Repurposing Content: 7 Ways to Repurpose Your Content Shared by Experts

When you have a thriving brand that has an indomitable digital presence in your domain, you must be aware that high-quality content is a staple.

You may already be well-versed in the motions of content creation, distribution and everything around it. This is regardless of whether you do all your content creation in-house or with the help of an SEO agency. But that does not mean it is not expensive or time-consuming anymore.

In fact, depending on the frequency, volume, quality and channel of your content, your content could even be the most affordable or expensive digital asset for your company. The question now is — are you utilising these precious pieces of content to their fullest potential?

If you are not, it is time to dust them off and put them to work again. If you are wondering how — that is what we are going to discuss in detail in this guide. What’s more, we got some experts to weigh in on the topic for you.

Eager to start? Let’s dive right in.

What Does Repurposing Content Mean?

Let’s start with the most burning question of them all — what is content repurposing?

Well, repurposing content means exactly what the term suggests.

You take an old piece of content and repurpose it in another format or platform to boost engagement and reach for that content. The process of repurposing can include taking entire blocks of content or even just a few elements.

In general, the repurposed content is generally presented in a different format than the one it is taken from. When done right, content repurposing or content recycling can also increase the lifespan of a content piece along with its reach.

Keep in mind that you can repurpose a single piece of content into many different formats and pieces.

Why Should You Go For Content Repurposing?

Now that you know what repurposing content actually means, the next question in your mind naturally might be why you need to know about it. That is a fair question!

Creating new content can be quite challenging especially if you are committed to posting a lot of content regularly. In such a situation, repurposing content can be a real boon and help you move along your content publishing pipeline.

Even then, it bodes well to understand the specific benefits of repurposing content that you should know about. Let us look at a few of them.

Assists Content Distribution Efforts

Content distribution is possibly one of the most important yet difficult parts of any content strategy. You have created and optimised some stellar content in every possible way. You now need to promote it so that your efforts can pay off.

When you repurpose content, say from a written blog format to a video format, you will be able to expand its reach. A written blog post that may have been doing so well on your website, will now get a new audience on YouTube or some other platform.

“All you need is a piece of high-quality content that is equally detailed and engaging. Video content nowadays is highly flexible and can find its inspiration anywhere. It can find roots in your social media posts or even one of your detailed guides. The key is to find the right platform to repurpose your content, and follow the guidelines of that platform to have a sure-fire hit!”

Beck Libson, SEO Content Writer at Supple Digital

Helps You Build and Maintain Your Online Presence

When you are able to reach new audiences on new platforms, you will be able to maximise your online presence. Each marketing channel has its own set of requirements, and taking a piece of content and recycling it to meet the requirements of different platforms can scale your online presence.

You will be able to push out high-quality content consistently on different marketing channels without thinking too much about developing new content. This is a great way to be active on various marketing channels without actively posting content on them.

Helps Meet Content Demand

The post-COVID content consumption studies make one thing very clear — people are going to keep needing content, which means you will need to keep producing it. But this growing demand may be harder to harness than it sounds.

Moreover, not all people in your target audience might enjoy consuming written, audio or any specific format of content. They may need to be targeted by different formats at different times as well.

So, you can potentially alienate specific sections of your target audience and instead target them using the right format with the help of repurposing. Regardless of the format your original content is in, you can repurpose it into different formats that your audience would prefer to meet the demand effectively.

Boosts SEO Performance

When you have a holistic SEO strategy in place, you know the kind of impact content has in boosting your performance on the SERPs. It is the lifeblood of your website, and quite literally helps you rank well, and be visible to your target audience.

More specifically, to rank for a specific keyword, you need to post a lot of content targeting it. The more content you have targeting the keyword, the better the chances that your website will rank for it. Makes sense, right?

What’s more, you can also repurpose your content outside of your own marketing channels and website to generate quality backlinks to your website. Truly a win-win situation!

How to Repurpose Content: The Process

While every brand can define its approach to repurposing content, it helps to understand the standard process that is generally used to do it. Content repurposing can be an integral part of your overall content strategy and hence requires diligent planning and execution.

It is crucial to draw up a detailed content repurposing roadmap before proceeding further.

