As you begin to build a library of content for marketing purposes, you may come to the realization that certain pieces of content have greater, longer-lasting value than others.
Particularly insightful, perennial, or significant pieces may in many cases be “evergreen,” meaning that they will always be relevant and helpful to potential customers. Which, in turn means that this content can be used many times, in many places, and can be “repurposed” to create new value without having to create additional material.
Let’s take a look at the 3 steps to repurpose content…
Identify Content of Value
Go through your archive of marketing materials. Start by picking out articles, blog entries, or other material that have broad, everlasting appeal. Think universal interest, or at least wide-ranging appeal.
Being able to reuse content may mean addressing different audiences, broadcasting it at different times, or presenting it in new channels to attract fresh readers and prospects. Ask yourself if your content holds value for more than one group of people.
Think About How to Freshen Content Up
To be able to reuse content again without a huge time investment is a marketer’s dream. Unfortunately, you will still want to spend some time and make a few changes to freshen up items that are stale, you should also ensure that everything is up-to-date. You should do this even if your content was well received when it was created.
Time alters people’s perceptions, tastes change, and contexts can become obsolete. It’s worth taking a new look at how you want to reuse content, how it can fit into a new medium or channel, and apply to a new audience. Spend a little time editing, augmenting, and expanding what you originally developed to make it newly relevant and compelling.
Repurpose Content
Now that we have addressed how to identify content that is good for repurposing, let’s look at 7 ways to repurpose content to drive more sales.
1. Break Up Existing Content
Break material apart and turn each division into its own piece of content. This can mean subdividing into many pieces of content from one piece of existing content. Alternatively, you can add to your original material and make it twice as long.
2. Create a Presentation
Turn text content into a presentation. Each point or statistic you cite can be its own slide. The finished piece can be distributed across the web on a platform like SlideShare.
3. Create an Infographic
Turn your content into an infographic. Familiarize yourself with the ways other companies have used this type of media. Content in this form is highly visual and easily digested, it will also typically increase the amount of shares on your content.
While creating an infographic can be time consuming, the information and graphics created for it can be repurposed as well.
4. Distribute to Different Networks
Post your existing content to new channels and outlets, such as social media. Finding new audiences is key to spreading your message and creating new customers. There’s no limit to the number of times the same content can be re-posted. It is important to note that if you title the same content differently each time, you can reduce viewer fatigue.
5. Utilize Email
Use email to get new pieces of content in front of leads or existing customers. Sending useful information to a lead will help nurture them into a customer. Likewise, sending the right information, based on previous purchases, to an existing customer can increase sales.
Another option is to send divisions of existing content, you can craft an email “mini-series” of pieces that can all tie together around a single subject.
6. Create a Downloadable Offer
Turn your content into a downloadable e-book that is accessed through a landing page form. That way you can collect potential customer email addresses and later utilize email to nurture them in your sales process.
It’s true that some content may need to be expanded upon to do this, but other content can do very well in this format.
7. Go the Extra Mile
Transforming written content into something like a video series or podcast can be a challenge, but the pay off could bring you huge results. Like e-books and presentations, podcasts can find their way in front of a wide audience and exist in libraries outside of your own website.
Be sure to add a transcript for those who would rather read than listen. Note that videos generally require a higher budget, and good content can be the source material for lectures and video presentations.
Conclusion
The key to digital marketing success is expanding your content resources to draw in your audience and collect email addresses. By providing your target audience with helpful information, you can establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry, as well as nurture leads and customers into more sales. So where do you start doing this? Repurpose content.
