Repurposing Content: A Smart Way to Extend Existing Content for Greater Impact
What Is Content Repurposing?
Repurposing is how you can make the most out of your content, be it a trendy topic or something that wasn't successful enough. It is a practice to utilize the topic you’ve already covered to improve its reach and engagement. But never confuse repurposing content with revamping your content.
Repurposing content doesn’t essentially mean you copy-paste the content with the least edits in a different platform. It requires a change of format, updating, optimizing, and in some cases, presenting the content from a new perspective.
However simple it may sound, it requires clever use of tone and modification to suit the new requirements. There might have been instances where an article had good potential but didn't fare as well as expected. Such content pieces can benefit you when you give them a second chance, addressing the cause of their downfall.
Repurposing is a convenient way to provide new content without the need for new sources. Maintain the quality throughout by adding associated content at the parts where the content feels stretched. The only aim of repurposing content is to give it new momentum and fresh clicks.
3 Best Ways to Repurpose Content
1. Identify Evergreen Content
The beauty of evergreen content is in the relevance that it always holds. This type of content is anytime worth repurposing unless it is extremely overused. Go through all the previous content pieces and you might come across such content.
What makes a content piece evergreen is
- The factor of timelessness. Readers read it and find it relevant at any point in time.
- The other factor that helps a content piece remain evergreen is its quality. People will always appreciate captivating content presented with quality.
Prioritizing evergreen content is convenient as the efforts spent on it will be minimal for the upcoming years. The repurposing efforts shouldn’t be limited to one-time deals. You can maintain evergreen content with subtle tweaks and still produce good outcomes.
2. Utilize Previously Successful Posts
Having a popular article would be a momentary success especially if your webpage regularly publishes content. Take a moment to analyze the page metrics to understand which content is getting more shares, reach, clicks, and visibility.
Take external factors into account when analyzing the metrics as the popularity of your articles can depend on what is trending. Popular articles that are faring better can help bring lots of momentum into your blogs.
Similar to the popular topics, you can also analyze the poorly performing topics. Just because it was an initial failure doesn’t necessarily mean it should be abandoned. It’s only your chance to optimize its flaws and give your content a second chance to shine.
3. Change the Format of the Content
You can start repurposing content simply by changing its format. There is no rule that says you need to limit any given content within one format. By creating multiple formats of the same content, you provide your audience with the choice for their preferences.
Switch to Images
The format that has seen the biggest jump is the image-centric format that goes beyond simple text or video. The information displayed on infographics is much simpler to understand even if they present complex aspects of a subject. Humans are more adept at processing images; so it’s a good reason to utilize image formats.
The potential of image content can be best seen in the worldwide sharing of tweet screenshots. Surprisingly, the screenshots of tweets tend to perform even better than the actual tweet.
Choose Audio
Another format that is gaining popularity is audio content. Utilizing blog articles for making podcast series is a clever way to hook users to your content. Get some good speakers and you are good to go with reading out the articles, giving them a conversational tone.
The reason podcasts are gaining traction is due to the convenience they offer. People can listen to them even when they are occupied with their daily tasks. Also, audio content is easy to transcribe for SEO.
Leverage Quora
To rope in some technical traffic, Quora is a good platform to start. Due to its direct question-to-answer format, it is highly convenient to display your solutions. The answers can be further linked to the content back on your website to bring in traffic.
Here is a quick recap of the formats you can follow to create alternative forms of your existing content:
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Screenshots and images
- Blog articles
- Case studies
- Video tutorials
- Tweets
- Ebooks
- Quora answers
What Are the Benefits of Repurposing Content?
1. Helps Expand Reach
The spectrum of your target audience’s preferences is wide and needs your content to be in multiple formats if you hope to satisfy them all. By presenting the content in the form of text, audio, image, and videos, you can gather the maximum amount of reach. This way, you allow people to digest your content in their preferred format.
2. Saves Time and Resources
Providing new and original content is the ideal way to engage your target audience but it is hard to deliver all the time. Instead of straining the team when there is content scarcity, encourage them to spend time repurposing content which is rather less time-consuming. Not only is it easier than coming up with new content but it also gives your marketers some breathing space.
3. Improves Retention
Coming across old content articles might not be something your audience is expecting. For increased effectiveness, you need to present in different formats to make it seem less repetitive. When you present the content in different formats with some modifications, it may seem less repetitive and continue to lure readers. Repurposing content thus increases your odds of customer retention and credibility.
4. Emphasizes High-Performing Content
Content pieces that show promising statistics don’t need to be recreated and should instead be pursued further. With content repurposing, you can utilize your old successful content to give them new life and fresher traffic. Make sure that any necessary updates are implemented.
5. Provides Backlink Opportunities
Having a wide range of alternative content formats improves the number of shares the content piece can obtain. The higher the number of shares that come with the links provided toward the page, the better it is for SEO.
6. Improves the Content Lifetime
With multiple articles published every week, it’s no surprise that older content can be buried under it and forgotten. People tend to never revisit articles that they have completely digested. Repurposing content will be something new for first-time visitors and your regular visitors can get any updates or modifications.
7. Redeem Unsuccessful Content
Blog articles might not always reach the expected engagements or analytics. Poor content pieces don’t necessarily need to be abandoned if they have good potential. Repurposing content allows you to correct the parts where the content went wrong and makes way for it to make a greater impact this time.
The change of format can be the key as in some instances, good content does not perform well due to the platform it was displayed on. Improving the poor content ensures that the efforts and time spent on the original content don’t go to waste.
When Is It Worth Repurposing Content?
Time is precious; you cannot expect your target audience to give you time to relax when you run out of content ideas, for example. Repurposing is a backup plan to reach the weekly content threshold. Repurposed content is the binding tool that gives marketers the ability to stretch out the available content ideas.
Repurposing comes to your marketing team’s rescue at a time when they might have writer’s block and are not able to produce content day in and day out. This strategy can be made to work on limited budgets. With completed content, marketers can simply recycle the pieces and provide new content.
Content repurposing can help you
- Get a good return on investment on almost every content piece.
- Squeeze out every last bit of marketing juice possible within the content piece.
- Get the most out of existing investments.
Your target audience can sometimes get tired of the same old content. When you repurpose your content, you can implement the present-day trends into your content pieces to provide an updated version of it.
Apart from this, your successful content pieces which are continuing to rope in traffic will be in dire need of repurposing. This is mainly because you do not want to display old references on it which are outdated. This can be stats, insight, and examples that should be updated immediately.
How to Create a Solid Content Workflow
Providing repurposed content has its benefits but without an executable workflow structure, it will only help achieve limited success. Repurposing in itself requires a well-designed workflow structure to improve your overall efficiency.
- Start with scheduling the content you want to repurpose to maintain a good amount of content uploads.
- Expand the content toward appropriate social media channels and improve your visibility by helping people see it on the channel they are using.
Note: Multi-channel content obtains a bigger reach than content limited to a single channel.
- Verify that none of your content clashes together as the audience following multiple channels may end up having a poor experience with your brand.
Remember that this is not it.
- Once you have published repurposed content on multiple channels, analyze the metrics of each and find out what works best on each platform.
Hence, you will get an idea of the overall success of your original content.
Conclusion
Repurposing content is a great time-saver for content creators and needs less effort than creating original content. Many content pieces have the potential to be split into multiple content formats or improved with more details, which leads to a much higher ROI.
When providing regular new content to your audience, don’t just forget about the published works that still have the potential to engage your target customers. If you are in need of a professional hand at content writing or repurposing, Growth Natives has a team of experts who know how to utilize each content piece, good or bad, to its maximum potential.
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