With marketers having to deal with more media platforms than ever, collating content is becoming an important skill. Laura Varley at Vertical-Leap provides advice on repurposing content.
Think of your favourite song – it hasn’t been released just once. It started off as a single, but has since been remixed, covered by other artists, sampled on various tracks and made its way onto a handful of compilation albums.
Music publishers know how to get the most out of their artists’ hard work. After all, coming up with a number one hit isn’t easy, and the same goes for audience-grabbing content. Repurposing existing content is an easy way to get more out of one, or sometimes several, pieces of work.
Let’s take a look at some simple but effective ways to repurpose your site’s content.
Collate your greatest hits
If you track how well your content performs via Google Analytics (and if not, you should), then you can easily see which pieces of content pull in the most readers. Make a note of the most popular pieces and see if a particular theme or subject sticks out.
Then, you can collate all the pieces covering that subject and turn it into a bigger piece of content, such as an ebook. You already know that, if done right, the ebook will pull in a big audience, as it contains some of the site’s most popular content and is about one of your audience’s favourite topics, so it’s not a big, time-consuming risk.
Alternatively, you can break a successful ebook/whitepaper into several smaller blog posts and direct your audience to the document’s download link should they want to read more.
Transform one type of content into another
So, you’ve written a blog on the various number of ways a business can save money, but why stop there? That blog could easily be transformed in an infographic, SlideShare, video, quiz and more. After all, not every member of your audience interested in that subject is necessarily going to want to read a blog post. They might prefer a more visual format, or something that’s interactive.
Plus, if that initial blog required you to do a lot of research, you want to get the most out of the data you mined. For example, to boost awareness of how much impact text message reminders can have for our client Textlocal, we decided to investigate what is the true cost of NHS missed appointments. This not only required us to sift through official figures, but to work out how else that wasted money could be spent.
The time expended conducting this research would have gone to waste if all we’d produced was a blog, so we also created a shareable infographic, a press release and drafted some social media posts for Textlocal to use across its channels. Big, bold campaigns are always going to be more successful than just a single blog post. The next time you write a blog post, think about what other types of content it could become.
Update archaic content
‘Five restaurant interior trends to look out for in 2013’ may be your best performing article of all time, but it’s not really relevant any longer. However, since this type of article has done so well in the past, it makes sense to replicate its success – it just needs updating.
You have the basic layout; you just need to change the content so it’s relevant for this year. Once you’ve written the new blog, you can link to it in the 2013 piece, so that the people landing on the outdated content can read the new version.
Further, you can boost the performance of existing content that’s still relevant, by going back and adding something new to it. Perhaps that how-to piece would benefit from a video or infographic?
Make use of other people’s content
Don’t limit yourself to just repurposing your own content – aggregate or round-up pieces are a quick, easy way to produce new content. Buzzfeed is famous for these types of articles; it takes images from elsewhere on the web and manages to create shareable listicles adored by the masses, and it doesn’t require much effort at all.
We have written several aggregate pieces for tech leasing client Hardsoft Computers and they prove to be extremely popular with its audience. One piece, entitled ‘Most incredible images drawn on the iPad Pro’ is the site’s best performing blog of 2016, having brought almost 4,500 people onto the site. Buzzfeed clearly knows what it’s doing.
Don’t let your great ideas go to waste – milk them for all they’re worth! Of course, you need to ensure that each piece you produce is of the highest quality, and not just simply a rehash of something else. However, when done right, repurposed content really can reap a lot of rewards for minimum effort.
By Laura Varley
Vertical Leap