Once you have decided to repurpose content, it is highly recommended that you keep repurposing at the back of your mind while creating and publishing new content. Other than that, here is how you can repurpose old content pieces effectively:

1. Track Down Your Evergreen Content

If you have been developing a repository of content on your website for a while, then you would surely have a detailed catalogue listing all of them. If you don’t, this is your cue to develop and maintain a list of all the content pieces on your website.

When you decide to repurpose your content, this list could be your first stop as you will be able to narrow down all the evergreen content pieces from it. These are content pieces that have remained relevant and useful over time, and still offer a lot of value to your readers. You will get a plethora of content repurposing ideas from here.

These are the content pieces that you can definitely repurpose into a different format, and capitalise on. Add these evergreen pieces to this content repurposing list so that you can prioritise these.

2. Keep a Check on Your Best Performing Content

Apart from your evergreen content, you also want to take into consideration content pieces that have been performing really well. The logic here is that if these content pieces are performing well, there is a good chance that a repurposed version of the piece will gain a lot of traction too.

It helps to have a list of such pieces handy at all times. To do so, you will need to establish specific metrics that you can measure to identify content pieces that are performing well.

Here, you are looking for content pieces that are getting a lot of readerships, are capable of engaging your target audience, and contribute to your reader’s decision to stay on your website for a longer period.

“To determine which content pieces to repurpose, look at the popularity. If one piece of content has performed well in the past, you should reuse it. This could be content that has generated a lot of website traffic, social media shares, or engagement.”

Jonathan Aufray, Co-Founder & CEO at Growth Hackers

It is important to audit your content periodically and keep a check on such content pieces that are performing really well. You should also conduct SEO audits to ensure that this content is performing well on search engines. These make for the perfect original source material from which you can then have different kinds of repurposed content that perform really well.

3. Make a List of Ways to Repurpose Content

As discussed earlier, a single piece of original content can be repurposed in several different ways. It helps to take note of these ways so you can be prepared when you actually start content repurposing.

For instance, say you have a long-form guide on plumbing SEO on your website. You might want to repurpose this guide into videos and a thread on Twitter to benefit from the valuable information contained in your guide. 

Do you see what happened here? Multiple forms of repurposed content from a single source of original content.

“One trick I like to use is to update and republish formerly successful content with current, relevant data and examples. Think of it like a content makeover: refreshing older content with new and useful information injects new life into your ageing resources. Not only do you have new content to promote, but you also get to preserve and capitalise on existing traffic and backlinks. It’s a win-win.”

Casey Crane, Content Manager at The SSL Store

This is a great way to organise your content repurposing process and make it easier to get the best out of your content. The bottom line is that you should check out all the awesome ways of repurposing content before you proceed.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid When Repurposing Content

Now that you understand the core benefits and processes associated with content repurposing, it is important to get it right. While effective content repurposing can reward your content with more engagement and reach, when not done right, content repurposing can often burn resources without leading to any significant results.

To avoid this scenario altogether, let us look at some of the common pitfalls that you should be staying clear of while repurposing your content.

Lack of Customisation

When you are writing a piece of content from scratch, there is an elaborate process associated with it. You conduct diligent research on the topic, look for the right format to post about that content, make a rough outline with all the important information that needs to be covered, and then work on a rough draft.

Say you are creating content for a SaaS company in Brisbane. Now, if you are working on a detailed guide on BigCommerce SEO, you will start right from what is BigCommerce SEO, all the way to how to do it right. But what happens when this guide has been performing well for a while, and you want to make a video out of it?

“A big mistake marketers make is simply repurposing content without restructuring for the platform/times/audience. Avoid this by customising content for each platform (people consume differently on Linkedin than on a long-form blog post), taking into account the format, tone, and style that resonates with the specific audience on that platform.”

Jaclyn Freedman, Senior Manager - Demand Marketing at SmartRent

Ideally, you will want to keep the essence and value of the original content intact, while giving it a unique spin. When you create a video based on a website blog, you will need to develop a custom script that will make the content more engaging for that specific format.

Too Much Content on the Same Topic

If the topic is interesting, you can definitely consider creating multiple content pieces on it. If it is an evergreen topic, this may even be a great idea to consider. However, understanding how much is too much is also equally important.

Moreover, it is natural to want to post about topics in which your company has expertise. But as an overwhelming amount of content makes its way into the digital realm every day, content fatigue among readers is also very real.

