Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is content repurposing?
You can repurpose content into different formats to maximize its use.
Repurposing content means that you adapt it or break it up to use for another purpose, such as taking an infographic and turning it into a number of individual images, each of which could be used in single social media posts or added to an email.
Benefits
There are many benefits to repurposing your content:
- Speed: It saves time as it's quicker than creating new content from scratch.
- Low cost: It's more cost-effective to reuse something than to purchase or commission new content.
- Efficient: If you've already spent time and money in researching and interviewing for a blog post, for example, and then writing it up, adding images, and strategizing social media posts, then you should reuse that effort and good content as much as you can. Break up elements of it into tweets, spark a discussion about it on LinkedIn, turn it into a podcast, or create an auto-generated video of it by using a tool like lumen5.com.
- Reinforcements: If content appears in more than one place, then it reinforces the message that you want to make. In short, if you have good evergreen content, always look for opportunities to maximize and reuse it and to save yourself some time.
In short, if you have good evergreen content, always look for opportunities to maximize, reuse, and save yourself time.
It’s worth noting that there are some great tools and templates out there for most of the jobs you need to do.
If you've written the article, you've done the really hard work of researching, gathering sources, writing it up etc. That can (should) then become lots of different types of content – quotes in tweets, an auto-generated video, a podcast episode where you discuss it with an expert, and so on.
Best practices when repurposing content
Here are some rules to be aware of when repurposing content:
- Quality: Ensure that the quality of the source content is high and free from any copyright. And don’t forget to credit sources, when appropriate.
- Placeholders: Remember to remove any placeholder content. (Your repurposing templates may include placeholder, or ‘boilerplate’, text.)
- Inspiration: Be inspired by these sources, but don't just copy them directly. Let them spark further creativity.
- Templates: Be careful of the contrast and fonts of some of the templates you might use for repurposing. For example, if you are repurposing a template you found on a site like Canva, you will need to pay close attention to the formatting and fonts on the existing version. Adapt these as required to suit your brand’s purposes.
- Videos: When repurposing content as video, be aware of aspect ratios and video length requirements.
- Platforms: Make sure you understand what works best on different platforms. For example, content on LinkedIn has a very different tone from content on TikTok. You may have to express the same idea very differently to suit the platform.
- Generative tools: When using auto-generation tools, aim to keep content reasonably on-brand when using templates.
- Publishing: Stagger publishing at different times and days to reach audiences of platforms at relevant times, and to reach other time zones.
- Text: Be aware of how text descriptions vary across platforms and don't just replicate blindly. People use hashtags differently and may have different @handles across different social apps.
Will Francis
Will Francis is a recognized authority in digital and social media, who has worked with some of the world’s most loved brands. He is the host and technical producer of the DMI podcast, Ahead of the Game and a lecturer and subject matter expert with the DMI. He appears in the media and at conferences whilst offering his own expert-led digital marketing courses where he shares his experience gained working within a social network, a global ad agency, and more recently his own digital agency.
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.
These walkthrough videos give clear, step-by-step demonstrations and guidance on how to apply key digital marketing concepts and strategies, and use industry-standard tools.
