Content Repurposing in 2023: How-to + Examples
It’s exhausting to keep creating consistent content for your brand on different social media channels. Don’t you think?
From writing engaging blog posts to creating videos, compiling case studies and shooting podcasts, you name it.
Your content marketing and SEO efforts through different platforms may remain tiring and even yield little effort. The solution to this is “Content Repurposing”.
I know what you might be thinking,
- My followers will notice and stop following me
- No one wants to see my old content again
- Won’t this imply that my brand is lazy about content?
- This is time-consuming for me and my team
Content repurposing is way more than just recreating old or new content in different forms.
Want to know how to do content repurposing in 2023 with practical examples? Let me walk you through it with this blog post.
Let’s start by defining what content repurposing is and what you stand to gain.
What is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing, also called “content recycling” is simply the process involved in changing the format of an existing content into a new one.
It’s done by brands and businesses to expand the reach of such content. A common example of repurposed content is turning a blog post into a video to be published on TikTok or YouTube.
Why should content repurposing matter to you? According to Semrush’s State of Content Marketing Report 2023, 42% of marketers affirmed that repurposed content contributed to successful marketing campaigns.
The ultimate goal of repurposing content is to reuse both old and current content in new ways.
Simply say with repurposed content
“You show up on different platforms with different content types, methods and angles”
Once you’ve identified what to repurpose, you necessarily don’t need to recreate word for word, add updates and you’re good to go.
Benefits of Content Repurposing
Here’s what you stand to gain when you repurpose content
- Content distribution: Changing your content formats helps cross-distribute on different platforms. Doing this promotes your content differently for more audiences.
- Growing online presence: Once you continue to push out various types of content, your presence grows on these platforms too. This implies reaching more people and building brand visibility.
- Satisfying audience content needs: Every audience has a preferred taste for content consumption. I watch videos more than I read texts. Repurposing your content will help you meet each target audience’s preference.
- Improved SEO efforts: Sharing multiple content on a particular topic or keyword can help to improve your content’s authority on search engines. You can make this work even better by linking repurposed pieces back to your website.
Choosing What Content to Repurpose
Let’s tackle the main question people ask. How do I know what kind of content to repurpose?
You should repurpose content that is:
- Evergreen
Evergreen content is simply content that stays relevant even after many years. This could be a guide to something, an ebook containing steps to achieve a goal or foundational tips to start an idea.
Revisit your old content to find out what you’ve produced before and still maintain its relevance.
- High-performing
For your content to gain high traction, it means your audience found it valuable and relatable. That is exactly why you should repurpose it.
Once you find your viral content, study how and what made it high-performing and use that information when repurposing.
- Low-performing
Looks like two sides of a coin? Yes, you can repurpose content that didn’t do well. It can be a bummer if your audience doesn’t catch up with valuable content.
They’re many reasons any content you create can flop and one of them is because the audience doesn’t see it enough.
The marketing rule of 7s says:
“A potential customer must see a message at least 7 times before they’ll consider taking an action”.
Look for relevant content that your audience didn’t maximise to repurpose.
- Easily converted
We can easily reform some content pieces into different formats. For example, you can convert listicles into infographics or a checklist.
If you find those content that are easily accessible and consumed by your audience on different channels, you can repurpose them.
- Socially popular
It’s not all trends you should jump on, but there are trending topics in your niche that can provide value to your customers. You can find these topics on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) trend table or discussion platforms like Quora.
You can also use Buzzsumo, to see popular topics about a keyword you’ve created content on before. This will give you more ideas about what to repurpose.
How Does Content Repurposing Work?
Before you start to repurpose content, you should consider having a strategy to make it work.
To repurpose content that works, I’ll break it down into 3 simple points:
1. Identify the content you want to repurpose
You can’t just repurpose random content because you created it. Spend time analysing your content and studying metrics for each platform you’re repurposing on.
