How to Repurpose Content like a Pro (and Make Your Good Ideas Last Twice as Long)

Producing and distributing marketing content that your customers find engaging and compelling can grow into a time-consuming and costly task, so it’s important to milk your best content for all it’s worth. Repurposing content is a killer way to get more traction out of the stuff that has performed well with your audience.

Not to mention, everyone is doing it. Almost 60% of marketers reuse content two to five times in order to generate “snackable” content based on assets and 45% of companies with marketing automation regularly repurpose content for efficiency. It makes sense that content marketers would want to rapidly reconfigure content and even deliver brand new information products from existing elements to make the most of their idea generation and avoid having to spend more.

How you choose to repurpose content depends on your company’s needs and technologies — but here is some helpful information that can help you get started.

What Content Deserves to Be Repurposed?

First things first — not all content gets a second chance. You have to sift through past content in order to find just the top-notch stuff. This content will not only resonate with the same audience that has seen it before, but is also more likely to reach and appeal to new folks as well. Generally, the content you set out to repurpose should meet all of the following criteria:

It’s Evergreen

Look for articles that are evergreen in nature — these are usually pieces that do not have a news peg, but rather that relevant over time. Any outdated info is, obviously, not going to be a hit with your followers.

It Was High Performing

Check your Google Analytics or other metrics to find out which material was the most popular with users the first time around. Why did they do well? It’s important to constantly analyze and assess your efforts in order to weed out content that just doesn’t hit the mark and let the more successful content rise to the surface.

It Has Room to Grow

When reviewing your older content, keep an eye out for material that could be expanded upon. There might have been new developments on a certain topic that could easily be included in an older post or maybe you have a new team member that has more expertise in a certain area since an article was released.

Best Ways to Repurpose

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 Elements

One of the fastest and easiest ways to get more leverage out of high-quality content is to update it with new data. Adding more statistics from different sources and bringing the text up to date with the current state of things is a great way to give older material more relevance. Shout Me Loud goes into depth on how two breathe new life into old posts.

Start a Newsletter

If you find that your blog posts are doing well on your site, consider turning them into a series of emails. If your audience loves reading your posts, chances are you can build a group that enjoys getting daily or weekly updates and news from you. Check out Tintup’s guide on how to make newsletters that people actually want to read.

Turn It Into a Photo

Photos work well across a number of different outlets. If you have a blog post or whitepaper that performed well, pick a popular quote from it and turn it into a photo. You can do the same with statistics.

Use Across Platforms

There are tons of ways to easily repurpose content across platforms by using the same information in a different medium. Old blog posts or whitepapers can be turned into webinars or YouTube videos. You can morph case studies into slidedecks. And all visual content can, and should, be translated into Pinterest Boards.

What Types of Content Perform Best?

Coming up with great ideas is a big part of the content marketing battle, but how you decide to execute that content is equally important. Here are five general types of content that both B2B and B2C companies use.

• How-To Posts: These set up a problem, supply a solution and then go through the steps to get there.
• Lists: These are pretty straightforward and usually hone in on a certain topic and then offer a number of points or tips on that topic.
• What-Posts: These offer info on specific topics and often compare two or more things.
• Why-Posts: These usually offer readers a reason or purpose for the topic being discussed and support it with details.
• Videos: These offer the audience a visual discussion of or explanation of a topic.

Fracti recently partnered with Buzzfeed to conduct a study on which types of content performed better than others. They found that lists and why-posts proved to have the most reliable social traction with an average of 21,000 shares per month. What-posts proved to be the riskiest format. However, content performs differently depending on whether you are a B2B or B2C company as well.

B2B vs. B2C

B2B customers want to be educated. They want proof that you are an expert and are offering them content of the highest value. For this reason, content such as whitepapers, eBooks, tutorials and webinars that offer highly detailed and lengthy information on a specific topic. Content like the infamous Blog Tree Infographic by Eloqua has been known to generate leads and increase traffic by 250%!

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.

Pay attention to the types of content that resonate with your audience so you can choose how to repurpose existing material in order to execute the most successful marketing campaigns. You’ll find that reusing content is actually fundamental to a successful unified content strategy and is a huge help to content marketers who are overwhelmed with the constant need to supply customers with helpful, smart and relevant content.

Originally published at ozcontent.com on July 30, 2015.