Repurposing Your Content: 5 Creative Ways to Get More Mileage Out of Your Message

Over half of all businesses engaging in content marketing, small and large, say producing enough content is a challenge. It takes a lot of time and effort to create even one piece of great content, where smaller pieces like blog posts and checklists can take a few hours. Unfortunately after all that time and effort, most companies only wind up with one piece of content to show for it. However there’s no rule stating you can only create one piece of content per idea. If you plan strategically, you can repurpose your ideas so that one marketing message can be presented and distributed across many pieces of content.  This allows you to be more efficient so you can stop feeling stressed about publishing enough material for your company. Here are five creative ways to get more mileage out of your message by planning ahead and repackaging it into new content to share in new places:

1. Turn Several Blog Posts into a White Paper or eBook

If you’ve been blogging for a while, then it’s likely that you have many posts dedicated to one topic. For example, if you’re a law firm, then you may have several posts regarding tax law, or estate planning, or traffic law. Since the content is already created, all you would have to do to create a white paper on estate planning is organize all those posts into a logical order and think of a good title for the white paper or eBook.  You may also have to add things like a new introduction, a table of contents, a conclusion, a cover page, a list of references, or redo the layout and the formatting, but the majority of the content will already be there. After taking the time to edit and to clean up the presentation, you will have a brand new piece of content that you can promote and use to convert web visitors.

This repurposing method can also go the other way around. You can take an eBook and turn each chapter into a blog post or guest post to gain exposure. Better yet, with each chapter/article, you can include a call to action at the end of the blog post leading visitors to download the complete eBook, capturing their email address in the process for lead generation. If you want to use this strategy for the approach from the last paragraph, where you combine multiple blogs into an eBook, just go back and add a call to action to download the eBook on the blog posts you used as the source material.

2. Combining Several Pieces of Long-Form Content into a Resource Kit

A resource kit is a set of materials that are bundled together to share an idea with your audience that is too advanced or detailed to be fully explained in a single piece of content. This is one of the easiest ways to repurpose content because you don’t necessarily have to redo or reformat anything to put it together. Creating a resource kit is a matter of putting different materials into an all-in-one package that makes it easy and convenient for your audience to find and act on your advice. The demand generation success kit is a good example of a resource kit, comprising of webinars, blog posts, a podcast, and a few worksheets outlining best practices. You can have one piece of content discussing demand generation, but to successfully explain a concept as advanced as this it’s more effective to create a resource kit.

With a resource kit, it’s often a good idea for you to use a variety of content types, since this allows you to present each concept using the medium that most clearly communicates the idea, keeps things engaging for users, and also accommodates the different ways people learn. However, you should balance the number of unique pieces inside your resource kit based on the complexity of the message, realizing that too little information will leave users feeling like your offering was inadequate and too much information will cause them to become overwhelmed and never even start.

A good rule of thumb is the more things you include in your resource kit, the more important creating some sort of order or sequence becomes.  This way, even when there is a lot of material, users know exactly where to begin and can proceed in order.  This makes the amount of material a lot less daunting.

3. Posting Your Webinar Slides on Slideshare

Webinars take a long time to put together, so why do all of that hard work just to present the information once and then forget about it? Slideshare is an often-under-used content sharing platform, but with over 60 million views monthly, if you have slides from a presentation just sitting around you’re missing out on a lot of potential exposure by not posting them. In order to maximize the value of your exposure, make sure that your presentation has an appropriate call to action at the end, so that you can carry the attention from the slideshow to your website, increasing visitors and leads. First, you may need to update the call-to-action that you used for the end of the webinar because it’s not the best choice to use on Slideshare, where a visitor is unable to listen to the presentation that’s supposed to accompany the slideshow and is not participating in real time. Second, you may have different objectives for people attending a live webinar, who are more engaged, compared to people browsing slides on Slideshare who are more passive.

Another great thing about posting to Slideshare is you can embed Slideshare presentations into your blog posts. Consider this a bonus way to repurpose your content or to further engage your reader once they’re at the end of a post!

4. Turn Your Webinar into Blog Posts

While creating a blog post summarizing your webinar and including the SlideShare presentation at the end, like the last section suggested, is not a bad start, because of the high level of effort for hosting a webinar there is much more you can do with that content. Your webinar probably had an agenda, which most likely was divided into sections or subtopics. You can turn each of those sections into its own blog post, or combine two or three if they can’t stand on their own, and illustrate each one with the graphics and/or quotes from your slides. The Recruitment Process Outsourcing Association does a good job of turning its webinars into blog posts, and posts like this one often generate a lot of traffic because it contains information their audience finds valuable.

A way to make your webinars more helpful and accessible is to hire someone to transcribe the webinar so that you have a transcript to accompany the audio and/or the video of your webinar. Doing this not only allows people to read along with the recorded webinar, but by adding a click to tweet option next to quotes and statistics, the material is much more engaging and is further divided into shareable bits. The transcript, if placed underneath the video on YouTube, Slideshare, or on a web page, also provides SEO benefits. If keywords are mentioned throughout the video, then the page can now rank for those keywords. Search engines have a hard time “seeing” that a video or slideshow is on the page.

One final benefit is that some people just prefer to read an article than listen to a webinar, and having the transcript makes your webinar accessible to that group.

5. Create an Infographic from a Tip Sheet, Checklist, or How-To Article

Variety is another common content marketing challenge, and visual content is one area where many businesses struggle. Granted, it takes more time and effort to create a video or a series of charts versus an eBook a series of newsletters. But if your business wants to offer more variety in its content marketing, then consider adding an infographic to the mix. Infographics are attractive, compelling, and easy for the reader to scan for the most important insights. They’re also an outstanding way to get more mileage out of your smaller pieces of content, or out of certain types of content that can be harder to repurpose. It’s difficult to turn a checklist into an engaging webinar, or to stretch that information out into a sizable white paper, but creating a decision flowchart out of it is a fun, visual way to reuse that material.

If creating visual content still seems like a lot, then use these infographic templates to get you started. Color schemes and icons aren’t for everyone, and every business doesn’t have a graphic designer in the building to do an infographic for them, but there are free resources out there that will allow you to test the waters to see if the ROI is worth investing in paying someone to help you in the future.

By repurposing one piece of content into many different forms, you don’t have to start from scratch every time you need to create marketing material for your campaigns. Instead of constantly stressing about what materials to create for your brand, reuse the content archive you already have and repurpose it for a different audience as a new content type in order to turn new people on to your company’s message!

Does your business effectively repurpose its content? Tell us how you do it in the comments!