Like the rest of the digital industry, content marketing is ever-evolving, including the types of content that companies are creating. To keep up with the increased demand, it’s becoming more common for marketers to repurpose content to present their information in a different format or with a different spin. As a result, you can save valuable man-hours and even extend your reach to people you may not have connected with otherwise.

Here’s the framework we use for repurposing content into multiple formats to help you get started:

5 Steps to Repurpose Your Content

1. Outline Your Topic and Key Messages

Every piece of content you create starts with a topic idea, whether it’s a blog post on video marketing or a how-to video on blogging. Flesh out your ideas with the key messages you want to cover so that each piece of content is designed to achieve your goals. 

For example, if your topic is “A Look Back at Fashion in the 1990s”, then your outline might include talking points like

• Popular shoe styles
• Pantone Colors of the Year
• Common brands and stores
• Weird or noteworthy match-ups

Don’t get too bogged down in the details during this step. Your goal here is to get a general idea for what you want to talk about (and why!) so you can start researching.

 

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2. Create Your Original Content

Got your idea? You’re ready to start creating—choose your format for your original content, such as a podcast, video, or blog post. You’re going to use this original piece to turn it into additional pieces later. 

Pro tip: Don’t let technology stand in the way of creating content in a new medium. You can use your own phone for a Facebook Live event, rent a recording studio in a nearby coworking space by the hour, or even be a guest on someone else’s podcast. 

3. Identify Content “Boosters”

Go back through your original content and look for things that make it effective, interesting, and unique. For example, you might want to pull impactful quotes from your podcast or turn an abstract idea into an illustration or chart. Content upgrades are ideal for capturing your reader’s email for your newsletter list.

Pro tip: There are tons of free or cheap tools to help you with this step. For transcriptions, use Otter.ai to get the full dialogue of your recorded conversations. Canva or Buffer’s Pablo tool can help you create custom graphics, even if you’re not a seasoned artist. 

4. Multiply Your Content

Step Four is where the magic happens: your single piece of content can easily become five (or more!) with minimal effort on your end. You’ve already done the topic development, research, and fact-checking. Now, your biggest focus is on adapting your work into different formats.

Use those content boosters we just talked about to enhance your main content. These are talking points that can help you further develop your original idea.

 

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Let’s look at the numerous ways you can potentially repurpose a blog post:

• Turn stats into an original stand-alone chart, graph, or infographic
• Use the blog post topic as the topic for your podcast
• Create an entire blog post, podcast, or social media post around a quote or stat pulled from the blog post
• Republish the blog post on sites like Reddit or Medium
• Provide a summary of your blog post on Q&A sites like Quora
• Put your blog post into an e-book or slide deck format for a lead magnet
• Use part of your blog post in an email newsletter
• Break up long-form blog posts into a series of shorter blog posts
• Summarize your blog post in a brief video

You can probably add to this list, but you get the idea of how one idea can easily fuel your multimedia content strategy for days (or even months!). 

There’s no reason why you shouldn’t squeeze out as much value for your time as possible, especially since other content marketers around you are doing it, too.

5. Distribute Across Multiple Channels

Content marketing takes many forms across multiple channels, so consider the ones that are already in your marketing mix to help you best reach your audiences. For example, you’ll want to publish your blog posts to your own website or blog, then use tools like HootSuite or Buffer to schedule a series of social media posts across your channels.

In addition, you should also examine the content marketing channels you’re using to see where it makes sense to expand. Google recently announced they will now show podcasts in search results, so podcasting is likely to be a critical piece of an optimized content toolkit.

The Impact of Repurposing Content: A Case Study

GoCo, a seasoned pro at repurposing content across many channels in multimedia formats, recently partnered with us to help them get more mileage from their “Creating A Great First Day for New Hires” webinar. GoCo provides flexible and easy-to-use HR, payroll, and benefits administration software, empowering companies to focus on their own employees and mission. Content Pros’ task was to partner with GoCo to help them turn their valuable webinar content into an e-book and social media promotional content to expand their reach and continue delivering value to their audience.

The Original Content: Webinar on Creating a Great First Day for New Hires

In the live webinar, GoCo asked their panel of human resource (HR) experts important questions about how to improve the first-day experience for new employees. They talked about the challenges new employees face and HR’s role in helping to eliminate those challenges. In addition, they gave HR professionals actionable steps they could take to streamline the first day and help employees feel at home.

 

 

The original webinar clocked in at just over 62 minutes, a large block of time that many HR professionals can’t invest all at once. GoCo realized they could extract tons of bite-sized, easy-to-digest nuggets from their content that HR professionals could implement into their onboarding processes. 

The Repurposed Content: A Free e-Book

Rather than expect every individual to review the webinar in full, they decided to cover this information in a step-by-step e-book that users could review at their own pace. Delivering the content in a different structure could potentially expand their reach to new audiences and create a more inclusive experience. 

Pro tip: Highlighting the key takeaways from any event makes an exceptional long-term lead magnet.

 

 

GoCo provided the webinar recording to Content Pros, along with their goals for the e-book and promotional content. Our professional content writers repurposed GoCo’s valuable information into other user-friendly formats that GoCo then distributed across all their social media channels. This process allowed GoCo to focus their energy and expertise on creating the main event.

If you’re at a loss as to where to start, remember that most of the process of repurposing content can easily be outsourced to experts. Quality content writers can help turn your interviews and research into case studies, e-books, and blog posts quickly and cost-effectively so you can scale your strategy without the guesswork. Outsourced content is one of the easiest ways to expand your resources and get more value from every piece of original content you create.