Do you ever feel struck by writer’s block when it comes to creating new content such as blogs or social media posts for your brand? You’re not alone. Marketers and brand owners are constantly striving to create fresh, unique content, and some days it feels like a struggle. If your brand has been online a couple of years, it’s time to think about how to repurpose content. For example, you can take an existing piece of content, such as a blog, and transform it into a valuable new creative asset to help you attract a wider target audience!

In this article, I outline the basics and benefits of content repurposing, and explain how you can repurpose existing content to reach wider audiences and grow your business.

What is content repurposing? 

“Content repurposing involves reworking existing content and presenting it in a new format to expand its reach, lifespan, and purpose.”

When you repurpose old content you are breathing new life into it and making it work hard (again) for your brand. Good online content is created with a purpose and adds value to those consuming it. However, with time some content can feel tired, lose visibility, and receive few hits. When this happens, it’s time to bring the content back to life and get audiences engaging with it again!

For example, content repurposing is updating an old blog post with new, relevant data, trends, and thought leadership quotes and sharing it across social media platforms.

What content repurposing is not!

Content repurposing should be not be viewed as a cheat or a lazy way to approach content marketing. Newness is great when it comes to content and as website owners we should regularly add new content and share new social content. However, existing quality content deserves to be seen and when visibility starts to dip its time to recycle and reinvent it for your target audiences and the current moment.

The 4 key content types in digital marketing

When it comes to content for your website or social media channels there’s a vast assortment of content types to choose from and the type you choose will depend on its purpose. For example, video is a great option when you want to entertain an audience. When it comes to content repurposing, digital content can be categorised into four key categories, these are:

1. Text Content: Heavily text-based content is what the internet is built on and it’s great for educating audiences. Blogs are valuable text content asset and they can be repurposed in many ways from videos to social media slideshares.

2. Video content: Videos are fast-coming a valuable creative assets for brands and are an engaging and popular medium for audiences. Popular videos can be turned into blog posts and even podcast episodes.

3. Audio content: Podcasting is new to many business owners and is the main form of audio content brands used to connect with their customers. Brands can also take audio clips from their video content to share on social media or embed into a blog post.

4. Social media content: Social media platforms host many content types from short-format videos to beautiful images. Repurposing existing content from another channel for your social media community is highly recommended. For example, share a customer testimonial from your website or Google in a short-format video.

When its comes to repurposing content consider the key format types and which type your audience is most likely to connect or engage with, next and where.

3 benefits of repurposing content

You may be wondering why should I repurpose my existing content when I can just make some fresh, new content. In short, an effective digital marketing strategy includes quality new and existing content so its not recommended to replace one with the other and vice versa. Here are the key benefits you can expect from repurposing your brand’s content:

1. Save yourself or your digital marketer time: starting with a quality content source means you’re already a good part of the way there to creating a new video, infographic, or blog post to redistribute to your target audiences.

2. Give your website’s SEO a boost: as long as you’re publishing valuable and quality resources, search engines will generally recognise that you have multiple resources focused around similar targeted keywords and may reward you for it with increased SERPs (search engine ranking positions) and more visibility.

3. Increase your reach: reshaping a blog post to share on Linked In or in an email newsletter gives you at least three types of content in one that you share on three different channels helping you to reach to a wider audience.

How to identify old content to repurpose

Older blog posts are often the most obvious pieces of content that need repurposing into more compelling and valuable content assets. For example, they may have been high on your most viewed pages report 12 months ago but recently traffic has dropped, or traffic may have always been poor but you know it’s a popular topic so it should be working harder for you.

Tip! As a website owner, you don’t want content just sitting on your website doing nothing, identify those pages and breathe new life in to them!

How to repurpose text-based content

The chances are high that you have plenty of existing text-based content such as blog posts that are currently just sitting on your website receiving limited views and attention from your target customer segments. Once you’ve published a blog post there is so much more than you do with it, and this includes that post you published two years ago. Here are some creative ways to breathe new life into your text-based content:

– Update the text with new thought leadership quotes and data.
– Share it on social media and utilise popular formats such as carousels. For example, create a slide for every key section of your blog post and engage your social community with the story.
– Create a YouTube video of specific how-to sections or guides within your blog posts, many people prefer to learn from video. Turn your blog post, or sections of, into a script and film yourself explaining how to follow your advice.
– Design an infographic for data-heavy blog posts and then share them on your social media channels.
– Share it with your new email subscribers.

How to repurpose video content

If you’ve invested time and money in filming videos you must do so much more than just hit the publish button on your website or YouTube. A video asset can be repurposed into many more creative assets for your brand, these include:

– Text-based content such as blog posts: if you’ve produced an educational or “how to” videos that follows a logical structure then its transcript won’t need much editing to become a quality longer form blog post. There are handy tools available that use AI to automatically transcribe your video for you so this really is a quick win as the bulk of your text already exists.
– Short-form videos or snippets: Look for key moments it your videos where you’re saying something valuable or impactful and clip it, these video snippets are perfect for sharing on your favourite social media channels.
– Podcast episodes: for every video you can extract its audio file and upload it on a variety of podcast platforms, from here once its optimized for their platform search it can start to reach new audiences.

How to repurpose audio content

The main type of audio content from brands online are podcasts, they are a great way for brands to connect on a personal level with their target audiences. Medium to large sized business are more likely to be producing brand podcasts, however, many small business owners and consultants are invited as podcast guests to chat and share their industry expertise. With small business owners in mind, here are a few ways to repurpose podcast episodes:

– Film a podcast for social media: take that personal connection with the audience even further and film your episode. Video snippets can shared on social media as teasers for an upcoming episode or an ‘available now’ messages, and the full episode can be uploaded to YouTube.
– Capture audiograms: An audiogram is essentially a visual that shows the voice wave and if you’re camera share this is a great piece of content to share on social media. Short snippets of when you’re saying something valuable are effective at guiding audiences to the full episode.
– Embed in a blog post: just like video, podcasts can be embedded straight into a blog post. Describe the episode and add further value to your readers. Podcasts can also be transcribed but may require additional editing due to their conversational tone.

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