repurpose content to attract and engage your target audience

A lot of advice when creating content is to evoke curiosity in our audience. But is it enough to just evoke curiosity? 

The answer depends on where you’re publishing the repurposed content. People are on different platforms for different reasons. 

So, say, for example, if the content format was a podcast and we looked at different platforms like LinkedIn, people would be looking more for something that they would get some value from if they listened to it. Perhaps an amazing tip within that it could be a 60-second- or two-minute clip or something that people might not know but something that they could listen and get real value from.

People might be listening out more for something funny or a blooper even or something more entertaining on Facebook and Instagram. 

It depends, you have to know your audience and know when they’re on this platform, what are they looking for and what are you competing against as well, what kind of content. When they’re scrolling through Facebook, there’s the funny cat video and the picture of all their mates out drinking the night before or something like that, and then you. So how do you slot into that? Is it entertainment? Is it education, etcetera?

You need to devise a strategy of, “When we’re listening for a great soundbite on this platform, should it be a bit more something that would make them laugh or whatever? On this platform should it be something standalone that they would want to learn?” 

You have to know your audience to know what you’re looking for and test it as well. Just try different approaches and see if you start to notice that you get way more engagement on that kind of a clip than you do on this other kind of clip. 

It’s all boils down to testing and seeing what works, seeing ultimately what we want on social media is engagement. Work out how you managed to get those likes, comments, and shares.

How to repurpose content to make it go further

Instead of staying on the hamster wheel of churning out content that disappears into oblivion with time, marketers would be better off if they look for ways to leverage their existing content and make it relevant to new audiences without too much more investment of resources. 

In other words, consider each piece of content an asset that can be reused and repurposed in a myriad of ways making it easier for your build on your content strategy. 

Not sure where to begin? Read on to discover 20+ proven ways to repurpose your content and in particular your podcast content. 

20+ ways to repurpose your content

  • Convert your podcasts into hands-on guides
  • Turn Your podcasts into blog posts
  • Make use of your internal data and put it together into case studies
  • Gather all your interviews into an expert advice e-book
  • Share advice on Quora
  • Transform the Quora Q&A into Valuable Blog Post
  • Share Your Statistics Through Twitter Posts
  • Update your old posts with new information
  • Create new blog posts and articles from spinoffs
  • Create whitepapers from blog posts
  • Create a slide deck and upload To SlideShare to reach new audiences
  • Build an infographic to make the best use of your old content
  • Put your current content together into an e-book
  • Write guest posts on topics you already have expertise on
  • Promote your existing blog posts from multiple points of view
  • Turn your existing content into videos
  • Compile your clients’ questions from support into an FAQ Page
  • Pull out the best questions you get via support and turn them into individual blog posts or formulate an answer to a related question on Quora
  • Convert the testimonials from your users into quality content
  • Make use of visual content assets using your product
  • Mix your podcasts and blog posts into valuable online courses
  • Share the best of your content via a newsletter
  • Pull out quotes that can be promoted to your target audiences
  • Break up Long Articles into a Series of Shorter Blog Posts
  • Have your content syndicated and win quality traffic and authority
  • Build and share an instructographic to reach new audiences
  • Craft visuals to share on Pinterest boards
  • Transform your content into an instructional email series
  • Turn your blog post into a webinar (and vice-versa)
  • Create a tips newsletter
  • Create Instagram stories or audiograms
  • Start a virtual summit

How to repurpose content so it is consistent with your branding guidelines

Branding and keeping the essence of your voice consistent is essential no matter the platform you use to share content on. 

Why? 

Because you want people on any platform, for whatever repurposed content you create, to say, “Oh, that’s your brandname”.

A good way to do this is to create custom templates or branding assets before you actually start creating content. 

How to gain SEO value when you repurpose content

When you’re clear on what the topic is, it’s important to then do a little bit of keyword research and try and work out from that topic, what would be a good keyword for us to try and rank for. You can use browser extensions like Keywords Everywhere or sites like Google AdWords to help with this research and try and find what looks, to you, to be a good keyword to rank for.

It’s really important then to write that blog post based on that keyword without keyword-stuffing it. A few areas where you want to be sure to insert the keywords are –

in the title and in some sub-titles. You want to have it appears a good number of times through the article along with related keywords. 

If you are dealing with a podcast it’s great to write show notes. But if you can go that extra mile and write a longer form, SEO-focused with a keyword-specific focus article, then you’re going to do a lot better in terms of the search engines. 

