Reading time: 6 minutes - easy!
Out with the old and in with the new? Not necessarily when it comes to content marketing. It isn’t easy coming up with good quality content. It takes strategy, research, patience, a few chewed finger nails and a lot of time.
Why do all that work just to publicize it once? Content marketing isn’t just about creating good content, it’s about making sure that it is utilized and distributed in the best way possible… as many times as possible.
This is why repurposing needs to be a key feature in your startup’s marketing strategy.
Repurposing requires updating or changing content into a different form to serve a different audience, or the same audience differently.
When you repurpose a piece of content, you’re usually doing either one of these things;
Integrating repurposing into your content strategy can lower costs, expand audience reach, and may even help position your startup as an industry leader. For many startups, understanding how to repurpose your content may get a little tricky… So Marketing Envy has come up with some tips to help you out.
Slideshare - Don’t just stick to writing out your content. Slideshare is a fantastic marketing tool for turning your content into visual information. With a bit of revamping, Slideshare is a great way to reuse the slideshow your CEO might have used at a recent lecture or meetup. It is also particularly useful when publishing ‘how to’ guides or wanting to list particular product features. With over 60 million users and over 159 million monthly page views, Slideshare also provides a high distribution network.
Podcast - Wanting to cater to people only the go? Or to people simply fed up of reading? Take your blog post and turn it into a podcast. It’s easy to do and has the added benefit of really personalizing your product and building your brand’s personality.
* Hot Tip: Make sure to record it in a quiet area with a good quality microphone. Poor sound and background noise is the perfect way to turn people off!
Linkedin Publisher - The ‘publisher’ tool on Linkedin is a fantastic feature to contribute to your professional community and increase publicity. The best way to make Linkedin publisher work is to take your latest blog and condense it into 400-600 words. Linkedin even allows you to upload images and videos to your post, so there is no reason why Linkedin should not be considered a necessary extension of your blogging.
If you’ve noticed your blog or presentation slides has received good feedback, consider sharing it on a professional Linkedin group on Linkedin to further increase your exposure.
** Hot tip: Linkedin publisher is great for when you want to repost a blog post at a later time (more on that later).
*** Boiling Hot Tip: Search Wilderness has a fantastic blog on how to use Linkedin Publisher. Definitely worth the read.
Global Blogs - If you truly want to make use of your content, consider publishing it in channels outside of your immediate social networks. Sites like Medium and BlogsRelease, allow you to insert your content in forums where people are already going to read and learn. This is another great way to generate buzz for your startup and your team.
Facebook/Twitter - Do not fear, we haven’t forgotten about social media’s royalty. With social media use constantly on the rise, of course you need to be Facebook posting and tweeting your latest content, but rather than always focusing on the information in its entirety, try focusing on one of two key points you want to emphasize. For example, you could take a diagram from your blog, write about it and post it on Facebook with a link to your blog as a ‘Read more’. You might try the same idea with Twitter by taking a quote from a conference your startup participated in and tweet it with a video link. Simple, easy, but very effective.
Infographics - With 65% of the population considered ‘visual learners’, images are clearly the key to engaging your audience. Information graphics, or infographics, are the perfect way of taking complex information and repurposing it into a visualised format. Infographics are perfect for when you startup wants to deliver statistics, technical information or even a ‘how to guide’ in a different way. Don’t worry - a graphic designer is not necessary. Infogr.am and Piktochart are websites that allow you to easily use your own information to generate the perfect inforgraphic. Once you’ve created the perfect image, send it out to the social media world and watch the magic happen.
Try something different - Written a few blogs about similar or related topics? Great! Why not try taking the content and making it into a story for your audience. Platforms like Roojoom and Tuteboard allow you to showcase a broad range of materials in a clear methodical way using links to websites, articles, slideshows, videos and so on.
Creating a white paper is also an easy way of consolidating a range of content to make something ‘new’ and position your startup as a leader in your field.
Important: Different members of your audience will enjoy absorbing information differently - some might prefer short snippets of information in a slide show, others might like to listen to a podcast. Repurposing your content is a great way of attracting different people in different ways.
Feeling a little overwhelmed with all that information? Think of repurposing like changing into a suit jacket or putting on lipstick before going out to dinner. Repurposing is all about taking the same content and giving it just enough of a makeover to make all the difference. The methods we listed above are great, but pushing your startup’s content can be done in many different ways.
Retitle to Repurpose
The simple act of changing the title of your recent blog post before pushing it back into the spotlight can make the world of difference. When you’ve written a blog, try to think of at least 4 alternative titles for the same post and plan different times you want to promote it on social media. We suggest using an excel spreadsheet to make it all clear and organized.
Here’s an example of a template Marketing Envy uses, feel free to adopt it and make it your own.
*Hot Tip: There are even tools to help you generate reader friendly titles for your content. Try Inbound Now Blog Title Generator or Impact Blog Title Generator when you have writer’s block.
See What’s Trending
Once you’ve written a few blogs, you’ll find that you have a fair few topics, subtopics and options in your blog bank that can be used at different times. Good content, never becomes irrelevant and you might find that the subject you wrote a blog about a few months ago is this week's ‘hot topic’.
Take advantage of what’s trending at the moment and use it to repurpose your content from the past. Tools like Buzzsomo, Reddit and What’s trending make it easy for you to see what your audience currently wants to read about. Thanks to the hashtag, Twitter also makes it easy for you to see what topics are currently popular. If what’s trending corresponds to one of your blogs, white papers or lectures from the past, now is a great time to ‘freshen it up’ and push it back into the limelight.
For example, Marketing Envy noticed an increase in articles written about how startup’s should approach creating their logo. This is likely to be because Facebook made a slight change to its logo last week and the change definitely didn’t go unnoticed by the marketing world. Our CEO, Billy Cina, wrote a startup guide for creating a logo in a blog last year. Using our repurposing skills, we tweeted out the blog once again with a different spin and shortened the piece in order to post it on her Linkedin publisher. No new content, but lots of new views. Win!
Evergreen content is quality, useful content that is relevant to readers for a long period of time. Repurposing is only ever effective when the content you are writing is well researched, well thought out and well written. The key to making sure you can use and reuse your content in a variety of different ways is to make sure that everything your startup creates is of a high standard - only then will your company and your content be professionally valued.