What formats should you use for repurposing?
Hey there! 👋
Time is a valuable resource for marketers.
If you can turn one piece of content into five (or even more) you save time and build high quality content across your ecosystem.
So, how do you turn one idea into multiple formats?
Start with where you want your gains across the content lifecycle to be:
Shorter term: These are quick wins and typically include social media posts, newsletters and blog posts.
Longer term: This includes interviews, research, whitepapers, ebooks, books and case studies which have a longer shelf life but require more effort.
But how do you repurpose content?
The answer is to think about how these formats connect to produce longer and shorter formats.
Let’s start with 4 popular formats you can use in your repurposing matrix.
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➡️ #1: Blog Post
Every marketer is guaranteed to have blog posts easily available for repurposing. So, reuse your blog content as summaries in social posts or as ebooks to build the customer journey.
Example: Zapier create one ebook every 90 days by combining blogs on connected subtopics into an ebook. This has led to over 15,000 downloads and 10,000 new email subscribers.
➡️ #2: Podcast
Take a blog series and turn it into a podcast that runs either as a limited or unlimited series. This is great to strengthen your presence in a particular niche—a collection of blogs on SEO, for example, could become a podcast that strengthens your thought leadership in the industry.
You can also do this the other way around, where podcasts become blog posts. The main gain is in inviting industry experts and using your podcast as a powerful networking tool.
Example: Hubspot’s show, Agency Unfiltered, began as a series of interviews and then the audio was lifted to create a high-quality podcast. Kevin Dynn said, "For us, it was a piece of cake to do. We already had titles, descriptions, the intro and outro snippets, and the full audio files. And thus far, the process has been easy and the results have been very encouraging."
➡️ #3: Video
Video is a hot trend in marketing—audiences love it and it’s relatively easy to produce. You can create videos out of any text format and embed it into newsletters, blogs posts and web pages to drive audience engagement and conversions. And it gives you access to new audiences—why not start a YouTube channel and post the content to social media for another quick win?
Example: Ahrefs turned this blog post on affiliate marketing into a video by aligning the most commonly used search terms on YouTube with their repurposed content. So far, the video has 126,950 views and 490 comments.
➡️ #4: Ebook
Ebooks take a lot of effort to produce, especially for smaller marketing teams. But you can maximize the ROI by using the core headlines for blog topics and then adding a call to action back to the ebook. And why not visualize the key arguments in an infographic, generate a webinar or create a video series?
Example: Copyblogger repurposed one of their most read ebooks into a slideshare presentation with over 104,000 views.
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🚀 TOP TIP
Make sure that you measure and track the success of your repurposed formats, so that you can put the most effort into the areas where you’re getting the strongest gains.
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A repurposing matrix that leverages the format that your audience visits the most will increase your team’s productivity and drive business outcomes.
I’ll see you again on Saturday 2nd April.
Take care,
Sarah
P.S. Which formats have given you the biggest gains from repurposing?
Hit ‘reply’ and let me know.