There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes, it just needs to be smoothed out a bit to get you rolling again. So instead of constantly trying to churn out brand-spanking new content, find ways to put a fresh spin on your current materials.
Why repurpose content
Marketers often fall into the trap of thinking original content is always best. But constantly creating new pieces takes time, and it’s not always worth the effort — especially if you have other successful materials you can revive. These are just a few of the benefits of repurposing content:
- Reach new people
- Save time
- Improve SEO
- Boost online authority
To repurpose your evergreen content, you need to find ways to change the target audience and/or its format. There are several different content options to apply this practice. These are the content tactics that B2C marketers are using:
- Social media: 90 percent
- Illustrations and photos: 87 percent
- eNewsletters: 83 percent
- Videos: 82 percent
- Blog articles: 81 percent
- Infographics: 62 percent
Maybe a blog article becomes an infographic you share on social media, or a video becomes your next must-read post. Need ideas for getting more from your current content? Here are a few types of marketing materials that will benefit from being repurposed.
Revisit your MVPs
You can probably remember these by name. We’re talking about your content MVPs — you know, most viewed posts. They made your “Top Articles” section for weeks, and even months and years later, they are still topping your list with the most views. So why not squeeze a little more life out of them by repurposing that content?
You could put them all together for a roundup post, like “Top 7 Articles of 2018 So Far.” That takes little effort to throw one of those together. Or, you can pull all of your top articles on a specific topic and make a roundup, like “Best Articles on Growing Your Business.”
Another option is to transform your top posts into another form of content. For example, take an in-depth piece and turn it into a listicle where you highlight the main points. You’ll broaden your audience and attract viewers who don’t want to invest in reading a long-form article. You can also make a video to repurpose the content from your MVP, either as a glorified slideshow or more of an interview format. Or, turn the trending blog post into a guide or whitepaper.
Turn data into visuals
After spending weeks of creating and managing your surveys, don’t you want to make sure you’re getting the most from your findings? Survey data gives you a wealth of insight and knowledge — and it’s information only you have. Maybe you initially shared your findings as a blog post, but there’s so much more you can do with the data.
One great option is to turn the survey results into an infographic. Viewers love seeing these visual pieces, and they’re also the media’s favorite. And you’ll love them, too: Infographics can increase web traffic by 12 percent. Plus, 40 percent of people respond better to visual information than plain text.
Go through your data to pick out the most compelling information. If it covers a variety of topics, you can create multiple themed infographics to really target your audience.
Transcribe your podcasts and videos
You put a good deal of planning and effort into creating marketing materials like podcasts and videos, so get more from them by transcribing the audio. It’s not always practical (or preferred) for your audience to listen to something, but adding text to pages with audio will improve your search rankings.
According to a case study on SafeNet, transcribing a video and including text took their page from unranked to appearing on the first page of Yahoo and Bing within three weeks. Three years after that initial testing, the page actually ranked higher than it did then: showing up on Bing as No. 2, Yahoo No. 4 and Google No. 7. That just shows transcriptions have long-lasting SEO power.
If you don’t want to go through the audio yourself — it takes four to six hours to transcribe an hour of audio — you can use transcription services like Descript, Trint, Sonix, Temi, Rev, Otter, TranscribeMe and Scribie. Even if you use one of those services, you’ll still need to copyedit it after you receive the completed text.
Beyond simply transcribing the audio into one long post, you can also take bits and pieces of it to turn into a “new” blog. For example, if your podcast was “10 Ways to Grow Your Business,” take one of those points and create a blog post around it.
Create five-star case studies
Someone left you a stellar review. That’s amazing! And maybe even more amazing is that they gave you great content without you having to lift a finger (besides offering a great customer experience to being with).
Reviews and testimonials can be repurposed into killer case studies or customer success blogs. You can collect the information and quotes from customer survey responses, social media reviews, customer interviews or site comments.
After you get the customer’s permission, turn their quotes into relatable material that highlights their initial problem, what they/you did to fix it and their amazing results. You can pull from their testimonial, persona and any other data or conversations you have with them. Make the study as relatable as possible instead of trying to sell them something.
No matter how you repurpose content — whether it’s creating blogs, videos, surveys, webinars or a dozen other things — it’s important to know who you’re targeting and what they want.