How to Repurpose Content (and Why)

Your marketing team spends hours each week creating content and pushing it out for the world to see. But what if there was a way to help them create content with better ROI without making them reinvent the wheel every time?

Here’s why it pays to know how to repurpose content—and repurpose it effectively.

Why Repurpose Content?

Saves Time and Resources

If you’re looking for how to create marketing content on a budget, repurposing your existing pieces is one of the best routes you can take.

As any department head can attest, marketing collateral isn’t cheap. Chances are, you’re taking hours out of your week to research, write, design, and optimize your content yourself. If not, you’re probably paying someone else to do it. However, if you repurpose your content for multiple platforms, you allow your content to go even further while using assets you already have, such as copy, images, and video footage.

While you still have to edit the content to adapt it to each of your platforms, it’s a lot easier to start with the collateral you already have. Even more, this requires less time and money than starting from scratch.

Increases ROI

Creating marketing materials requires an investment of resources, money, and time. Therefore, you should get as much mileage from each piece as possible. 

Repurposing your marketing content improves the returns on the investment you and your team made in creating the piece. Even more, it does so without requiring as much additional time. While it still requires some time and effort, it likely won’t be as extensive as it would be if you were creating the content from scratch.

Extends Your Marketing Reach

Different members of your target audience might have certain ways they like to learn about your industry. Some people prefer to learn more about new products or solutions through reading written content, while others prefer learning through videos, infographics, or podcasts. Repurposing your marketing content helps you engage with those who wouldn’t have seen it before and allows you to engage with them where they’re most likely to be.

Improves SEO

Done right, repurposing your marketing content can reinforce your overall SEO strategy. This is because you could potentially have multiple pieces of content targeting groups of similar keywords.

While you’ll generally have to make sure your repurposed content focuses on different subtopics, this makes it easier to rank for specific keywords based on content you already have in your marketing arsenal. Subsequently, you’ll be more likely to rank for those targeted keywords because Google will start to notice you have a lot of expertise related to those keywords.

Developing a Content Repurposing Strategy

As much as we recommend repurposing your content, not every piece is a good candidate for repurposing. Plus, you can (and should) prioritize some over others.

We typically recommend taking these steps to develop your content repurposing strategy.

Assessing What You Have

Chances are, if you’ve been marketing your brand for several years, you likely have some existing content sitting idle or not being used to its full potential. This is your best opportunity to conduct a content inventory. Not only will this allow you to find content you can repurpose, but it also allows you to see what you already have.

If your brand is old enough, you may still have print materials with good information. While not every pamphlet, trifold, and billboard design you’ve ever had needs to be digitized and put on your website, you can repurpose some of the verbiage, graphics, or images into other types of high-quality content.

Identifying How Your Content Performs

After you’ve conducted your content inventory, it’s essential to look at how the marketing assets you found have performed historically. You might find a whole range of results. For example, there could be some pieces that still drive significant traffic and conversions on your website, while others haven’t been pulling their weight and have outdated information or resources.

But that doesn’t mean low-performing or outdated content should be relegated to the dustbin, either. By contrast, these are potentially your top assets for repurposing. Some lower-performing pieces can be refreshed or rewritten with newer, more relevant information so they can more easily attract people using search engines, while others are adaptable to different types of content.

Building a Content Repurposing Workflow

Just like when you create content from scratch for the first time, having a workflow in place can help keep your efforts efficient. The formula for folding repurposed content into your broader marketing strategy is somewhat of a microcosm, looking something like this:

• Establishing goals: It’s important to know what you want to accomplish by repurposing your marketing content before you start the process. Maybe it’s more email clicks or higher traffic from social media. Whatever the case, it’s important to know what you want your repurposed content to accomplish.

• Choosing your channels: Select a main channel, such as your website, as well as other channels like email or social media. For example, if you’re repurposing your blog content into an eBook, you might gate the eBook behind a form on a landing page for your website. To drive people to that landing page, you could also create teaser blog posts and promotions on social media.

• Incorporating repurposed content into your calendar: Once you start repurposing content, your marketing department’s overall editorial calendar should reflect that. Intersperse your repurposed pieces throughout the quarter or year to get the most for your efforts.

• Repurposing your content: Now comes the process of adapting your content to the channels where you’ll promote it. This might look different for a blog post than it would for republishing videos from the vault or promoting content on Instagram, so you should never treat it as a strictly cookie-cutter process.

• Publishing your content: Schedule your content to publish in advance whenever possible, and make sure you optimize the precise times and dates for when your email open rates or engagement levels on social media platforms are highest.

• Assessing the results: As with all other types of content strategies, it’s essential to check how your content performed after the fact. Depending on where you’re repurposing your content, this could mean reviewing everything from your Meta ads metrics to analyzing traffic through Google Analytics.

Making Old Content Evergreen

Sometimes, the content you made several years ago can be the perfect candidate for repurposing. Making evergreen content out of old or dated blog posts can be a great way to start, especially if your company has been blogging for years and is at risk of becoming too repetitive with its blog content.