You can check this by the number of likes, shares, followers you gained, and people who talked about it. This is to ensure that your audience is still willing to see that same content twice.
If you have doubts about what value your content holds, it’s better to hold on with repurposing and focusing on creating more useful content,
2. Find out what ways your audience better consumes it
The next thing to do is discover ways your audience will prefer content. You can run a poll or do a quiz to better evaluate the credibility of your results.
See a poll I ran on LinkedIn about what reduces content marketing efforts:
Doing this will help you know what format of content you should focus on and help you build a content marketing strategy to reach more audiences and users.
You can also do this by checking what your audience is searching for on different social platforms that your content tackles.
For example, you can do TikTok research by checking for keywords your audience uses and then repurpose some of your content into short videos that solve the problem.
3. Repurpose and Distribute
Finally, it’s time to do the hard work.
After repurposing, what’s next is distributing it to the audience. Most brands downplay distribution because they think the hard work is creating content.
If you’re done creating, the process of consumption isn’t complete until you tell people about what you created. The hard work is in convincing the audience to take action regarding any content.
Think of it as running a relay race. Winning the race depends on the last person to receive the baton, not the first runner. Effective content distribution is the last runner.
How You Can Repurpose Content
Here are some ideas to convert your content into different formats
- Create images from blog posts
You can use important bullet points highlighted in a blog post to create images you can post on social media or even the article itself.
- Turn user comments into an FAQ
This is useful if you have a new product, and your users have questions about it. Make a list of frequently asked questions from their comments and opinions about the product.
- Adapt blog posts into videos for TikTok and Reels
If you don’t want to convert your whole blog post, you can pick each heading and turn it into a series of short videos.
This can keep your audience wanting more and you also get to add new and updated information into your video.
- Compile articles into an eBook/audiobook
You can reshare your cluster content articles into a short eBook or an audiobook for your audience. This can also serve as a lead-generating magnet to build your email list and sell out offers.
- Create instructional videos from how-to guides
How-to guides are explanatory blog posts about using a product or understanding a concept. You can repurpose them into short and fun instructional videos to aid usability and comprehension.
- Make a report from statistics and internal data
Companies like Hubspot and Semrush do this a lot of time because they have a wide range of audiences that trust them with information. Working with other companies and agencies leads to diverse and valuable reports.
- Turn podcast transcripts into newsletters
You did a podcast that was a hit and you had fun doing it? You can repurpose it for your email newsletter community and even promote the podcast using that route.
- Create a blog post from a poll or survey results
Remember that poll I referred to before, I can create a blog post that highlights the problem and teach my audience how to solve it.
The article will most likely gain traction before I’ve identified what I can add to make it valuable to them from the poll.
- Use Facebook or Quora discussions for webinars
If you go to Quora and Facebook groups, you’ll find several people who need answers or solutions to different issues. You can use this as a guide to create either free or paid webinars to help them solve their challenges.
- Turn an article into a LinkedIn carousel
LinkedIn remains a leading platform for B2B and B2C brands looking to grow and reach more audiences.
If you have amazing content published on your blog, you can make a carousel with the snippets to drive traffic to your website and make the content more exciting for readers.
- Create quizzes for poor-performing posts
Do you have a post that didn’t do too well? You can repurpose it into a quiz or poll to understand your audience’s perspective. It’s always advisable to make these easy to fill out and less cumbersome to navigate.
- Make checklists for how-to and step-by-step guides
Guides are mostly evergreen content with little updates as the years go by. You can make a social media checklist from an old post and use that to make your audience consume more content from you.
- Turn a blog post into an infographic
We all have that blog post title that reads “10 steps to winning your dream client” You can make that into an infographic. This makes it easier for some audiences to consume and grasp what the whole content is about.
- Create an online course from FAQs
If your audience is constantly asking questions about a sector in your brand or what your content addresses, you can put together a free course for them.
This will also aid in directing new individuals with similar questions to take the course, especially when it needs constant upgrades.
