Do you want to amplify the reach of your marketing content? Quality content feeds your target audience, makes your business relatable and enables satisfying audience interactions. It pays to plan additional ways to use your content to assure it is being seen and to extend your reach to new audiences. Having content available in a variety of different formats makes your content more easily discovered and digestible.
In this article, we'll share ideas on deliberately reusing valuable content – or being (re)purposeful with content.
What is (Re)purposeful Content?
Your goal when creating content is to share valuable information with your target audience. But that can be tricky, because different people engage with information in different ways. Some may prefer highly visual content like infographics; others may favor presentations with audio components like webinars. By reformatting your content for different media, you accomplish two fundamental tasks. You give yourself a way to post the same content differently, in order to present information to a single audience more than once and you appeal to a wider variety of people by presenting information in a format they love. That both deepens and widens your target audience reach.
And, fun fact, an upside that many don’t consider is that, by posting multiple pieces of content about the same topic, you can generate an SEO boost and provide additional opportunities to target a particular keyword.
Here are five different ways you can repurpose your existing content for an added edge over your competition.
1. Blog Articles
One of the simplest ways to create new blog posts is to take the topics discussed in a single article and use them as inspiration to create new content. A great example of this is to take a listicle post (like this one) and create several new posts by breaking out each item on the list and discussing it in greater detail. This adds presence and weight to your original topic and up-levels your audiences’ experience. Plus, you get to make the subject matter even more engaging.
Blogs are easy to read, share, and promote. Well-written and informative blog posts typically increase traffic to your site and raise recognition and credibility for your business within your industry.
2. Infographic
Infographics (and their more interactive contemporary counterpart, web graphics) help process content more quickly through a visual format. They can be very fun and are a great tool for transforming complex information into bite-size pieces that are simple to grasp and visually engaging. In some cases, infographics may communicate your content better than traditional text format. But creating them effectively takes skill. Luckily, there are several infographic tools that can help even if you have little design experience. Here are some infographic design tools to consider:
3. E-book
While blogs and infographics are great sources of content; E-books take the experience of a blog or infographic a step further. E-books contain additional information, photos, or data visuals in a digitally downloadable book or brochure format. Keep in mind when creating this content that users may not have time to read the entire book, so make sure to emphasize important information with easily scannable, eye-catching text boxes throughout. E-books are content rich, valuable resources. If you create an e-book, consider distributing it in a transactional way (often called "gated content"). People that are interested in downloading your e-book are already at least somewhat pre-screened for your business. Ask your audience for their contact information or create a landing page with a form, a strong call-to-action, and highlights from the book to encourage downloads.
4. Podcast Series
Podcasts are a series of audio episodes focused on a particular topic or theme. You can think of them as blogs you listen to. They are useful for content delivery because they're accessible on the go and fit into the spaces of people’s lives. People listen to them in a variety of settings such as the office, the gym, or even in the car on the way to work. Podcasts allow you to engage with people in a way that requires very little effort on their part. Use content from your blog post as a starting point and create a bigger conversation about that topic in the podcast. Bring in guests who have some subject matter expertise and do an interview-style pod to relay information in a conversational way. Each podcast can be included as a new post to your website, much like a blog. If you are considering a podcast but don’t know where to start, check out Anchor; an easy-to-use tool that makes editing and distributing podcasts a breeze.
5. Webinars and Videos
A webinar is an engaging online event where one or more speakers delivers rich content in presentation format to a large audience. Webinars can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to provide robust information about a topic and engage an audience in a larger conversation. Your blog content is a great place to look for ideas for crafting webinar content. To dial in your webinar's content and attendance, we recommend posting a questionnaire to social media to see what your audience would be interested in learning more about.
Logistically, webinars are more complex and require more effort to be successful. To ensure you get a good return on your investment, be sure to go the extra mile in promoting your webinar and creating a hype around getting registrants and key stakeholders involved. Use as many methods as you can to make sure people know about your webinar. Create a hashtag for social media, send frequent "inside scoop" emails, and push attractive promotions to your audience. After the live webinar event, save the presentation to your video content. It can be used as gated content for lead generation or shared on your social channels.
Conclusion
However you choose to create and share content, remember that content is a way to have market conversations around topics of interest or challenges your target audience experiences every day. It’s a way for your business to share your values and become relatable to your audience. Every effort brings added value to your business objectives and your audience. Adopting a strategy for being (re)purposeful with content will help you get the most value out of your content efforts.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in December 2017. It has been completely revised and updated.