“Build a list and add one of the following tags:

READY. Content that works well, is on brand and high quality.

UPDATE. Content that needs to be updated because of outdated facts, examples, broken links or irrelevant sections.

REMOVE. Content that is outdated.

In this process you usually get ideas for new content. You also minimise the risk of outcompeting yourself on search engines by having too much content on the same topic rather than a very few updated and compelling pieces of content that provides good answers to the questions of your audience.”

Joakim Ditlev, Owner at contentmarketing.dk

In such cases, it is important to explore different angles pertaining to a specific topic, and not have the same kind of content on your marketing channels. 

Ignoring Data Insights

In today’s day and age, you should probably not move ahead with any strategy that does not have enough data to back it up. The right datasets and metrics can illuminate and inform your strategy, and the lack of them can be like shooting in the dark without guaranteeing the outcome.

“Analysing your content doesn't stop when you repurpose the good stuff. Continue analysing repurposed content's effectiveness and continuously use that data to influence your strategy.”

Jaclyn Freedman emphasises

Indeed, you will need to keep monitoring and fetching insights on your repurposed content for your strategy to be truly effective.

7 Best Practices for Repurposing Content

All clear on what you should avoid while repurposing content? Great! 

With that, let us now look at some of the best practices that you should adopt while repurposing your content.

#1 Track & Measure Your Content Repurposing Efforts

Any progress that you make with the help of any kind of marketing campaign would be amiss without the right metrics to monitor and measure progress. Content repurposing is no different. You will undoubtedly be picking the best-performing content for repurposing, however, to gauge its true impact, you will need to measure the performance of this content after it is posted.

So, if you repurposed snippets of a website blog to post on social media, check the engagement and impressions on these posts. If you repurposed that long-form guide into a video, you will want to monitor the views, likes, and comments on it.

It is important to not just measure the performance of the repurposed content but also to track the performance over time with the help of content and SEO metrics.

#2 Creating New Content With the Aim of Repurposing

You can try your best to repurpose all the content that exists on your website, but the truth is that you cannot possibly recycle all of it. But even if you do not have too much existing content that can be repurposed, you can make adjustments going forward.

When you create new content for your website, keep repurposing at the back of your mind so that you can reuse the content at a later stage, and increase its lifespan. After all, high-quality content can always give birth to more high-quality content which is always a good idea.

Specifically emphasises how you can plan to repurpose any new content as you are creating it rather than going through old pieces of content. She says, “This means as you’re outlining your written content, highlight snippets that might make good social media posts. Could this post be an infographic? Pull out stats and soundbites and structure your outline in a way so it can be repurposed into an infographic directly. Then write your piece from your infographic-ready outline, and you’ve got the power to repurpose it immediately.”

Whitney Blankenship, Content Marketing Manager at Drip

Sounds simple, right? To put this into perspective, imagine the amount of resources and effort you will need to put into an infographic that you are creating from scratch.

#3 Analyse Your Target Audience’s Needs

Regardless of whether you are creating a new piece of content or repurposing it, you will need to understand your target audience really well. Any content pieces that you create will work only when they are tailored to the needs and requirements of your target audience. Here lies the importance of defining a content repurposing strategy.

Maybe you have been creating a lot of website blogs on popular topics, however, are they really what your audience expects from you? If you do not know, it is time to re-evaluate.

“Consider your target audience’s preferences when developing a content repurposing strategy. You should check out what they are searching for, which content formats prefer the most, and where they like to see such content.”

Irina Weber, Content Marketing Specialist at SE Ranking

With the help of competitor analysis, and a little bit of research online, you will be able to identify the topics that your target audience is interested in, and actively discuss. If you have already published content on these topics, repurposing them at this time might be the right way to strike the metal when it is hot, rather than creating content from scratch.

#4 Using Efficient Tools for Content Creation and Repurposing

So far, if you feel like content repurposing seems like a lot of manual labour, you may not be completely wrong. But when you are equipped with the right content repurposing tools, all of this can be super efficient and feel like a breeze.

If you have an informed SEO and content marketing strategy in place, you may already be using certain tools to aid your efforts. For example, you may be using keyword research tools to come up with the right keywords to target through any piece of content. You may even be using tools to monitor analytics that will help you gauge your SEO performance.

