What is content repurposing?

Many e‑commerce busi­ness­es ded­i­cate thou­sands of hours per year to con­tent creation.

These hours are expen­sive, tir­ing, and some­times offer min­i­mal returns.

Instead of only ever cre­at­ing entire­ly new con­tent, busi­ness­es are now repur­pos­ing their con­tent to make the most of it. But what exact­ly does that mean?

Con­tent repur­pos­ing refers to the process of tak­ing exist­ing con­tent and trans­form­ing it into a new for­mat. Typ­i­cal­ly, busi­ness­es repack­age con­tent to ben­e­fit a dif­fer­ent pur­pose (e.g., tar­get a dif­fer­ent KPI) or reach a new audience.

The prac­tice of con­tent repur­pos­ing allows busi­ness­es to max­imise the val­ue of their exist­ing con­tent by extend­ing its lifes­pan and reach while also reduc­ing the need for and expense of cre­at­ing new con­tent from scratch.

What kind of content can you repurpose?

You might like to repur­pose a blog post into a video, pod­cast episode, or info­graph­ic. Or you might repur­pose a webi­nar or pre­sen­ta­tion into a series of blog posts or social media updates.

By mak­ing your con­tent avail­able in dif­fer­ent for­mats and on dif­fer­ent plat­forms, you increase its vis­i­bil­i­ty and engage­ment. But why repack­age the same con­tent for dif­fer­ent online spaces? The answer:

Content repurposing means catering to different preferences

Peo­ple con­sume con­tent in dif­fer­ent ways, mak­ing con­tent repur­pos­ing high­ly effec­tive for reach­ing new audi­ences. While some peo­ple are visu­al learn­ers, oth­ers like to read for extend­ed peri­ods of time or absorb infor­ma­tion via a pod­cast while get­ting on with oth­er tasks.

By repur­pos­ing your con­tent, you can reach those who pre­fer video, audio, or visu­al for­mats, as well as those who con­sume con­tent on dif­fer­ent plat­forms such as social media, email, or your website.

If you choose to start repur­pos­ing your con­tent, you’ll be able to cater to a range of peo­ple with dif­fer­ent con­tent pref­er­ences. Here are some dif­fer­ent for­mats to consider:

• Blog posts and articles
• Videos
• Emails
• Social media posts
• Pod­casts
• Info­graph­ics
• Webi­na­rs
• Inter­views
• Q&As
• Free tools and templates

Over­all, con­tent repur­pos­ing is an essen­tial strat­e­gy for dig­i­tal mar­keters, as it helps to extend the lifes­pan and val­ue of their con­tent while also improv­ing its reach and engagement.

If you’re inter­est­ed in repur­pos­ing some of your busi­ness’s con­tent, read on to learn how you can get started.

How to repurpose your content

To start repur­pos­ing your con­tent in the right way, fol­low these steps and best practices:

1. Identify your goals and audience

The first step of repur­pos­ing con­tent is iden­ti­fy­ing your goals and defin­ing a clear audi­ence. Think about what you want your new con­tent to achieve and who you want it to reach.

For exam­ple: per­haps you want to engage a younger audi­ence or strength­en your brand’s pres­ence on a par­tic­u­lar platform.

By clear­ly defin­ing your goals and audi­ence, you can keep them at the cen­tre of your repur­pos­ing efforts and ensure every step is tak­en with your tar­get audi­ence and desired out­comes in mind.

2. Analyse your existing content

Next, you need to iden­ti­fy the pieces of con­tent that can be repur­posed. Look out for con­tent that has per­formed par­tic­u­lar­ly well, as it might be pop­u­lar in a dif­fer­ent form. Equal­ly, con­tent that did­n’t per­form so well could be engag­ing to some audi­ences – just once it’s been repurposed.

For exam­ple, if you notice that your mar­ket­ing emails always do quite well, you might decide to start pro­mot­ing your oth­er con­tent via email.

The process of analysing your con­tent in this way will help you get famil­iar with the health of your con­tent and form a stur­dy basis before you embark on this new project.

To help with this, you might like to cre­ate a mas­ter spread­sheet that shows the suc­cess of all your brand con­tent from each of your chan­nels, so you can work from one cen­tral data­base going forward.

3. Choose the right format

Choos­ing a for­mat will be easy as long as you under­stand your goals and tar­get audience.

