Why Repurposing Content is worth all of your Attention

Content creation and publishing is one of the most crucial aspects of your digital marketing strategy. High-quality content can help you achieve various goals such as increased website traffic, improved online presence, and better brand reputation.

However, creating good content on a regular basis is a herculean task. One way to simplify this process is by repurposing content that you’ve already published.

Repurposing content offers a number of lucrative benefits for marketers and content creators. However, before we explore the advantages, let us first understand what it really means.

Repurposing Content: Understanding the Concept

Repurposing content simply means taking existing content that you’ve created for a particular purpose and using it for another purpose. This implies transforming an existing piece of content into a new format.

You could convert an extensive blog post into a podcast series or pick out vital information from an ebook and design an infographic with it.

For instance, the team at Moz publishes short informational videos every Friday on their YouTube channel as part of the company’s “Whiteboard Friday” series.

Each video is also accompanied by a blog post that includes detailed video transcriptions. This gives their audience the option to choose between two different ways of consuming the same content.

Image via Moz

Repurposing content can also mean changing the target audience for that content.

Let’s say you have published a blog post on travel photography tips. You could edit the post and restructure it so that it’s applicable to other genres of photography such as landscape and wildlife.

Now, let’s take a look at how repurposing content can benefit you.

Optimum Use of Time and Effort

The most obvious advantage of repurposing content is that it saves you the trouble of coming up with new content ideas.

A topic that has struck the right chord with your audience once is more likely to gain traction than a new one. So instead of brainstorming an endless list of content ideas, you can pick the most potent ones. And then concentrate on creating high-quality content to get the most out of it.

Expand Your Reach

Your audience – be it your social media followers, blog readers, or email subscribers – keeps growing over time. Some of them may not be aware of an ebook you had published a year ago.

Repurposing content gives you an opportunity to convey the same information to your new audience members without becoming redundant to those who have read it before. For instance, you could transform the ebook into a detailed tutorial video and publish it on YouTube.

Additionally, while your target audience may have a lot of things in common, their learning styles and preferences will vary.

For instance, some people might be visual learners who prefer to consume information in the form of interesting videos and infographics. Others might prefer a white paper that is full of statistics and case studies.

Repurposing content allows you to cater to these varying tastes without creating different content for each of them.

When you publish an ebook and accompany it with a podcast series, the same content starts appealing to different members of your target audience. It also helps your content reach outside the confines of your target audience and gives your brand increased visibility.

For instance, Jay Baer, the founder of Convince and Convert, creates two- to three-minute informational videos on topics related to digital marketing.

His team then converts thess videos into blog posts for their website, infographics for social media, podcast episodes, and blog posts for Medium. This allows them to reach out to a massive audience on different platforms.

Target Different Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

Your target audience is comprised of people in three different stages of the buyer’s journey – awareness, consideration, and decision. The frame of mind and preferences of people vary at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Someone in the decision stage has already done their research and is on the verge of making a purchase. They may want to read a detailed article or ebook that will help them make an informed decision.

On the other hand, someone in the awareness stage is just getting acquainted with your brand. This person probably won’t invest the same amount of time into reading an extensive white paper. They’d rather quickly glance through an infographic that summarizes your product or services.

Repurposing content allows you to reach out to people at different stages of the buyer’s journey, without creating different content for each one of them.

Continue reading this article on Shane Barker's blog.