How to repurpose one piece of expert-led content 11 ways
Creating original content is one of the most powerful ways to establish your expertise as a brand and help build your reputation online. The challenge is that it takes time, effort and probably budget to do it well. Which is why it’s important to repurpose that content so you can share it in lots of different ways and increase the ROI you’re getting.
Repurposing content in different forms also means you’ll catch a larger audience, because everyone has a different way they like to consume information, whether that’s through visuals, the written word, audio and so one.
The first step is to decide what your foundational content is. Are you going to focus on blogging, on video, on podcasts? Perhaps you’ll invest in white papers or webinars. You may well end up using all of them, but it’s hard to do lots of things really well, especially if your budget is restricted. Better to have one as your base and build off that.
For us, blogging is the heartbeat of our content marketing strategy. Blogging is a powerful tool for both social engagement and SEO, it doesn’t need lots of equipment to produce and can easily add huge amounts of value for your audience.
If you blog for your business, here’s how we’d recommend squeezing the most value you can from each post, to ensure that you’re reaching as many people as possible.
TL:DR
- Write a valuable, strategically informed blog post
- Share it on social media – more than once
- Summarise it in your newsletter
- Turn it into a press release
- Film a video blog
- Use your post as a chapter in an ebook
- Record a podcast series
- Create an animation
- Put together a presentation
- Design an infographic
- Send it to a prospect
1) Write a valuable, strategically informed blog post
Step one is to create the original piece of content, in this case your blog post. At this stage, don’t think too hard about how it might be repurposed. You want to focus on making it the best blog possible, with a headline designed to engage your audience or perform well from an SEO perspective, formatting that makes reading it as easy as possible, and most importantly, as much value as you can possibly include. By doing this, your blog will start adding value from the moment it is published.
2) Share it on social media – more than once
Before we move onto repurposing per se, make sure you’re sharing your post as it is on social media – ideally more than once. Your first share can be a straightforward one, introducing the topic and encouraging people to click through and read it by selling the benefits of the post. You can also use questions, stats and quotes pulled from the blog itself to vary the social sharing copy and encourage more engagements and views.
3) Summarise it in your newsletter
Your email list is made up of people who are at least moderately interested in what you have to say, so don’t deny them the chance to read your post. There are several ways you can share posts via email:
- Include the whole post – this reduces the need for your reader to click through, but means you won’t get the website traffic.
- Use the first few paragraphs followed by a ‘keep reading’ CTA, which will hopefully hook people enough that they want to read more.
- Write a headline and short ‘sell’ as part of a roundup of newsletter content, encouraging people to click to read. This is the method we use in The Right Words.
4) Turn it into a press release
If your blog post has a strong news hook, original research, controversial opinion or anything else that might be of interest to a journalist, why not repurpose it as a press release? Make sure to understand the publication you’re pitching to and what you’re hoping to gain e.g. do you want to write a similar piece for them or do you want to go on their expert contact list? Many online publications have submission guidelines that will help you understand how best to approach them.
5) Film a video blog
We’ve already talked about doing one thing well rather than lots of things poorly, but there’s no reason why a well written blog post shouldn’t help you create a video blog. Unlike brand videos, which are worth getting a professional for, video blogs can be filmed with a decent laptop or smartphone.
Again, there are several ways to tackle this. You could go through all of the points from your blog post in one longer video. You could chop it up into different sections e.g. if you have 5 tips, you could film one video for each and make a series. Or you can use video as a teaser, for example sharing just one tip and encouraging people to click through to the blog for more.
6) Use your post as a chapter in an ebook
Chances are that once you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ll have a collection of posts around several key topics. This is a great opportunity to create an ebook. As an example, we had three blog posts covering different sales and marketing challenges faced by B2B businesses, which we then turned into an ebook. These can be useful tools for your sales team to use as part of any outreach campaigns.
7) Record a podcast series
Another way to repurpose a whole collection of blog posts is to record a podcast series. Once again, you can do this in different ways. The most straightforward would be to simply record audio versions of each post for people who don’t have the time to read and prefer to consume their content on the go. But you might also prefer to be a little more free flowing and conversational, using the key points in each post as a starting point rather than a script. Or why not get a guest on to discuss each blog to get a variety of views?
8) Create an animation
This isn’t a cheap or easy option so we certainly wouldn’t recommend it for every post you write. But if there’s a particular piece of pillar content that is foundational to your content strategy, animation is a powerful way of getting – and keeping – people’s attention.
9) Put together a presentation
Next time you’re asked to give a presentation at a networking group or industry event, don’t stress about what you’re going to talk about. Dive into your blog and you’ll find plenty of inspiration. Chances are that many of your posts are a talk in themselves, containing an introduction, several main points, and a conclusion. All you have to do is create the slides.
10) Design an infographic
Depending on the information included in your post, it might lend itself nicely to an infographic format. These are great for sharing on social media and also rank well in terms of image search on Google. Remember, you don’t want to include all the words from your post in the infographic – it needs to be primarily visual, so take the core concepts and use text sparingly.
11) Send it to a prospect
Some blog posts naturally fit within your sales process. For example, you might have a buyer’s guide designed to help your audience make the right choice of product or service. Do put these posts on your website, but don’t leave them there. Send them directly to prospects too. You might do this at the same time as sending a proposal, for example, or as a follow up that feels a little more valuable than “Have you had a chance to consider our proposal?”
While all of these repurposing techniques take a level of input in terms of time and effort, they should ultimately take the knowledge you put into your blog – the research, the concepting, even some of the phrasing – and give it different forms.
By doing this, you get the most business value out of the expertise you put into your post. And you reach more people, both by using different content forms that appeal to different people, and by simply showing up more times in people’s digital landscape.
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