Content marketing is awesome. It delivers value and generates leads and sales. But did you know a whopping 70% of content remains unused? This means 70% of your content is never read by anyone. It is wasted. This is why you must have a content repurposing strategy to utilize unused content. How to repurpose content and use the same content to reach different target audiences are the two key areas covered in this article.
Let’s get to the nitty-gritty.
What is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing, also known as content recycling, refers to the practice of reusing your existing content to increase its reach. It is a transformation of existing content into a new format to target a new audience or a different buyer persona:
For example, you can convert a blog post into a YouTube video to target a different buyer persona that is more interested in video content. Brian Dean did this for this on-page SEO blog post:
It was converted into a video:
This video has more than 200K views:
This is how you can recycle content to reach a new audience.
Benefits of Content Repurposing
Repurposing content isn’t just limited to changing the content format to reach a new audience. It offers a lot of value to your business in several ways including:
- Reach new audiences by changing the format of the content. When you change the content format, the target audience changes. It increases the reach of your content that lets you target a new market that wasn’t reachable with the old content format
- It improves content engagement by 31%. Changing content format helps you reach new people at new channels that engage and interact with your content
- Content repurposing improves search visibility as you have similar pieces of content on different channels that search engines rank for your primary keywords
- It is estimated that buyers need to hear your message 7x before they convert. Content repurposing helps you achieve this by reinforcing your message across multiple channels.
According to a survey, content repurposing has several other benefits that include:
- 31% reported that it increases content engagement
- 21% reported it increases brand awareness
- 15% said it increases website traffic
- 13% are of the view that it appeals to an audience with different learning styles
- 8% said it saves content creation time
- 4% reported that it helps generate leads
- 2% said it is cost-effective.
How to Repurpose Content?
So, how can you enjoy these amazing benefits of content repurposing? How to repurpose content to reach and target new audiences at new channels?
Here are the best ways to repurpose content:
- Convert blog post into a video
- Turn data into an infographic
- Create social media content from blog posts.
1. Blog Post into a Video
There is nothing better than converting a blog post into a video.
Why?
People love watching video content. Six out of 10 people prefer watching online videos to live TV:
It is estimated that videos will make up more than 82% of all internet traffic by 2022. You shouldn’t miss video content.
Converting a blog post into a video isn’t a big deal. Here is how to do it:
- Choose one of the best-performing blog posts that drives a lot of traffic
- Create a list of key topics (via subheadings) and list all the key takeaways
- Convert it into a video script for voiceover
- Use an app like Lumen5, Wibbitz, Biteable, or any other
- Publish your video on YouTube and other streaming platforms.
Initially, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on video creation, recording, and editing. A basic tool is enough. Once you’ll know what type of videos your audience loves, you can then buy tools and equipment for those types of videos.
For example, some consumers love animation videos while others like professional videos with a human interacting with them. Find out what works best for your audience and then invest in the right tools.
2. Turn Data into an Infographic
Infographics are great for several reasons. They’re engaging, easy-to-share, and acquire backlinks naturally:
Importantly, an infographic is 30x more likely to be read as compared to the traditional blog post:
Creating infographics from existing content gets easier when you have a lot of published content. You’ll need to pull important statistics and data from existing content and create an infographic out of it.
Or, if you have a how-to article, you can create an infographic to visually illustrate the steps.
Follow these steps to create a professional infographic from existing content:
- Collect data from different content pieces on a topic of your choice
- You can use an infographic tool (e.g., Canva, Piktochart, Venngage, or any other) or hire a freelance designer on Fiverr or Upwork
- Create a short supporting article for your infographic and publish it on your blog.
3. Blog Post into Social Media Content
Do you find it hard to create content for social media?
Well, you need to repurpose blog posts and convert them into social media posts. Better yet, you can create small snippets of the infographic that you just repurposed (see above) and use each data point as a social media post.
This is the best technique to keep your social media calendar filled with amazing content.
Here is an example of how to convert a blog post into an infographic and social media posts. This blog post was converted into an infographic and then each content writing tip was published as a social media post individually:
All the tips were published as social media posts individually:
That’s a whopping 105 social media posts for all the social networks. Amazing, right?
You can do this for pretty much any blog post that you have. Here is how to do it:
- Pick a top blog post that is already performing well
- Identify key takeaways and subheadings from the blog posts
- Use a design tool like Canva to convert text into social media posts
- Publish posts on social media platforms.
Don’t Ignore Content Repurposing
There are several other ways to repurpose content such as presentations, PDFs, lead magnets, podcasts, webinars, email courses, and more. Once you have created content, the rest is easy.
Changing the format of existing content is far easier than creating new content.
Don’t let your content sit idle on your CMS, recycle it.
Featured Image: Pexels