“To automate specific tasks, I use tools like Canva, SlideShare, Veed, and free WordPress plugins like Revive Old Posts for content repurposing.”

Irina Weber

 “I don’t know that I use any tool specifically for repurposing, but my content timesaver tools include:

Drip for easy newsletter/email marketing automation. Not to mention, if you’re looking to build your own email list, Drip has some of the best email capture features on the market.

Notion for organisation and project planning. Notion can do so much more than just serve as a wiki, and if you know what you’re doing, it can be a PM powerhouse.

Canva for easy visual creation for social media, blog graphics, infographics and mockups, etc.

Google Docs for writing/structuring different types of content.”

Whitney Blankenship

All you need to do now is find ways to utilise these tools to repurpose content. Some of these tools also offer features that will help you figure out whether a new piece of content has the potential to be repurposed in the future.

#5 Never Compromise on Quality

Repurposing can easily sound like recycling, and that can easily paint a picture of something old and not as good as the original. But that is definitely not the case when you are repurposing content.

Even as you take an old piece of content, and try to repurpose it into a new format or style, quality always has to be one of the top considerations in the process. A lot of businesses end up trading volume for quality, which will inevitably affect the way that piece of content performs. Regardless of whether your content is fresh or repurposed, it is not possible to ignore the EAT aspect if you want it to perform well on the SERPs.

Be mindful of the fact that you will be targeting a lot of new readers or a section of the target audience through your repurposed content. Expanding the reach is one of the primary reasons for repurposing your content, yes?

So, you will need to ensure quality even if you are using snippets of content from an existing video or guide to turn into social media posts.

#6 Consider Multiple Avenues for Repurposing

Remember that there are many channels and avenues that you can consider while repurposing any kind of content. By sticking to only certain channels for repurposing, you would not only be limiting your opportunities but may push the strategy to be counter-productive.

Julia B., Technical Copywriter at Spacebarpress Media, talks about leveraging the opportunity to create a new marketing asset in a different format for audiences that might have missed it in the original format.

“Everyone consumes content differently, so by repurposing content into different formats, a marketer can get that same message and value into the hands of their audience. For example, I'm not a big fan of video marketing, so by repurposing a video into a blog post, maybe a quick meme to be shared on LinkedIn, and a one-pager I can download from a website, I'll be more likely to consume it.”

Julia B., Technical Copywriter at Spacebarpress Media

When you are considering repurposing content, it is important to consider all the channels and formats you have at your disposal. It is also possible to repurpose a single piece of content into multiple formats at the same time. 

For example, a long-form guide on Wix SEO can be repurposed into a video. At the same time, you can also take smaller sections or snippets of content and create social media posts to generate some extra buzz.

#7 Keep SEO as a Key Priority

After all, you have learned about repurposing content so far, it is easy to write it off as a mere content creation strategy. Not that it is completely inaccurate, but content repurposing has a greater role to play in your SEO strategy just as much.

But for your repurposed content to perform well, you will need to take a strategic approach towards the process. 

“Create content for your audience and publish it in the relevant format on the platforms where they naturally hang out. Let’s take video as an example. Streaming live simultaneously to YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter gets us a live audience on each platform. We then take the video and extract Knowledge Nuggets: short clips from the live show that contain a helpful point. We then republish them on YouTube and create a page on our site with an SEO-friendly title, the transcript and Schema provided by the Wordlift plugin. This page can then rank on Google for relevant search queries.”

Jason Barnard, CEO and Founder at Kalicube

When optimised effectively for SEO, your repurposed content can drive as much value as a carefully crafted new piece of content. Plus, brands must ensure that any content that they publish should be optimised for SEO — repurposed or not.

Repurpose Content With a Purpose

Now that you know everything you need to about repurposing content, it is time to try it out for your website. When done with the right purpose and with defined goals and objectives, you will be able to make the most of any piece of content on your website.

Start with gauging your audience — the formats and platforms that they are most likely to engage with. Next, conduct keyword research, take stock of your existing content, and start repurposing.

Having said that, the process of repurposing content can quickly get complicated if you do not have the necessary expertise or tools. If you find yourself in that position, feel free to reach out to us so that we can help you take determined steps forward.