There’s one key area to inbound marketing that propels the whole strategy forward: quality content. And here’s the thing, it doesn’t come easy. Quality content takes a massive amount of time, energy, and creativity to produce in a consistent, diverse, and meaningful way. We know that if our content isn’t excellent, people won’t gravitate towards it and our entire inbound marketing strategy breaks down. If you’ve been at it a while, you probably have a fairly extensive library of quality content that was used once and is now collecting digital dust in your hard drives, cloud storage, or on your blog pages from yesteryear.
But all your hard work doesn’t have to be filed away, never to be seen again out of fear of repeating yourself. In fact, if advertisers have taught us anything, it’s that repeating ourselves every now and again is one of the surest ways of being heard. Instead of always looking for something new and shiny that can help catch people’s attention, why not repeat yourself in a helpful and creative way and make something new out of something old? By repurposing your content for free resources, you’re able to give your hard work a second chance so that it can further benefit your audience.
Repurposing your content is all about finding the most helpful idea from the common kinds of content you consistently produce (say a blog post, presentation, or video) and then reimagining and reusing those ideas in another content format or context. Stated simply, use your good ideas in more than one place for more than one audience. What you used as a top of the funnel strategy can be repurposed as a customer resource. What you used as internal training could be reimagined to be used as a free guide for other people in your same business. See what I mean?
Sometimes you don’t need brand new content. Sometimes you just need to see what else that content can be applied to. Mind you, that doesn’t mean repurposing your content requires less creativity or effort. Rather, it means that you can use that same creativity not to create new content, but to find fresh ways of presenting that same content in a new and helpful way. Here are some ways you can begin to repurpose your content today:
- Turn your blogs into books. This might be the simplest way to start and can be converted into a lead magnet without a colossal amount of effort. So, say you’ve written fairly extensively about a topic multiple times over the years and have amassed a fairly extensive resource library on that topic. You can use that collection of blog posts to create a free eBook (or physical book for that matter) by compiling those blogs into chapter format, using them as a kind of source material for the book. This can be as simple as compiling posts, or if you want to take an even bigger step, you can rework the material into a new outline that helps lead your audience down further into the funnel, ending the book with a call to action.
- Turn your live presentations into videos. If part of your strategy involves any form of public speaking, then leverage that physical presentation to be used in a video format. That said, there are a bunch of different ways this can be applied. Maybe you spend a good deal of your time training new team members to do the same kinds of tasks, but are finding yourself a little stretched when it comes to your other responsibilities. Record a video (might we suggest by using Loom) of that same presentation that you can then keep on hand when onboarding new team members. By the way, this can be applied to resource videos for customer onboarding also. Another way to utilize video is to present your written content (say a blog post) in a more personal way that is also more engaging for your audience. Feeling brave? Use your written content to create a Facebook live webinar over a specific topic to get even more people engaged.
- Turn your internal data into social media content. There’s something to be said about the power of statistics, especially when you’re able to cite your own data. If you’ve put in the work to measure your analytics, then you have a wealth of content that’s waiting to be used. With your data in hand, you can use that information to assess your market and create content from that data that helps set you up as a local authority on the subject. An effective way to do this would be to create a spiffy infographic from your internal data that you share on your social media platforms.
The Beef
Whether you’re wanting to create engaging content or if you want to find more ways to repurpose your existing content, our staff is here to help. Talk with one of our inbound marketing experts today!
