What’s the Most Time Consuming Task Every Writer Has?
Your most difficult task is writing the content to fulfill the needs of your digital marketing strategy. It requires a tremendous amount of time and effort to produce the content that your customers find engaging and compelling. That’s why it’s so important to milk your best content for all it’s worth.
Do you want to get more use out of content that has already performed well with your audience? If you do, then repurposing your best content is the way to accomplish that. Why not? Everyone else is already doing it.
Statistics show that almost 60% of marketers recycle their content. Most marketers reuse their content between two to five times to produce “snackable content” from assets they already have. To build efficiency into their content management, 45% of companies with marketing automation regularly repurpose content.
To avoid additional expense, it just makes sense that content marketers would want to reconfigure and reuse their existing content. Updating and recycling your content helps you deliver fresh new information to your audience derived from your existing content.
How you repurpose content depends on your company’s needs and abilities. The following information may help you get started.
How do You Select the Content That Deserves to be Repurposed?
You first need to understand that not all content gets a second life. You have to carefully critique your past content in order to select only the very best material.
The content you choose will not only resonate with the same audience that has seen it before. This great content is more likely to appeal to new visitors as well. The content you repurpose should possess the following qualities.
Evergreen Qualities Should be Part of the Content You Repurpose
Select articles that are evergreen in nature. Evergreen posts are not tied to a particular event or time. Instead they contain information that will remain relevant with the passage of time. An article would not be a hit with new followers if it contained obviously outdated information.
The Content You Repurpose Should be High Performing
Find out which of your content was the most popular with the best engagement rates by using Google Analytics and other metrics. Why did the content do well with your audience?
You should constantly analyze your content performance. It’s important to find and eliminate the content that does not perform well. This allows your more successful content to achieve better exposure with your readers.
You Should Choose Content That Has Room to Grow to be Repurposed
You should be constantly reviewing your older content. You are searching for published material that has room to be expanded. Perhaps there have been new developments on a topic that you have already written about. That post might be perfect for updating and including the more current information. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of gaining a new perspective on the value of a previously discussed topic.
It’s Important to Choose the Best Way to Repurpose Your Content
When you repurpose your content, you’re either changing the format of a piece, or you’re changing the target audience. There are many ways to do this successfully – you can even get creative and see how many different versions of content you can get out of a past post.
Add New Information to Improve Your Repurposed Content
Adding new information is the easiest way to leverage your high-quality content for repurposing. This could be as simple as adding updated statistics from a different source. Or you could edit your text, updating it to give new relevance to older material. Shout Me Loud gives an in-depth analysis of how you can breath new life into your old posts and other content.
Start a Newsletter to Help You Repurpose Your Content
If you find that your blog posts are doing well on your site, consider turning them into a series of newsletter emails. If your audience loves reading your posts, chances are you can build a following that enjoys getting daily or weekly updates and news from you. Check out Tintup’s guide on publishing newsletters that people actually want to read.
Repurpose Your Content Into an Amazing Infographic or Photo
Turning your existing content into a photo or an infographic can work well and be used on several platforms. Just remember to size your image differently for each platform.
If you have a blog post or article that performed well, choose a quote from it and turn it into a photo. This also works well if done with statistics. Be sure to make your image eye catching to appeal to another audience.
Be Sure to Share Your Repurposed Content Across Your Favorite Social Platforms
There are an unlimited number of ways to easily repurpose your content and share it across platforms by using the same information in a different medium. Your old blog posts or articles can even be turned into webinars or YouTube videos. You can morph your case studies into slide-decks. You can even take all your visual content and translate it into Pinterest Boards.
What Types of Repurposed Content Perform Best?
You know how hard it is to win the digital data war. It’s difficult enough just coming up with great ideas to write about. Deciding how to execute that content is equally important. Here are five content formats that both B2B and B2C companies use.
- How-To Posts: These set up a problem, supply a solution and then give you the steps to get there.
- Lists: These are pretty straightforward and hone in on a topic offering a number of points or tips on that topic.
- What-Posts: These offer info on specific topics and often compare several things.
- Why-Posts: These offer readers a reason for the topic being discussed and support it with details.
- Videos: These offer the audience a visual discussion of or explanation of a topic.
A recent study on content performance which partnered Fractl and Buzzfeed showed which types of content performed better than others. The study found that lists and why-posts have the most reliable social media traction. They averaged over 21,000 shares each month. What-posts were proven to be the riskiest format to choose. Another factor discovered was that content performs differently depending on if you are a B2B or B2C company.
Your Content Performance Changes if You are a B2B or B2C
Your Content Needs to Educate Your B2B Customers
Your Business to Business customers want to be educated. They want to see the proof that you are a brand expert. They wonder if you are offering them the highest value content. They are seeking articles, blog posts, eBooks, tutorials and webinars that offer highly detailed information on specific topics.
Design Your Content to Entertain Your B2C Customers
B2C customers on the other hand are looking for entertainment. Their buying process is usually emotionally driven and is also very short. They generally prefer content that is short, simple and easy to absorb and share.
You Have to Make your Content Relevant to Your Audience
Ensure that your content engages and resonates with your intended audience. Choose your most engaging content when deciding to repurpose existing material. This will insure that you are able to execute the most successful digital marketing campaign.
You’ll quickly discover that reusing content is actually the foundation of a successful unified content strategy. Repurposing your evergreen content is helpful to content marketers. Repurposing helps overwhelmed marketers supply your customers with helpful, smart and relevant content.