And then, of course, you can see if there are other people and other authority sites that you think could benefit from linking to your article. There may be people that you know that you could reach out to and let them know. Apart from them sharing the article, gaining links from authority or trusted sites would be really useful too. 

You might also want to go back and look at your best performing content to see which ones could benefit from repurposing and some SEO value. 

You can use Google Analytics for this. Simply log into Google Analytics and head over to the “Behaviour” tab.

In the sub-dropdown option, click on “Site Content” and then “All Pages”

All your posts should be listed chronologically in terms of page views (most popular to least).

Now that you know which posts performed well you can filter them to find ones that can easily be repurposed like lists, data-heavy posts and how-to posts.

You could turn these into slide decks and share on SlideShare, Craft infographics, mini-graphics or videos as the case may be. 

How to approach repurposing content when starting out

When starting out a good place to start would be to inventory your resources. 

Your approach would depend on the resources available. 

If you’ve got a full marketing team available to you, then you can really just go to town with it. But if you don’t, if it’s maybe just you or a limited team with maybe their skill sets, then you need to start smaller really, especially if you don’t have a budget. 

Let’s assume you don’t have a big marketing team behind you or, maybe don’t have a huge budget. 

  • First, establish your core content format. 
  • If it is a video or a podcast, then repurpose it into a well-written SEO focused content to try and get found by the search engines in that way. 
  • To add another step, think about a different medium again. So again, if your core content is a podcast then invest in video. Think about a different medium, so that you can try and connect with people who really do prefer to consume the content in a different way.
  • Most importantly just take it one step at a time. Identify one thing that you’re going to do differently to repurpose and get consistent with that. Don’t do several repurposing tasks at once as you’ll find yourself and or your team being overwhelmed. 

Good practices to abide by when you repurpose content

To ensure you repurpose content in a way that makes sense for your content marketing abilities and objectives it helps to look at good practices that will further your 

  • Your original content should be quality content. 
  • If you create quality original content, then your repurposed content is going to be quality as well. So, focus on quality then on the right places like knowing where your audience is and the platform specifics. 
  • Be consistent with your core content and then consistent with your re-purposing efforts.
  • Respect where you are repurposing to, and don’t just follow a just a cookie-cutter kind of content, copy and paste type of approach to every platform and expect to get positive results from that. 
  • Know what your processes are, document them, write them out and then make sure that you are consistently following them and respecting the platforms.
  • Make sure that content-repurposing isn’t an afterthought. 
  • Think when you are creating your content, what you are going to be re-purposing it into
  • Keep that in mind when you create the content because if you create content knowing what it’s going to go and be re-purposed into, it makes the whole re-purposing process a lot easier, a lot simpler. 

Metrics to measure your content repurposing efforts

It’s hard to isolate content repurposing efforts because it will be part of your content creation and content marketing efforts. 

Amy says – In science classes they say – You can only measure the effect of one parameter if everything else remains constant, otherwise if other things change too, you can’t isolate it.

So, ask yourself – why am I repurposing this content? 

  • Is it because I want more podcast downloads? 
  • Is it because I want more visitors to my website? 
  • Is it because I want more email subscribers? 

Knowing what you want and then tracking those metrics is a great start. 

  • Start looking at Google analytics, email subscribers, podcast downloads, followers on social, whatever is important to you.
  • When you start publishing repurposed content lookout for spikes in listeners, traffic, subscribers, etc. 

It is a bit challenging, but if you have a focus and you know what you’re trying to achieve, then watch those metrics and try and make sure that you are seeing them go in the direction that you want them to go in.

Repurpose content to drive business growth consistently

As you’re looking to repurpose content, you may come across some posts that had plenty of potential at the time but aren’t completely accurate today. Change happens, and these can be salvaged quite easily. Simply update those posts with new information to make them valuable again. 

Beyond getting traffic and SEO value from older posts and your podcasts reposting on social media can also be valuable. Not only do you provide more exposure for your content, but you can also test out headline variations, timing to release new content, etc. 

We have also seen how we can change content formats given the time and resources available in order to give new life to content and make it available to new audiences. 

The purpose of repurposing content is efficiency while helping drive business growth. Should you consistently be pumping out fresh, engaging content? Of course. But exposing your audience to older content or newer content in different formats should be just as important. You have the content already, so why not make the most of it?

Resources

Author

  • Vinay Koshy

    Vinay Koshy is the Founder at Sproutworth who helps businesses expand their influence and sales through empathetic content that converts.

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