Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing means turning your content into different formats for different audiences. This is good for SEO because it allows you to increase your visibility on different websites and platforms, which can improve your placement in search results. It also gives you the chance to reach more people with your content, and cater to different learning preferences, which in turn can lead to more website traffic and more return visits.
How to repurpose content
There are a number of ways that you can repurpose your existing content.
Audio
For example, you can repurpose written content for audio delivery. To develop a podcast for example, you can take a long piece of written content and use it to develop an in-depth one-to-one discussion, or even a roundtable, for a podcast covering the same topic. Conversely, you can take a podcast and transcribe and edit it into a series of blog posts.
Video
Just like podcasts, videos work both ways.
They can either be transcribed, or they can be used to further expand on a piece of written content. They can also be turned into audio-only versions that people can listen to on the go.
Webinars
Webinars can also be turned into one or more blog posts, an ebook, or a podcast. And again, the opposite is possible, in which blog posts, ebooks, and podcasts can inspire a webinar. This is especially useful if there are a lot of questions around a topic, or when you want to encourage community engagement and participation.
Slide presentations
If you’ve produced many infographics, blog posts, or podcasts, it may be beneficial to repurpose their main points into one or more slide presentations and upload the new content onto SlideShare, for example. This provides your audience with easy access to a summary or ‘bird’s eye view’ of your key points and you can also link this to longer content formats hosted on your website.
Social media
Similarly, you can take the main points of your existing content and turn them into social media-friendly images that quickly provide a takeaway. Then you can link to the full content on your website to generate more interest and drive further traffic. As infographics are very effective for summarizing content in a visual format, they are particularly well suited to being adapted and repurposed on social media – on Pinterest or Instagram, for example. This process can be reversed by taking the data from an infographic and elaborating on it in a new blog post, or in a white paper or case study on LinkedIn, for example.
Blogs
Another tactic to consider is combining multiple types of existing content into a single in-depth blog post to appeal to the widest possible audience, enabling them to consume the information in the way they like best.
For example, one or more video explainers can be combined with content selected from a presentation, or a webinar, and reformatted as an in-depth blog post with embedded video. This facilitates learning from your content and may help to hold your audiences’ interest and keep them coming back for more.
Experimenting is always a good tactic when you are repurposing content. And because you’ve created the original content already, it often requires much less time, and fewer resources, to repurpose it than to create something new from scratch.
Content repurposing tools
There are a number of tools that can be used for repurposing in this way. These include the following:
- Canva or PicMonkey help you to create images easily with text, frames, and other graphics.
- Pablo by Buffer makes it easier to overlay quotes or phrases on photos and then share them on Buffer, or other social networks.
- Quotes Cover, which is an alternative to Pablo by Buffer, works in a comparable way.
- Photoshop or Affinity Photo are advanced graphic software suites for editing image properties, such as color or red-eye, combining images, adding overlay tints, and more.
- Gif Creator is a tool for creating gifs from a series of images or videos.
- Boomerang is used to shoot a few seconds of video that then loops once the user hits play on Instagram.
Nikki Lam
Nikki Lam is Senior Director of SEO at Neil Patel Digital, where she oversees the Organic Search offering, leads a growing team of over 20 passionate Search strategists, and assists in award-winning SEO campaigns for NP’s growing roster of enterprise and Fortune 1000 clients.
Joe Williams
Joe Williams teaches search engine optimization at Joe Wills. He holds a degree in Computing Informatics, and he’s been an SEO specialist for over 15 years. He’s consulted and trained many large blue-chip companies including The Guardian, Cosmopolitan, and Sky. He's on a mission to make SEO easy, fun, and profitable. You can catch him on X and LinkedIn.
Clark Boyd
Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company Novela. He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.
Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing.
Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Slideshare. He writes regularly on Medium and you can subscribe to his email newsletter, hi, tech.
