How to Repurpose Content to Optimize Your Marketing Budget
Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate new leads for your business — it can help you attract, stimulate and convert your audience into potential consumers for your products or services.
But how do you achieve success in content marketing?
There are many strategies you need to follow to generate qualified leads. To mention a few, you should take advantage of content syndication, perform market research, write guest posts for other websites, upgrade your content, and optimize your SEO.
Success in content marketing requires consistency and organization. Most marketers spend up to six hours creating content.
Content marketing requires time, energy, and money. In this article, we’ll focus on how to optimize your marketing budget by repurposing content.
What is Content Repurposing?
In short, repurposing content means turning existing content into a new format to expand its potential reach.
For example, you can simply refresh the content of a blog post with new data, new illustrations, new facts, etc.
How Can You Benefit From Repurposing Content?
First of all, repurposing content will save you time and money.
According to Asana, 6 out of 10 marketers spend most of their day on time-consuming tasks (for example, researching for information for content marketing).
When you repurposing content, you will focus on creating one single piece. From that, it will be relatively easy to reuse it for a different format or channel.
Secondly, repurposing content will increase the traffic coming to your website or blog.
If you have multiple pieces of content, you consequently have more probability of them getting shared by your audience. As a consequence, you have more opportunities to gain backlinks pointing to your website.
A high number of backlinks to your site give authority in Google’s eyes and more chances to rank for your target keywords. This will help you increase traffic to your site.
Finally, repurposing content will help you reach new users: The members of your target audience have commonalities, but they likely learn in different ways and use different channels.
That’s because although your target audience has many general characteristics shared by different users, each of them prefers to learn in a different way or a different channel, based on varying demographic or psychographic characteristics.
If you offer content on different channels, you will reach users that you wouldn’t be if you used one channel or format alone.
How to Repurpose Content: 5 Creative Ideas For Your Business?
Now you know what content repurposing is and how you can use it to optimize your business’ content marketing budget. Let’s now dive into some of the best ways to repurpose content.
- 1. Use Your Existing Blog Posts
If you already have high-quality blog posts sitting on your website, consider auditing them to understand if they’re providing value and generating leads for your business.
That can be a huge opportunity to upgrade and improve your blog posts.
Start by grouping them together by category. Then, think about how you could repurpose them. For example, you can use the content of the articles to put together a newsletter. If you have good video production skills, you can use the content of the blog post to put together a video.
If you want to focus on traffic and SEO, transform the article into a long-form guide.
On the other hand, if you feel like you have enough traffic coming to your website, use the same content to create a different content that you can offer as a lead magnet to convert your visitors. For example, you could use the information of your vlog posts to write an eBook and ask for contact details in exchange.
- 2. Start a Podcast by using Successful Content
As mentioned earlier, not all of your target audience consumes content in the same way. For example, some users only consume content while doing other tasks (for example, while driving or taking a walk).
If a piece of content that you published is performing well, it means it resonates with your target consumers. You should definitely expand its reach to all your audience?
Did you know that more than half of the U.S. population listens to podcasts in 2021? Consider starting a podcast and deliver content in a digestible way.
Use your original piece of content (for example, an article) and start a discussion around that topic.
- 3. Reuse Customer Testimonials
In our article about creating social media content on a budget, we mentioned using customer testimonials to create graphics.
According to a 2019 survey, 90% of people trust what a customer says about a brand more than what that company says about itself.
If you have testimonials, consider creating a visual asset that will grab your audience’s attention, especially on social media. This is free advertising and will help you convince readers to visit your site.
If you want to achieve the best results, consider creating videos. A recent study showed that 77% of people who watched a testimonial video say it influenced their purchasing decisions.
- 4. Put Together an Online Course
Do you have existing videos that performed really well?
Take advantage of this to create educational content that will make you an authoritative resource in front of your audience.
You can do that by creating online video courses.
You can choose to either sell these, offer them for free, or use them as lead magnets to capture your visitors’ contact information.
The online education industry is expected to reach $370 billion in 2026 and video courses represent the best format to convert visitors into customers since people looking for courses have an urgent need that you can solve with your products or services.
If you’re not sure where to start from and you want to minimize your budget, consider using a free and easy-to-use e-learning platform like Opencast to offer your videos as online courses.
- 5. Recycle User-Generated Content
User-generated content can come in different forms Coming in different forms. Some of the most popular ones include social media posts, reviews, and videos.
Consider creating a social media contest to expose your brand to new audiences. Then, you can use hashtags to look for people who shared content about your brand. If you find high-quality content, you can repost it on your social media profiles or use it on your blog.
User-generated content is one of the most effective content marketing formats since users trust other people more than a brand when it comes to the features snd benefits of s product or service.
How To Choose Content to Repurpose?
The first step to repurpose your existing content is chossoing the right content.
To do that, start by auditing your content. Create a spreadsheet to keep all your content inventory in one place. Add the URL, headline, description, views, shares, and other analytics elements.
Try to find evergreen content. This is content that will be relevant for years to come and will not require many updates or improvements to be relevant.
Similarly, look for content that generates lots of traffic. You can use an analytics tool like Google Analytics to find popular topics.
Finally, choose content with lots of engagement: Look for content with comments, shares, and likes (depending on the format and channel you shared this on).
If you’re unsure whether a piece of content you created has the potential for repurposing into a new format or channel, take a look at this flowchart to find out.
Wrapping up
There are many smart ways to repurpose pieces of content into fresh ones. Don't hesitate to use these piece of content to drive awareness and traffic back to the original piece, whether that's a video or a blog post.
But please, don't just make content like ordinary bloggers: get more out of it. If you’re on a tight budget marketing-wise, you want to spend every penny and every minute wisely. Repurposing content is a big step to saving money efficiently and gaining more exposure smartly. Good luck!