If you’ve ever been responsible for preparing a big holiday meal, you know the work often begins days in advance and includes countless hours of cooking, cleaning and shuffling around hot pans. You also know that after investing so much time, money and energy into creating your feast, there’s no way you’d let a single morsel go to waste. Luckily, sometimes dishes are even better as leftovers than they were the first go-around (Thanksgiving sandwiches, anyone?).
But, where do you start?
First, start by determining which content assets provide the most value and engagement. Not every piece of content is worth repurposing — some may be too outdated or didn’t resonate well with your audience. But starting with the most valuable assets will help you compound your success. After all, if an asset did well the first time, there’s a good chance your audience wants more.
Here are a few things that will help you find for your content gold:
For content repurposing to be successful, you have to start with high-value content. But you also need to make sure the content you choose has potential in other formats. Is it weighty enough that it can be broken up into smaller bits? Or is it simple enough that it could be combined with related content into a larger piece?
For example, suppose your business is an enterprise IT security company, and you’ve written a long-form guide covering the top 10 cybersecurity threats of 2021. You might consider pulling out a few of the most severe or common threats and rewriting those sections as blog posts.
Alternatively, suppose your company manufactures solar panels, and you’ve written a series of blog posts on the benefits of investing in solar energy. You might consider compiling all of these blog posts into a gated downloadable buyer’s guide.
One of the best benefits of repurposing content is it allows you to rapidly expand your content arsenal without requiring the same amount of resources necessary to create a brand new resource. So, as you begin this process, it’s crucial you don’t overcomplicate the process or make things harder on yourself (otherwise, it defeats the purpose).
Boom. One piece of content becomes (at least) four.
Consistently publishing high-quality content is essential to driving new traffic and moving existing prospects down the funnel. But creating valuable content also requires a lot of labor, so it’s critical you mine those assets for every last nugget of gold before you demand more of your team’s precious creativity.
By regularly repurposing content, you can continue benefiting from that initial investment of time and energy without running your content creators ragged. Additionally, it will help you consider opportunities for repurposing before you even begin a new project — potentially boosting the value of each new piece of content and making sure you’re not leaving anything on the table.