Repurposing content: getting more out of every piece

By Nick Morrison via Unsplash

We all know that content is king, but not ALL content has to be the first of its kind. When there’s new content published by everyone, every day, across every platform, the pressure can be on to stand out. But you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to create something that works for your audience. 

Whether budgets are being squeezed or in fragrant abundance, you’d be crazy not to repurpose your already existing content. 

A long-form blog can be chopped up into bitesize pieces for social, reimagined as a downloadable whitepaper for potential clients, or even turned into a video. As long as it’s not exactly the same, i.e. duplicated content (take note - Google doesn’t like that!), recycled content can build your SEO, boost your rankings, attract more web traffic and of course, make meaningful connections. 

We quite often see ‘content panic’ when suggesting content recycling. “But we posted about that last month,” they might say. Well, yes. But there’s two things you need to remember: 

• One, no one remembers your content as well as you do 

• Two, repurposed doesn’t mean reused or reposted (remember what we said about duplicate content?) 

Let us share some stats* about the benefits of content (original and repurposed): 

• Content marketing brings in three times as many leads as traditional marketing yet costs 62% less  

• 61% of online purchases happen as a direct result of a customer reading a blog – that level of engagement and influence on behaviour is extraordinary  

• Companies that publish more than FOUR blogs a week get 3.5x more traffic than those posting less than one  

• SMBs using content marketing get 126% more leads than those who don’t  

But like we said, not EVERYTHING needs to be a completely original idea or start from scratch: repurposing content allows you to build on an existing idea and reshape it in a different way to expand its reach.

Social Triggers founder Derek Halpern said:  

“You don’t have to create content day in and day out. You just have to work on getting the content you already have in the hands of more people.” 

As well as saving you time and money, recycling content helps you reach new audiences, reinforce your message and improve organic visibility – according to BrightEdge, organic search holds a 51% share among traffic sources. This means that repurposing content can give you a lift in organic visibility and traffic. 

So, now we’ve told you WHY to recycle content - we’ll next explain HOW…stay tuned. 

Your content is there; use it to your advantage. 

*Information via HubSpot