It is no secret that in this business, information, tips, and tricks evolve and change, quite literally, faster than one can convert a quality lead into a sale. What may be a novel idea now will be reduced to an afterthought in a matter of months. That’s why every content marketer strives to make their blogs and articles not just relevant and useful and timely, but timeless as well. Yes. As if consistently creating great content isn’t challenging enough, you also have to make sure they’re timeless, or if they age, at least they do so gracefully.
But only wine and people age gracefully, and a great writer can only do so much when it comes to timelessness. As you publish more and more content, your audience will naturally prefer the newer, fresher blogs or slideshows to the older articles and podcasts, however timeless they may seem. So don’t feel bad when your most-shared vlog six months ago isn’t getting any double-takes nowadays – that’s just how things work.
Fortunately, there’s this thing called repurposing content. Frankly speaking, it’s glorified recycling of ideas, only this time you try to create content of a higher quality or value than the original. Or at least, make it sound fresh. So that most-shared vlog six months ago? It’s not stale. You can tweak, expand, cut, or even present it using a different perspective or add something new to it to make it a fresh piece of content altogether.
Here are the six most important benefits of repurposing old content:
Easier to create.
Repurposed content is easier and faster to create because there are already certain elements like images or quotes that need not be changed. When you tweak content, you can do so by just adding new information or presenting it in a new angle. You don’t have to overhaul the whole thing.
Related: How do B2B Marketers Craft an Industry Related Content
Good for SEO.
Yes, SEO isn’t just about numbers, but numbers play a huge part in SEO. That means when you repurpose content, you send out as many materials of various themes and forms to the world that would attract search traffic. By repurposing content you are making friends with Google because Google likes quality content.
“Most of our website visitors get dissatisfied whenever they landed on our old and low-quality blogs. So we have backtracked all these content with high unique visits, repurposed them by adding latest and relevant information, add call-to-action and improve the user experience of each piece.” says one of the SEO Specialist
Thus, repurposing content is a blessing to your SEO efforts.
Maximizes multi-channel marketing.
By now, you already know the importance of multi-channel marketing in lead generation. But, surprise, surprise! Content marketing can be maximized to benefit multi-channel marketing as well, by expanding one idea into several varied content pieces. Have a blog post? Make an infographic out of it. Get the important parts, include some graphs, numbers, and images, and create a slideshow. Summarize that “How-To” article and turn it into a video, or just use the audio for a podcast.
Here’s one example we got:
Email Marketing Series: How to Make Emails Impossible to Ignore [VIDEO]
Related: The Recipe for an Award-Winning Content Dish [INFOGRAPHIC]
Reach more prospects.
Let’s face it. People consume information in different ways. Most people are visual, others would rather read. Others have relatively short attention spans, while those who won’t admit to the attention span issue, say they’re busier than others. Some prefer a long article, while there are those who just want to go over the whole thing, pause on the images and quotes and infographics. Content repurposing helps you reach more prospects and customers across different mediums.
Related: 5 Perky Blogs in the Payroll Industry: Which Content Strategy Stands Out?
Increases retention and brand credibility.
Repetition is a key tactic in marketing, but people get tired of hearing and seeing the same thing over and over again. To be effective, you want to deliver your message in different ways and sustain it for a considerable amount of time. Repurposing content allows you to do this, which is one way to increase recall, authority, and credibility in the market.
Related: How NOT to Market your Product: 9 of the Worst Branding Failures
Increases contents’ shelf-life and value.
Tens of thousands of content are being published every day and tens of thousands of content become stale because once the audience reads them, they’ve essentially gotten what they wanted from it. But through repurposing, the same audience may come across your content after it has been tweaked, or via a different medium, and for them, it’s a new experience altogether. Priceless!
Repurposing content is a great way to squeeze every juice out of your content marketing efforts, save time and money, and expand your reach, too. You just have to know how to do it and do it well. And that deserves an entirely different article.