How to Repurpose Content
After pouring so much effort into creating your content, it makes sense to get as much out of it as possible. Repurposing content helps you do just that.
Repurposing content is taking content you already created and reimagining it into new pieces.
For example, you might take a long-form piece of content like a comprehensive blog post and turn it into a series of engaging social media posts, or vice versa, combining multiple short social media updates into a cohesive video.
This transformation helps you put your content to work more efficiently, allowing you to reach a wider audience and save time and resources compared to creating entirely new content from the ground up.
Content repurposing is different from content refreshing. When you repurpose content, you transform existing content into new pieces. When you refresh content, you edit old content to improve it or provide updated information in the same format. Both repurposing and refreshing are critical components of a good content strategy. Before repurposing any content, consider whether it first requires a refresh to remain relevant and effective. That’s why we’re going to show you how to repurpose content.
Why You Should Repurpose Content
Repurposing content should be an important part of your content strategy. The strategy has benefits that are hard to pass up.
Reach a New, Wider Audience
Instantly reaching more people is one of the biggest wins when repurposing your content. Your audience isn’t just hanging out in one spot. They’re scattered across your channels. Some might love diving into your YouTube videos, while others look forward to your emails popping up in their inboxes. Then there are the Instagrammers who haven’t missed a single one of your stories but might not be aware you’re sharing valuable insights on LinkedIn, too.
If you aren’t repurposing your content, you’re likely missing out on engaging with different segments of your potential audience. Reaching them where they are deepens your relationship with them.
Save Time
Saving time is a massive perk of repurposing content. When you imagine the hours required to craft unique content tailored for each platform, you realize how much repurposing streamlines this process.
By transforming a single piece of content for various platforms, you drastically reduce the workload on your team or on yourself.
While it still requires effort to adapt content thoughtfully for different audiences, the time investment is significantly less than starting from zero.
This efficiency means you can maintain a robust online presence across multiple channels without the burnout, freeing up hours of your day!
Save Money
Saving money and time go hand in hand. Repurposing content helps you reduce the hours spent brainstorming and creating while extending the lifespan of each piece of content. This process means you get more value for your investment, as you can stretch your content budget further, letting you allocate resources to other business needs.
Boost SEO
You created your original content with targeted keywords in mind. You can amplify your keyword strategy across multiple platforms by repurposing that content into various formats. You will have multiple published pieces that target similar keywords, and each new piece that aligns with those original keywords will help establish you as an authority on the subject. That collection of material signals to search engines that you are a credible source of information, which can improve your SEO rankings and make it easier for your audience to find you.
Use Information You Already Have
Repurposing content leverages the insights you’ve already gathered about what your audience responds to. By recycling material that has previously done well, you eliminate the guesswork. You won’t need to put in time to do additional research or spend time on something you’ve already seen flop. You’re maximizing the value of your best-performing content, spreading its impact across different formats and platforms without the extra legwork of starting from scratch.
Make Existing Content More Accessible
Not everyone enjoys consuming information the same way. While a video might captivate one part of your audience, another segment might prefer the details of an in-depth blog post.
Repurposing content allows you to meet your audience exactly where they’re most comfortable, offering them the choice to engage with your message in the format they prefer most. This strategy not only widens your audience, as we mentioned above, but also enhances user experience.
Identify Content for Repurposing
Now that you’ve learned the benefits of repurposing content, you might be ready to dive in. But, to make the most of your efforts, you’ll first want to identify the right pieces of content to transform. You’ll want to ensure you spend your time and energy on content that will have the most significant impact when repurposed.
Evaluate Existing Content
Kicking off your repurposing strategy begins with a look at what you’ve already created. Start by zeroing in on what’s resonated most with your audience so far. Your top-performing content should rise to the top of your repurpose list!
This step will be simple if you’ve monitored your content’s performance through metrics. If not, tools like Google Analytics are your friend, showing you which pages or posts your audience has visited the most. Within social platforms, you can use each channel’s analytics to identify pieces with the most engagement — shares, likes, or comments — and consider these as your guide for what to repurpose.
As you sift through your content, look for patterns or common themes to help you determine what direction to take. Occasionally, you’ll stumble upon content that didn’t perform as expected. Don’t throw these out. You might want to add them to your list of underperforming content to fix.
Another way to determine what content will do well once it’s repurposed is to consider what questions your clients or customers ask you most frequently. You’ve likely already spent time answering these, so now you can repurpose it to reach other parts of your audience that likely have the same questions.
Of these well-performing pieces, some of the best content will always be your evergreen pieces. Evergreen content is not tied to any current events and doesn’t reference specific times in the future. Itt will be relevant to your audience for much longer, if not forever. You’ll know the lifespan of this content will continue to be helpful if you decide to regularly repurpose it.