For exam­ple, if you want to reach a visu­al audi­ence, con­sid­er cre­at­ing info­graph­ics or social media graph­ics. If you want to reach an audi­to­ry audi­ence, con­sid­er cre­at­ing a pod­cast. Remem­ber that dif­fer­ent demo­graph­ics use dif­fer­ent social media plat­forms (we’ll go into this later).

The key is to choose a for­mat that res­onates with your tar­get audi­ence and can be com­pat­i­ble with the con­tent you intend to repurpose.

4. Adapt your content for the new format

Once you’ve com­plet­ed the plan­ning stages above, it’s time to repur­pose your content!

Depend­ing on the con­tent’s orig­i­nal form and intend­ed new pur­pose, this step can involve a range of things. It might include edit­ing, design­ing, film­ing, refor­mat­ting, and more. What­ev­er you do to repack­age your con­tent, make sure it’s opti­mised for its new for­mat. For instance, a video-turned-blog post will need to be opti­mised for SEO.

5. Promote your repurposed content and repeat

Final­ly, once you’re hap­py with your new­ly trans­formed con­tent, it’s time to post and pro­mote it! Whether you’re upload­ing to Insta­gram, YouTube, or send­ing an email, make sure to do it at an opti­mal time and share it to mul­ti­ple plat­forms if possible.

After you’ve done it once, you can con­tin­ue to repur­pose old con­tent – per­haps work­ing through the mas­ter spread­sheet from ear­li­er. Don’t for­get to keep an eye on per­for­mance met­rics to mon­i­tor the effi­ca­cy of your work.

5 best practices for content repurposing:

Keep the fol­low­ing best prac­tices in mind when repur­pos­ing your con­tent to ensure opti­mal results:

1. Repur­pose con­tent that has per­formed well in the past to ensure you are invest­ing your resources in top­ics that res­onate with your audience.

2. Only choose for­mats that align with your goals and audi­ence rather than wast­ing resources on unprof­itable channels.

3. Cre­ate a con­tent repur­pos­ing cal­en­dar to ensure you work through your back­log con­sis­tent­ly. Or inte­grate your repur­pos­ing plans into your pre-exist­ing calendar.

4. Test dif­fer­ent for­mats and plat­forms to deter­mine what works best for your audi­ence and goals.

5. Mea­sure the effec­tive­ness of your repur­posed con­tent to deter­mine its impact on your mar­ket­ing goals. Always respond to pat­terns in per­for­mance data, as these can be high­ly reliable.

How to use social media effectively when repurposing content

Social media plays a sig­nif­i­cant role in all con­tent mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, and that does­n’t change when the con­tent gets repur­posed. Busi­ness­es can choose from a range of con­tent for­mats when repur­pos­ing it for social media, such as the following:

• Images
• Graph­ics
• Info­graph­ics
• Videos and reels
• Live streams
• Q&As
• Con­tests and giveaways
• User-gen­er­at­ed con­tent (UGC)
• Col­lab­o­ra­tions with influencers

When think­ing about repur­pos­ing con­tent for new plat­forms, busi­ness­es should con­sid­er the fact that dif­fer­ent social media sites have dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es and audi­ence demo­graph­ics. For instance:

LinkedIn is pre­dom­i­nant­ly used for net­work­ing, B2B com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and pub­lish­ing Thought Lead­er­ship con­tent. You’ll find young and mid­dle-aged pro­fes­sion­als on LinkedIn, and its con­tent tends to be for­mal, prac­ti­cal, and serious.

YouTube is suit­ed to a wide range of busi­ness types as it’s used by a high­ly mixed demo­graph­ic. How­ev­er, the plat­form demands a lot from its cre­ators in terms of post­ing con­sis­ten­cy, which can be off-putting for some businesses.

Tik­Tok is where you’ll find the younger gen­er­a­tions. As such, it’s great for B2C brands with an empha­sis on lifestyle themes.

Insta­gram has a young audi­ence, but you’ll find more old­er peo­ple than on Tik­Tok. Busi­ness-wise, it’s pre­dom­i­nant­ly used for B2C com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and brands that post high­ly engag­ing visu­al con­tent per­form better.

Twit­ter allows brands to answer more ser­vice and sup­port queries, as well as start con­ver­sa­tions with con­sumers. You’ll find a mixed demo­graph­ic on Twitter.

Face­book is a great all-rounder as it caters to both B2C and B2B com­pa­nies and hosts a high­ly mixed demographic.

