Why Repurposing Your Content Works

A lot of effort, time and research goes into content creation. We know, it’s not always easy to churn out new high-quality content regularly. 

Repurposing content will help save you the trouble of always creating something new, maximise each ‘content opportunity’ and lengthen the shelf-life of your existing work with different audiences.

Curata research shows that 82% of marketers do repurpose their content.

What does it mean to repurpose content?

Repurposing your content means that you’re taking an existing content asset and presenting it to a new target audience on a different platform. 

After all, the people you’re trying to reach are not homogeneous — they have different content consumption preferences. 

Some people like to look at pictures and infographics, while others may prefer to read in-depth articles and blogs. There is also a growing population of audio-oriented consumers who like to listen to podcasts.

Repurposing content that can work in different mediums will help you appeal to a wider audience, and give your existing work a new lease on life.

As our Content Director, Michelle Cheong, says, “By repurposing your content, you cater to the changing ways different people consume content, enabling it to reach a wider audience.” 

Additionally, it is an efficient way to maximise your content, meaning a single video can be turned into a podcast, smaller video snippets for social channels, or even a behind-the-scenes video. This will allow you to have more content at your disposal without having to make it from scratch. 

What kind of content should I repurpose?

If you can’t decide which content to repurpose, you should focus on two main sources — evergreen content, and content that has performed well on your site.

Evergreen content

Evergreen content refers to timeless content. It’s always relevant, regardless of what season or news cycle we’re in. 

For example, if you’re a dietician, you may consider writing a piece on “Foods that keep your heart healthy”. Whether it’s 2022 or 10 years from now, the topic of healthy living will always be relevant.

“Remember that a video does not have to stay a video, nor does an article have to stay an article. It can be repurposed into many content formats, even written articles can be represented visually as infographics or videos with stock footage and simple text on screen,” says Michelle.

Popular content

It makes plenty of sense to repurpose your most popular content, based on analytics and reach. 

You already know that they are relevant and have connected to a segment of your audience. Now all that’s left to do is to repackage it into another format so you can put them out on even more platforms and boost awareness of your brand.

“Start with the ones performing well on your site—convert them into other forms. Next, take inventory of your longer pieces that have good information, but which may put people off from consuming the entire thing due to decreasing attention spans. You could turn these into bite-sized content that is more digestible,” says Michelle.

Ways to repurpose content

Turn long videos or webinars into short social clips

As you might know, the attention span of people has been in decline for years. It might be more beneficial to cut your long videos or webinars down to short clips for social media so as to keep your audience engaged. By making these shorter shareable clips, you can produce more assets from one original piece of content, and widen your audience reach especially as social media platforms have become part of our daily lives.

How-to blogs into carousels

How-to blogs are part of your evergreen content, so they can be used to grow your traffic over time. However, keep in mind that visual data is processed 60,000 times faster than text, so turning your how-to blogs into visual content like carousels is an effective way to go — enabling new audiences to digest the information more quickly.

Studies/reports into infographics

In today’s busy world, not everyone has the luxury of reading pages of meticulous research published by your business. Instead of it going to waste, why not summarise your findings in infographics? This allows you to entice new audiences who don’t have the time to read your whole report. 

Webinars to podcasts

Reach audiences in a new way by turning your webinars into a podcast episode. You can extract the recording and record an introduction to add more context or re-record the audio with the talking points of the webinar. Your guest can add more insights or newer information that’s not in the webinar.

Podcasts into articles

Podcasts can be a great content source for your articles or blog posts. It can maximise your reach in both audio and text platforms. But don’t overwhelm your readers by transcribing the entire podcast — select quotes or themes that you want to highlight, and reorganise the conversational content into an easy, readable version for the audience.

Republish blogs on alternative sites

Your website is not the only place for your blog to flourish, but it can be repurposed to appear on other content publishers you’ve partnered with. 

For instance, you can do a guest posting gig for your partners, linking the piece to the original content on your blog. By doing so, both businesses benefit from increased traffic. 

Alternatively, your blog post can also be posted on Linkedin or Medium to maximise reach.

Do you know that Quora has over 300 million unique monthly visitors? By answering a question on the site using information from an article you’ve written, you can build credibility and trust in your brand. Most importantly, you can even redirect them to the original post to increase traffic. 

Best Practices

Refresh and edit with updated SEO keywords if possible

Google’s algorithms are continuously changing. It’s your job to keep up if you want your content to rank high on their search engine consistently. Do edit SEO keywords, headlines, or meta-data descriptions based on these algorithm changes. 

Update and tweak your content if necessary to stay current. For example, if you wrote about “Best Social Media Platforms” in 2017, you may want to update add TikTok to the list in 2022.

Update with new statistics if available 

As time goes on, society’s attitudes, behaviour, and preferences change, so having the latest statistics and figures is essential to keep your content updated and relevant with the changing times. By doing so, your audience can trust you as a credible source at all times.

Repurposing your content is a great way to maximise the reach of your existing content without breaking the bank. It saves time and energy to engage new audiences on different platforms that will result in your brand being known across multiple channels and segments of your audience.

As Michelle said, “Repurposing content could also come in the form of updating existing content. Do so by revisiting older content you have and giving them a refresh.”

Our Experience

One of our clients, a Singaporean higher education institute, approached us to assist them with editorial pieces for their portal. We repurposed content primarily based on their previous panel discussions posted on YouTube and Facebook. Other instances include repurposing a whitepaper or research into an 800-1,000 word article.

With another client, it was more of an end-to-end approach: we were tasked to not only organise and film a panel discussion for the financial and human resources company, but repurpose the content filmed to be consumed in different formats. This included podcasts, a whitepaper, and trimmed videos that were more shareable on social media. 

For the podcasts, we broke and cut down the panel discussion by topics to produce several episodes, and for each we added a narration to provide additional content and thoughts for the listeners. 

Meanwhile, the whitepaper detailed information on the main topics discussed on the panel, with key points from the speakers, and supplemented with additional research from our editorial team to make it a more comprehensive whitepaper. 

Photos and quotes from the event were also used to populate their social media channels, proving the benefit of using a single piece of content or event and repurposing it in various ways to extend one’s reach.

“We always aim to create value for our clients with our content, and what better way than to think outside the box to see how we can increase the value of a single piece of content?” Michelle says. 

Repurposing your content is a great way to maximise the reach of your existing content without breaking the bank. It saves time and energy to engage new audiences on different platforms that will result in your brand being known across multiple channels and segments of your audience.

Read more from Click2View:

1. Do you speak people?
2. Creating evergreen content
3. Is Augmented Reality a Winner?
4. Make sure you aim for a content bullseye with Millennials and Gen-Zs

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Click2View is Southeast Asia’s premiere full-service independent B2B content marketing agency servicing clients like Microsoft, Google, Visa, Prudential, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.