Useful Examples of Content Repurposing
Finally, here are cases of how other companies are repurposing content:
1. Hubspot
Hubspot is a leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool targeted at helping businesses with marketing, sales, content management and customer service.
They repurpose their content and so far it’s been working.
See an example of a blog post about a guide to web forms repurposed into an eBook with extra information and collaboration with Gravity Forms.
2. Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is an amazing content marketing tool used to research, audit, write, optimise and generate SEO-optimised content like blog posts, web pages and many more.
See an example of repurposed content where they shared about optimising your B2B content on LinkedIn to make people watch the full video on YouTube.
I’ve watched this video and I’m sure you’ll find it valuable if you’re a content person too.
3. Mio
Mio is a budding SaaS solution that allows for cross-platform collaboration.
They have successfully integrated platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom and Google Chat to make it easy for teams to work together
They repurposed a blog post on Medium about the top 50 Unified Comms influencers in 2019 and made an update to the blog post in 2020 bumping it up to 100 influencers. This time they published it on their blog.
They made the same content into an X (formerly Twitter) thread, they did the countdown on a thread, which caused the engagement to increase because people who made the list shared it with their audience too.
4. Threads
Threads, the new Meta app for text-based conversations, rolled out a few months ago and when users started joining the platform, there were a lot of questions about how to use and navigate the app, which helped them come up with Frequently Asked Questions.
See an example of a user comment used for an FAQ page
5. Semrush
Semrush is a SaaS platform used for keyword research, site audits, competitive analysis, backlink tracking, and other insights related to search engine ranking.
See an example of a blog post they made last year turned into an Instagram Carousel shared 3 weeks ago.
Making the blog post an infographic made it easier for their Instagram audience to grasp what the blog post is about while they drive traffic to the website.
See the caption of the post
6. Social Media Examiner
Social Media Examiner is a U.S.-based media company that publishes online magazines, blogs and podcasts on how businesses can leverage the use of social media.
Check out this example where they repurposed their podcast episode into a blog post. In this episode about how to promote and sell, they shared it as a blog post for audiences who prefer reading to listening.
7. Userpilot
Userpilot is a product growth platform that allows businesses to personalise websites and set up systems to improve their product adoption and customer onboarding.
See an example of a research report on the State of SaaS Onboarding for 2023 that was repurposed into a blog post.
The blog post mainly shared key insights to help the reader see the value of the report and check out their services to help SaaS optimise and enhance user onboarding.
8. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a popular SaaS solution that helps with scheduling, managing, and analysing social media.
With this tool, you do a wide range of planning, from curating to publishing posts and managing teams.
The content team created an infographic reel on Instagram to remind their audience to download their 2023 Social Media Career Report.
Frequently Asked Questions
You could still have some questions about repurposing even though I’ve explained explicitly here. The following questions can provide you with the answers you need.
- How often should I repurpose content?
There’s no fixed limit for this. While you’ve created your content marketing strategies, content repurposing is an extra step to increasing your progress with less effort.
Consider the tips I have shared on how to choose content to repurpose and fix that into how many times you want to convert. Don’t overdo it, though.
- What tools can I use for content repurposing?
There are several tools you can use for content repurposing, depending on your specific needs.
For anything visual, Canva is a great tool. You can also try Repurpose.io for audio and video content.
- Is repurposing good for my brand?
Yes, remember you can also add fresh statistics, visuals, and data to newly repurposed content to give it an edge over the old ones.
If you still have any doubt, remember that top companies repurpose content and they still have credibility and engagements.
Conclusion
Content repurposing has proven to be a powerful marketing strategy to maximise the value of your content efforts.
As we’ve explored in this guide, audiences are seeking to consume content in different formats through different channels. As a brand, adapting to these trends will help reach new audiences, strengthen your authority and stay relevant.
Don’t hesitate to explore the ideas and make the most use of them in your content marketing strategy.
