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The Ultimate Guide to Repurposing Content

Written by Impulse Creative | May 14, 2015 at 4:30 PM

One of the biggest challenges for marketers today is consistently creating remarkable content. Creating content takes time, and constantly coming up with new, innovative ideas can be exhausting, not to mention daunting. After all, the Internet is flooded with content, and it's more challenging than ever to create content that stands out from the pack.

Fortunately, there's a powerful tool in the marketing tool that's often overlooked: repurposing. Repurposing content is the reincarnation tool of the marketing world, and it allows you to give new life to an old piece of content. When you repurpose content, you already have a head start on the content creation process. All that's left is figuring out what to do next.

What does it mean to repurpose content?
Repurposing content means one of two things: changing the format of a piece of content and/or changing the intended audience. Changing the format could mean turning a series of blog posts into an eBook or turning a fact-heavy webinar into an infographic. Repurposing content can also be re-writing a blog post to target a different buyer persona. In this case, the meat of the blog may be the same, but the pain points that you address would be different.

Repurposing content shouldn't be confused with revamping content. When you revamp a piece of content, you continue to use it for the same purpose it was originally intended, but you update it, so it remains relevant to your audience. For example, maybe you take an old eBook about SEO and update it to reflect new trends in SEO, new Google updates, and revamp the design to be more current.

Why repurpose content
Repurposing content allows you to get more out of your content. It's easy to see content as something that has a short lifespan. After all, what can you really do after you've shared your content on social media a few times? Believe it or not, there's a lot you can do. Repurposing content allows you to use old ideas to fuel new content. It allows you to do more with less, adds value to your past content, helps you gain additional authority about a topic, and allows you to reach a new buyer persona or target audience.

Ways to repurpose your old content
One of the biggest struggles for marketers is determining what content to repurpose. You're not going to want to repurpose every piece of content you've ever created – especially if it's something that didn't perform well. Look at your analytics and see which pieces of content performed the best and resonated most with your audience. Most importantly, make sure it's something that can be transformed into a different medium or that it can be reconstructed to address a different buyer persona.

Still stuck? Here are a few ways to repurpose your content:

  • Use eBook content to create a series of blogs
  • Take a series of blogs about a specific topic and turn it into an eBook
  • Turn an infographic into a blog post
  • Use blog posts to create infographics or other visual images (Canva is PERFECT for this)
  • Turn a blog post into a webinar, video, or podcast
  • Take a webinar and create a series of blog posts about it
  • Take a blog post that targeted one buyer persona and reconstruct it to target and address the pain points of another
  • Turn a slideshow into an infographic
  • Find a blog post that performed well and break it into multiple, more detailed blog posts
  • Re-promote evergreen content on social media
  • Turn blog posts into an email series

Repurposing content take be a huge time saver for content creators, and it allows you to get the most out of your content. Whenever you're creating content, think about how you can repurpose it in the future and build that into your marketing strategy. Remember: When you repurpose your content, always focus on adding value. If you do this, your repurposing efforts should be successful.