Determine Which Formats You’ll Repurpose
After you’ve decided what content is ripe for repurposing, you’ll want to determine what formats you’ll want to reimagine it for. We give you a lot of detailed ideas below, but for now, your metrics might give you some insight into which topics do well as social posts and which perform great on YouTube. No matter what you choose, you must ensure your repurposed content is a good fit for that platform’s audience.
Consider Your Audience
Before diving in, determine your target audience for each piece of repurposed content. The crowd that loved a blog post for its in-depth analysis might differ from the Instagram crowd looking for quick, visually engaging insights. Your goal for the original content — such as establishing your expertise — might shift when moving to social media, where the focus could be on sparking engagement or attracting new followers.
How to Repurpose Content
Now that you know which pieces of content to repurpose, the next step is to choose your approach. The format of your original content will guide you. Each type of content offers unique opportunities. Understanding the strengths of each format will help you repurpose it effectively, whether you’re condensing, expanding, or converting your material!
Repurposing Long-Form Content
One effective strategy for repurposing long-form content is transforming it into new, equally engaging long-form pieces. Your blog posts, for instance, are prime material for adaptation. They can be tailored for platforms like LinkedIn or Medium or even as guest posts on other sites, reaching new audiences and contexts. Similarly, chapters from e-books or key points from research papers can find new life as detailed blog posts.
If you have many pieces of long-form content on a particular topic, they can translate into a great new e-book! When you repurpose content this way, you’ll often adjust the posts into chapters and create a title and cover for the book.
Webinars, with in-depth discussion and insights, also fall into the long-form category and are perfect candidates for repurposing. Consider turning a webinar into a series of YouTube videos, whether as shorter, topic-specific clips or full-length features.
You can also turn your webinars into blog posts or LinkedIn articles. The shorter clips of great moments in the webinar make great short videos for social media channels. This approach can be especially valuable if you have a guest speaker on your webinar. You can pull out clips of your speaker for the videos or pull out quotes to feature on blog posts or social media posts and tag them! They might enjoy resharing the content as well, expanding your reach.
And, of course, you can take long-form posts on a common topic and use them to inform a webinar.
Overall, the most obvious repurposing option may be to use blog content to create social media posts. Reimagining long-form content into more visual posts for sites like Instagram or Pinterest isn’t quite as fast and easy as text-to-text (Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn), but pulling out good quotes or lists can allow for strong engagement while keeping more text-heavy details in the captions.
Repurposing Short-Form Content
If you’ve got posts that have done well on platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, there’s a good chance it’ll resonate on other social media platforms, too.
X and LinkedIn, for example, complement each other well. A hit post on LinkedIn could be reimagined as a Twitter thread, and conversely, a series of tweets might be woven into a compelling LinkedIn article. This strategy leverages your content’s versatility, ensuring it reaches and engages as broad an audience as possible.
Repurposing Visual Content
Infographics take a lot of time to make, but they’re packed with valuable content ready for repurposing. Consider turning each stat or fact into a slide for a presentation or an image for a social media carousel post. This way, the effort you put into your infographics goes even further.
Videos, too, are ripe for repurposing. Chopping up a longer video into shorter clips can make your content perfect for platforms like Instagram reels and YouTube shorts. The sound from those videos can also play a role. It could find a new life in your podcast episodes or even kickstart a series of audio-only versions of your content. With the help of free AI transcribers, audio and video can quickly transform into engaging blog posts.
Repurposing Strategy
It’s best to plan for repurposing your content right from the start. When creating a new piece, consider how you can modify it for use on other platforms. If you have something important or time-sensitive to share, coordinating the releases across your channels can make a more significant impact.
Planning ahead for repurposing means you’ll have everything you need, like graphics and other materials, ready to go because you just created them. With tools like Canva, you can quickly adjust your visuals for different platforms, giving you a head start in tailoring your content for each audience.
Although similar, this is different from cross-posting. When you cross-post your content, you post the exact same thing to multiple platforms. When you repurpose content to post on other platforms, you adjust the content to resonate better with that platform’s audience and style.
As you bring older content back into the rotation, mix up the posting schedule with the new stuff you’re putting out to keep your content fresh and engaging for your audience.
Be Consistent With Repurposing Content
Repurposing content is a strategic decision that will amplify your voice across platforms and allow you to connect with more of your audience without needing to create constant content from scratch. By identifying the top performers in your existing content and transforming them for new formats and platforms, you’ll save time and resources and boost your SEO.
Your thoughtfully crafted content deserves more time to shine. Ensure it gets the attention it deserves across all your active channels. Your blogs will make fantastic, engaging videos, and the quotes from your guests on your webinars will do great on social media.
Crafting, implementing, and adjusting a content strategy can seem overwhelming, but creating and repurposing content is most effective when done consistently. The truth is that you can do it, but you may not have time while you’re busy running a business. Let Content Journey handle the work for you and see your content perform better than ever. Contact us today.
