Let’s talk about repurposing content, a very common mistake in the world of marketing is to mix repurposing content with reposting content. They are completely different. One is much more effective than the other re posting content is when you simply take something that you’ve shared before and you repost it, maybe three months later, maybe six months later now, there’s still value in that.
Reposting content making sure that new audiences can still access old content. But repurposing content is retelling that story in a different way. It’s breathing new life into content and ideas that you’ve published previously.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say you just published a blog post and your blog post consists of seven tips to do this or that. And now, to repurpose that blog post, you can break up your seven tips into seven different tweets. You can create an infographic that illustrates those seven points in cartoony Graphics. You can create a short form video series where each day you address one of those tips in a video just like this one, what you have effectively done is taken that blog post and extended the life of that content across many different platforms, communicated in many different ways. Now, if you apply that idea, you’ll see that you don’t even need to produce new content, to be able to fill your content calendar.
Chances are, if you’ve been in the business for a while, you probably have years of blog post that you can draw on. My number one tip when it comes to repurposing content is take your highest performing blog post, historically, take that and turn it into six or seven different pieces of content and retell that story. If it’s a long blog post, turn it into a video series. If it’s a short blog post, turn it into an infographic. Split it up into a number of different tweets that you send out on social media, create discussions around that topic. Great ideas are timeless. And it’s such a waste for us to be able to just tell that story once and then leave it be.
Repurposing old content is also a great way to modernize the way these stories are told. How we consumed content 10 years ago is fundamentally different from how we consume content now. There are new social platforms that exist now, there are new formats that exist now, for example, Instagram stories just didn’t exist 10 years ago. You can take a blog post you published ten years ago, split it up into daily Instagram stories, and you’ve breathed new life into an old story.
Another great impact of repurposing content is to make your stories available in lots of different places. Every single day you’re target customers are going through different stages of their day. If they’re driving, maybe they want to listen to a podcast and they’re not reading anything. If they’re by a computer with their headphones on, maybe they want a bit more, maybe they want to watch video with an audio track, they want to see visuals. Throughout the day, sometimes they’re on a large screen, sometimes they’re on a small screen and repurposing content is all about making your content available on all of these different platforms, different formats to be able to keep telling your stories at a time and place that meets with your target customers.
With all the tools available out there now, there’s really no excuse to not repurpose your content. Some of the videos that I create is just me repurposing blog posts. I’m reading a blog post, I’m recording the script of it and I’m putting some stock media in there to create a video version of a blog post. And I do all of that in a couple minutes with the tools are available on platforms like Lumen5. So if you’re looking for more content ideas, look no further than the content you’ve already published. Today is your official challenge to take your highest performing content and repurpose those stories into lots of different formats. Hopefully, this was helpful. Let me know what you think about repurposing content in the comments below and I’ll see you in the next video.