For example, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies found themselves making content to address what they did to adapt to the rapidly unfolding health crisis. Some also created content about how their entire industry had changed due to the situation.

Depending on your circumstances, some of this highly topical content might have been a one-and-done situation. However, if any of your business practices have changed or your industry shifted permanently after the pandemic, it may be helpful to revisit that content. Not only does that help establish your brand as adaptable, but it can also build trust among your customers that you can adapt.

Choosing Content to Promote

Promoting existing content can also be a practical way to continue promoting your brand, especially if the content already has a high rate of conversions or brand recognition. While certain assets shouldn’t run all the time, you could potentially repurpose some every year on a seasonal basis.

One of the most recognizable examples is with brands like M&M’s, Hershey’s, and Campbell’s. All three of these brands have been repurposing their television commercials from the ‘80s and ‘90s every year around the holidays to promote their candies and soups, respectively. However, as streaming and YouTube have become more competitive platforms for advertisers, they’ve used those commercials as 15-second ads on videos and live streams.

Part of the reason why those ads still run every year despite being at least 30 years old is because they’re so effective at boosting seasonal sales. You can use this same concept to promote and repurpose your content every year, especially if the content was initially successful.

7 Ways to Repurpose Content

Now that you know where and how to start identifying content with good repurposing potential, here are the most successful ways to repurpose your content for different target audiences, platforms, and purposes.

1. Converting Blog Content into an eBook

It could be an eBook, a whitepaper, an interactive guide, or a series of case studies, if applicable.

Regardless, if you’re looking for how to repurpose blog content, this is a perfect place to start because the written content is already part of the way there. It’s a great way to increase conversions on your website without starting the development process from scratch.

However, if you’re going to do this, it’s essential to add exclusive insights that weren’t in your original blog content. Whether the new eBook includes updated statistics or exclusives about your products, or if there are insights you would like to promote that your customers won’t find anywhere else, it should be something that your visitors would be willing to give their email addresses to receive.

This can make the difference for someone who isn’t sure if they should trade their email address for what you have to say. Make it clear that they’ll get new information by downloading your eBook, including teaser text that hints at what they haven’t seen yet.

2. The Reverse: Turning eBook Content into Blog Posts

Creating blog posts from eBooks is one of the easiest ways to promote and tease the content you keep behind forms. Depending on the format of your eBook, you could convert certain excerpts into multiple blog posts with relative ease.

There’s a notable caveat, however. Don’t just copy and paste your eBook content into your CMS platform and hit publish.

To get better mileage out of your repurposed eBook, you’ll need to do some edits. Adapt the excerpts you use with relevant phrases using keyword research. If there are synonyms in the section headings or the copy itself that you can replace with the keywords you’re targeting, use them. After all, a blog post that doesn’t attract organic traffic to your website isn’t pulling its weight.

It’s also just as important to include calls to action to drive the blog’s visitors to download the full eBook.

3. Creating Email Newsletter Content

Your older collateral can also reach new target audiences when you use it in your company’s email marketing content. Since email is one of the most consistently effective marketing channels available, repurposing your content through it is a great way to increase engagement with those pieces.

This can include:

• Utilizing existing visuals and infographics in your emails in new and engaging ways
• Including excerpts from blog posts in your email newsletters
• Driving people to your website by linking to blog posts with teaser text
• Encouraging people to download your gated content like case studies and eBooks

4. Compiling Content into a Pillar Page

If you have multiple blog posts on different facets of a topic, you can create a pillar page that serves as your site’s library of resources on that subject. Pillar pages are also a great way to provide information in the form of infographics, videos, and other types of content to supplement your written pieces.

Repurposing content with pillar pages can be invaluable for SEO. It shows your authority on all facets of your subject of choice and allows you to build links internally, spreading equity throughout your site.

5. Repurposing Audio and Video Content

As mentioned, some people prefer to consume content over audio or video instead of reading because that’s most convenient for them. Meanwhile, other people may need audio or visual content to learn about your products. 

Offering multiple ways to consume your content isn’t just a matter of appealing to the different preferences of your target audiences—it’s also a way to be more accessible.

Even more, podcasts are becoming more and more prevalent as a way for customers to learn more about your industry. Converting your written content into podcasts gives them that opportunity, especially if you promote them on other platforms.

6. Creating Infographics

Infographics come in many forms, but most include high-level statistical information or facts about a given topic with sharp, clean visual content to support them. These visually pleasing options allow the viewer to learn about the subject at hand in a more digestible way.

Once you’ve converted the highlights of your content into infographics, you have several options for using them, including:

• As standalone pieces of website content
• Broken out into smaller images for blog posts
• Within email content
• And much more

7. Repurposing Content for Social Media

Out of every recommendation we’ve listed, repurposing marketing content for social media is the lowest-hanging fruit. If you have videos or visual content, you could adapt those pieces for social platforms like TikTok and YouTube. Otherwise, you could find ways to turn them into text posts for LinkedIn, images for Instagram, and other platforms—the possibilities are only limited to the platforms you use.

The best part is that you can continue incorporating them into your social media calendar for months after the fact, provided that you change the pieces up enough to provide your followers with something new each time.