What’s the one trait all successful small businesses have in common? Resourcefulness: the ability to employ creative, cost-effective solutions to overcome challenges. Despite our consumerist culture, however, resourcefulness remains an incredible virtue. For many entrepreneurs and people who own small businesses, resourcefulness is the one thing that separates us from the businesses who fail.
Aside from being a standout business operations strategy, being resourceful also works wonders for marketing. Perhaps you’re feeling a little stretched when it comes to your marketing resources, and you feel like you don’t have enough to keep up a consistent strategy. Or, maybe you’re just looking for a few places to cut costs. Whatever your reasons, here’s how to repurpose content to save money, conserve resources, and attract new audiences.
Choosing Content to Repurpose
The first step in repurposing content is choosing what piece you’d like to transform into something new. It shouldn’t be any run-of-the-mill content piece that you threw together in thirty minutes. Instead, the content you choose to repurpose should have the following qualities:
Top Performing
Leverage your analytics tools to determine which content pieces have been most popular with your audience. Since these content pieces have already driven the most traffic to your blog, repurposing similar content will only double that effect.
Evergreen
Trend roundups and breaking news won’t do. Choose a piece of content that’s evergreen, meaning that it’s universally relevant and not rooted in a specific time period. This will ensure that the repurposed content stays valuable to your business for years to come.
Details
If you want your repurposed content to be enriching, details are key. We’re not talking just about numbers and statistics, however. Quotes, facts and examples are a great foundation for repurposing content because they pack a powerful punch on their own.
After choosing a top-performing blog post that’s detailed and evergreen, here’s how to give it a new life (for free!).
Slide Presentations
In a world driven by short attention spans and a “get to the point” attitude, slide presentations are a great way to share information. When creating a slide presentation from a full-length blog post, the key is to make your content easy to consume, yet informative and actionable. Blog posts that have a how-to approach, or that feature a lot of examples, work especially well for slide presentations. Since they’re already broken up into bits and pieces of digestible information, they translate well to slides that are short and succinct.
Depending on the topic, a slide deck can also make a great sales tool. Let’s say you have prospects asking the same questions about your product or service. Instead of reciting the same spiel time and time again, send them a slide deck that they can read at their own pace.
As you transform your blog post into a slide presentation, you may want to consider creating a slide template. A dedicated template will optimize future content repurposing efforts to make the process even more efficient. We recommend first creating your slide deck using Google Slides, then uploading to SlideShare. Before publishing your slides on SlideShare, be sure to optimize them for search by adding a keyword-rich description and relevant tags.
Video Content
It’s nearly impossible to navigate marketing advice without coming across some mention of video. It’s true that video is an increasingly important tool for marketers. It’s also true that blog posts can be repurposed into video content in more ways than one.
In an article on how to turn blog posts into videos, Social Media Examiner suggests looking at your blog post like script. This technique enables you to view your blog post in shorter segments that are actionable and interesting (and get rid of the fluff). Look for paragraphs where an important question is answered, or a concept is explained. After you get into the scriptwriting mindset, you can create either a short video series or webinar.
Short Video Series
A short series tackles the key points of your blog post across multiple videos. Each video should be around 3 minutes long and contain at least one key takeaway. The benefit of a short series is that it can be used over time to create anticipation. For example, you can post one video and invite viewers to tune into the next video for more tips on whatever given topic. You won’t want to post these directly on your blog or wherever your original article is, of course, but you can try posting on YouTube or another video site to reach a new audience.
Webinars
The key difference between webinars and videos is that webinars are live. This also makes them more interactive, meaning that the host can address questions and comments from the audience. Filming a webinar may seem intimidating, but they’ve been proven to create stronger connections between brands and their audiences. A webinar script can be created similarly to a video script, but it should have more of a conversational tone and provide opportunities for questioning. Plus, it’s important to leave room at the end to address audience concerns.
Graphics
Graphics are a fun and easy way to repurpose your content across social media. Graphics are great because their information is extremely limited. This means that one blog post can generate dozens of graphics, keeping your social feed stocked up with minimal effort. Depending on the type of data and information in your blog post, here are a few graphic ideas.
Quote
Everyone loves quotes. Whether it’s an expert tip or an inspiring line, quotes are one of the most popular forms of visual content shared on social media. Comb through your blog posts to find quotes that stand well on their own. These are often found at the end of a paragraph, where writers tend to summarize a key finding or reinforce a point. Your blog post may also feature expert quotes from other people, which are absolutely fine to use as long as they’re correctly attributed. Once you’ve found a handful of quotes you like, try using a simple software tool like Canva to design creative quote graphics that turn heads.
Infographic
In the beginning, we said that it’s important to choose a blog post rich in key information and data. Aside from being more compelling, a data-rich blog post has more opportunities for repurposing into infographics. There are many ways to approach infographic creation, and all depend on your audience and industry. For example, a long infographic with lots of colors and visuals might work better for a B2C company that’s focused on individual satisfaction. Alternatively, a B2B company might be more successful with a series of short, targeted infographics that deliver details pertaining to a specific topic. With a wealth of free tools for creating infographics on the market, there’s no excuse not to get started.
EBook
Writing, designing and promoting an eBook certainly feels daunting. But who says you have to start from scratch? Combining multiple relevant blog posts is an easy and viable way to create an eBook. With this approach, you’ll have to choose more than one blog post that you’d like to package into a long form piece.
Look for common topics across your most popular blog posts and see where they unite underneath a common theme. To keep the content relevant and interesting for someone who’s already a subscriber, see where you can add new statistics or update key information. Then, you’ll need to add a table of contents, an introduction, and a conclusion. Top it all off with a CTA page and voila! You’ve created a highly valuable piece of content marketing for just a fraction of the cost.
Content repurposing is an easy and effective way to increase your content creation while cutting down costs. By starting with a blog post that your audience already loves, maximizing your resources has never been easier.