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, you could repur­pose con­tent for each of these dif­fer­ent chan­nels, as well as for your web­site and email. How­ev­er, there’s no need to cater to every­one. As long as you select the right social media plat­form for your busi­ness’s goals and tar­get audi­ence, no more than one or two con­tent for­mats are needed.

Potential problems when repurposing content

While con­tent repur­pos­ing is an effec­tive strat­e­gy for max­imis­ing the val­ue of your con­tent, there are some issues you could run into if you make cer­tain mis­takes. Here are three com­mon prob­lems and some strate­gies for avoid­ing them:

Loss of quality or relevance

When repur­pos­ing con­tent, you run the risk of com­pro­mis­ing the qual­i­ty or rel­e­vance of the con­tent. This can hap­pen if you fail to adapt it to the new for­mat or plat­form effec­tive­ly or if you try to force a piece of con­tent into a for­mat that isn’t entire­ly compatible.

For instance, sim­ply read­ing a blog post out loud won’t make for an engag­ing video and tran­scrib­ing a com­e­dy pod­cast might not car­ry the intend­ed tone or message.

To avoid los­ing qual­i­ty or rel­e­vance, take the time to care­ful­ly adapt your con­tent to fit the new for­mat or plat­form. This may involve edit­ing, refor­mat­ting, or even reimag­in­ing the con­tent to ensure that it works in its new context.

Duplication

If you repur­pose con­tent with­out mak­ing sig­nif­i­cant changes to it, you may end up with mul­ti­ple pieces of con­tent that are essen­tial­ly the same. This can be prob­lem­at­ic for SEO per­for­mance, as pla­gia­rism is a cru­cial red flag for search engines. Plus, it can annoy your audi­ence if they feel like they’re see­ing the same con­tent over and over again.

To avoid dupli­ca­tion, make sure you are mak­ing suf­fi­cient changes to your con­tent when repur­pos­ing it. This may involve chang­ing the for­mat, reword­ing pas­sages, adding new infor­ma­tion, or focus­ing on a dif­fer­ent aspect of the topic.

Confusion

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, repur­pos­ing con­tent can some­times con­fuse your audi­ence when they see dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the same con­tent on dif­fer­ent plat­forms. For exam­ple, if you post a blog

on your web­site and then repur­pose it into a video for YouTube, your audi­ence may be con­fused about which ver­sion to engage with.

To avoid con­fu­sion, make sure you are clear about what they can expect to gain from each piece. For instance, if you cov­ered the top­ic of on-page SEO in full detail in a blog post and just gave an overview in a video, you should sign­post these dif­fer­ences when pro­mot­ing both.

Alter­na­tive­ly, you might want to use dif­fer­ent calls-to-action (CTAs) for each ver­sion to encour­age your audi­ence to engage with the ver­sion that is most rel­e­vant to them.

How to scale your content repurposing efforts

As your con­tent library grows, it can become more chal­leng­ing to man­age and repur­pose your con­tent effec­tive­ly. To main­tain order­ly oper­a­tions over time, you can do a few things:

Creating a calendar

A con­tent cal­en­dar can bring a sig­nif­i­cant sense of cohe­sion to a mar­ket­ing team, not to men­tion organ­i­sa­tion and consistency.

Your cal­en­dar can be as detailed or sim­ple as you like. It should at least be a sched­ule that out­lines when and how dif­fer­ent pieces of con­tent will be repurposed.

This one sounds sim­ple, but you’d be sur­prised by the num­ber of brands with huge blogs that don’t use an offi­cial calendar.

Automation tools

To stream­line your con­tent pro­duc­tion process­es, there are many tools and tech­nolo­gies avail­able that can help.

For instance, you can set up tem­plates in the design tool, Can­va, which makes it sim­pler to repur­pose con­tent, such as graph­ics, reg­u­lar­ly. Or you might opt for a social media man­age­ment tool such as Zapi­er, Hoot­suite, or Buffer to auto­mate post­ing as reg­u­lar­ly as you like.

Final thoughts

It might seem like there’s a lot involved when repur­pos­ing con­tent, but it does save time, mon­ey, and effort when com­pared to an entire­ly orig­i­nal con­tent strategy.

If you’d like some help repur­pos­ing your con­tent or man­ag­ing your social media chan­nels, get in touch, and our team will be hap­py to help.

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