Long-form content, such as a bylined article, is effective but producing it can be time-consuming and may require additional resources. As marketers, our most precious resource is time. So, what can a busy marketer do to create powerful content? Repurpose high-performing long-form content into additional bite-sized marketing content pieces.
Why repurpose your content?
Content repurposing involves taking a piece of marketing content and turning it into something else. Repurposing content saves time because you won’t always be scrambling to create content from scratch. It also helps you promote and amplify the original piece of content, giving it additional mileage and introducing it to new audiences.
It’s important to create fresh content consistently. But repurposing will give you a breather. Repurposing content doesn’t mean just republishing the same information in snack-sized pieces. Instead, it uses one long-form piece of content as the foundation for other formats.
Choose what content to repurpose
The best piece of content to repurpose is evergreen (it has long-term relevance) and long-form (more than 2,000 words). In addition to bylined articles, white papers and e-books are excellent cornerstone content formats from which to work.
To start, ask yourself a few questions about your content:
- Is there more to be said about this topic?
- Is this content already popular with your audience?
- Will this content be relevant in six months? One year?
If the answers to these questions are yes, you have a good candidate for content repurposing. Here’s how to create 10 pieces of additional content from just one article.
- Republish your existing content. The easiest way to repurpose your article content is to republish it on public blogging platforms like LinkedIn Articles and com. Be sure to give credit to and link to the original source.
- Break up key points into blog posts. Look at the section headings in your article and choose topics you can flesh out into useful posts of at least 700 words. When publishing your blogs, be sure to link to the original article as well as the related internal posts. This will help with SEO and can boost the visibility of the source article as well.
- Condense content for an email newsletter. Highlight the original article and the blog posts in your email newsletter. Since not everyone on your mailing list will read your blog, this effort will help put your content in front of a wider audience.
- Issue a press release. If your article contains newsworthy information, convert the content into a press release and send it out to key industry media contacts, bloggers and other influencers.
- Host a webinar. A solid evergreen topic provides an excellent foundation for a webinar. Think webinars are too much work? Once you get the process down, they are simple to produce. Use a webinar hosting platform, such as GoToWebinar, Zoom or Crowdcast. These services make it simple to invite people, track attendance, create a landing page, conduct polls, share downloads, record the presentation and send follow-up emails. Be sure to record your webinar because that is your next piece of content.
- Upload your webinar recording to YouTube and your website. While creating the webinar may be a bit time-consuming, posting the recording is one of the easiest ways to repurpose content. Simply upload the webinar recording to your company’s YouTube channel and website. For best results, include links to resources, especially your original thought leadership piece.
- Upload the webinar slides to SlideShare. When you host a webinar, you spend a lot of time designing your slides. You can get more mileage out of your presentation by uploading them to SlideShare. Be sure to send the link to all webinar attendees in your follow-up email. Include a link to your original article in the SlideShare description and use hashtags and keywords that will make your topic easily searchable online.
- Spread the word on a podcast. If your company has a podcast, this piece of content is easy. Reserve a time to talk about the topic covered in your article and publish the podcast as you normally would. If you don’t have a corporate podcast, look for podcasts in your industry, and pitch yourself as a guest. Podcast directories such as Stitcher, iTunes or Google Podcasts can help you identify podcasts related to your industry. Listen to a few episodes to determine whether your topic might be a good fit.
- Create social media posts. Take bite-sized pieces of information from the article and post them on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Include a link to the original article, and webinar or podcast recordings.
- Design an infographic. People retain 65 percent of the content they see versus only 10 percent when they hear information. Visuals make it easier for people to quickly scan dense topics and extract critical information. Design tools such as Canva, Visme, Visage and Venngage make creating infographics easier than ever before.
Insurance for your marketing team
Think of content repurposing as “marketing insurance.” It’s there to pick up the slack on the days or weeks when you just don’t have the time to create new marketing content. You’ve also invested a lot of time and hard work in your article, white paper, e-book and other forms of long content. Repurposing helps you squeeze every ounce of usefulness out of your content and continually demonstrate your expertise. The more content you produce about a topic that is important in your industry, the more likely you are to be seen as a thought leader and expert in your field. Need help transforming your bylined articles or other long-form content into multiple marketing pieces. Schedule a call with Trade Press Services to see how we can help.
