Creating enough content to consistently engage with your audience on social media, drive traffic through your blog, capture leads with bottom of the funnel assets, and entertain your Youtube audience is no small task.
Wouldn’t it be great if you had a system in place that could generate content for social media from your Youtube channel? Or how about new ideas for blog posts every time you deploy a new Ebook or case study? A diligently executed content repurposing strategy may be the answer.
What is a content repurposing strategy?
Content repurposing is a well-known, but rarely executed strategy to give more life into your content marketing materials. If you’re struggling to publish enough content across all of your social channels, blog, Youtube, and lead gen campaigns, the solution might not be to hire more writers to produce new content, but to look inward and see what existing content can be repurposed and recycled.
A content repurposing strategy is a systematic set of steps to turn a marketing asset into one or more additional marketing assets without having to re-do the core research, writing, and messaging. Converting a piece of written text, video, or audio into a different format for a specific channel helps a marketing team extract as much value as possible from an original piece of content.
A common pattern in content strategies is that content created for a specific channel and customer profile and it isn’t used to create additional material. It just sits in its original location and becomes stale with diminishing returns.
To have a well-documented content repurposing strategy ensures that every new marketing asset will have the biggest impact as possible in contributing to the education of your audience and the acquisition of new customers.
What types of content should be repurposed?
Pretty much any content can be repurposed, but some formats and channels are better suited for the task due to their length and amount of research that went into creating it.
For example, it’s not hard to imagine how one might compose a series of Tweets from an Ebook, but it’s a stretch to expect someone to compose an entire case study from a single Tweet without a significant amount of additional time and effort. This would defeat the purpose of a content repurposing strategy. As a general rule, converting a large piece to a single or a collection of shorter pieces is a sure fire way to get the most out of webinars, blog posts, and interviews.
Convert long text into social posts
A single text-based asset like a blog post, case study, Ebook, white paper, or press release can be converted into a collection of social posts. The great part about this is that your social posts will have a coherent theme, tone, and point of view because they all originate from a single or a group of similar assets.
Blog posts and Ebooks are set up to naturally produce a series of social posts with their well defined structure of headers and subheaders (or chapters and sections). It’s common for a marketer to create a blog post and simply post a link on social media with a quick recap and call it a day. That’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about creating “zero-click” content that is native to the social platform. The goal is not to get the user to go to your blog, the goal is to get the user to engage with your social content. We’re simply using the blog post as a starting point to create new standalone content for social platforms.
Convert video to social
Video has become a primary marketing channel as people are consuming more and more content on their phone and on social media. With Youtube as the second largest search engine behind Google, most companies are realizing the compounding value behind investing in a video marketing strategy. However, high quality video is very expensive and time consuming to create, so it should be particularly important to extract as much value as possible from every video produced by your marketing department.
Repurposing video into social content can take two forms. First, you can simply break up the video and distribute it on social media as standalone content with accompanying text. It’s been shown that social content that contains graphics and videos have higher engagement than single text-based posts. Additionally, you can use the video content as a starting point and inspiration for completely new written content on social media.
Video content like webinars, interviews with subject matter experts, and promotional videos are rich with details and insights and can be used to assist multiple marketing functions from product marketing to brand development with repurposed content.
Webinar content is underrated.
People like to joke that ‘no one watches webinars’ but one webinar can become:
1 blog post
5 linkedin posts
2 twitter threads
1 linkedin carousel
6 video clips for socialMarketing teams that embrace repurposing have a competitive advantage.
— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) August 2, 2022
Convert audio to social
Much like video content, audio typically has a lot of locked up value that should be repurposed and used as text or audiograms across social platforms. Interviews with subject matter experts should also be repurposed and expanded as standalone blog posts and Twitter threads.
There are a number of tools to help convert audio into a visual post for social media. Wavve and Descript are two top-tier solutions to get you started.
Convert one social channel into another
Although the ideal formats for different social channels are often different, content on one can easily be repurposed for another. A long LinkedIn post can be repurposed into a series of Tweets for a thread, or a series of Facebook posts to be posted over the course of several days.
What to avoid when repurposing content
It’s important to note that repurposing is not reposting, and that each social channel has a very specific format and tone that should be followed.
The language used in a webinar might not necessarily be appropriate for a Twitter thread, but the content within it can add a ton of value to your Twitter audience, so the conversion is certainly a worthwhile exercise.
Establish a repeatable repurposing process
Automated alerts
There are so many channels for new content these days with Youtube, blogs, PDFs, email, TikTok, LinkedIn, among others that it is difficult to keep track of new content published. Having alerts set up to let your team know when a new piece of content is posted is a good way to establish consistency in a content repurposing strategy.
A team member responsible for writing social posts on LinkedIn and Twitter may not be paying much attention to what is being posted on the blog or on the Youtube channel, but there may be a wealth of opportunity to use that content in her role as the primary social media content creator.
Schedule content on social
There are a number of social scheduling tools out there from HubSpot, to Hootsuite, to CoSchedule. With every blog post published on your site, you can set up five Tweets to be automatically published every day of the week and a LinkedIn post to be scheduled every other day. Front loading your work all at once makes it a lot easier to find consistency on social media with a pillar piece of content like a blog as the primary inspiration.
Content repurposing frameworks
There are many frameworks to follow (like this one by Justin Simon from Metadata.io) to establish a reliable repurposing habit that your whole team will follow. The most important feature of a content repurposing framework is repeatability. This relies on identifying patterns in your marketing assets that can be reliably exploited to produce additional content.
For example, if the structure of your blog posts are constantly changing, it will be difficult to design a framework that can be used on every blog moving forward. However, if you identify a pattern in your case studies that follows a well defined pattern that easily lends itself to generating a series of LinkedIn posts or Twitter threads, then this framework should be developed, documented, and executed with consistency.
Key Takeaways
A content repurposing framework can greatly reduce the workload for a writing team and help publish more content with less effort than creating a new piece of content.
Having a repeatable process to turn one marketing asset into multiple new ones helps maintain brand identity, messaging, and can improve consistency of your content creation pipeline.
