For many businesses the idea of constantly churning out content to support social media, blogs, video, and a variety of other marketing channels is daunting. However, if you prioritize creating a few robust, educational marketing pieces about your business and service offerings there are plenty of ways to repurpose that information into a variety of formats that you can serve to your digital audiences over and over again.
Today we are sharing some of our favorite ways to think about repurposing the content you already have on hand.
This “content” can be information from your existing blogs, write-ups from your marketing brochures, old flyers or pamphlets that haven’t been updated or seen the light of day in a while. The key is finding assets where the hard work of writing the copy has already been done for you.
Let’s face it, writing the copy is one of the hardest parts of creating content, but if the ideas are already there, you’re just reframing them in a fresh new way, instead of reinventing the wheel each time you sit down to develop content for your business.
REPURPOSING YOUR PRINT MARKETING MATERIALS
Most established businesses have a collection of small marketing handouts they have created over the course of time. This includes things like brochures, flyers, postcards and more. These are a great jumping-off point for developing content to support your digital marketing efforts. Here are a few ideas.
Turn them into “bite-sized” social media posts
Print marketing pieces tend to be loaded with information (aka are text heavy). Find ways to pare this information down into bite-sized information about your business or your services and pair them with on-brand photos, videos or graphics to share something visually interesting and informative for your audience.
Here is a great example of converting a print piece into a social post. We created the informational cards on the left for a client and a few months later we converted it into a few short interactive videos that they used for a series of social media ads.
Through a quick rework of the formatting and some quick text edits we were able to create a batch of usable content for a completely different medium.
Turn your print marketing into blogs
When you’re writing blog content, it can be hard to think of all the “right” verbiage to explain your business and the how-tos.
The great thing about repurposing your old brochures and flyers is that some of that information already exists. Print marketing pieces are often full of all the pertinent information you’d want someone to know about your business or how you approach serving your clients.
As you’re building out blogs, refer to some of our “repurposing blog posts” tips below to create content you can share several times without it looking like the same recycled piece over and over again.
Create an E-mail Marketing Campaign
For many businesses, direct mail campaigns used to be a great way to reach potential new clients, as marketing shifts to digital mediums, a lot of those quick, snappy marketing pieces you put together for mail campaigns are likely being left in the dust, but they don’t have to be!
Dig up a few of those old postcard designs and reinvent them as a piece for your next email marketing campaign. If you were sending out 5 reasons to hire your business or 5 tips to prepare for XYZ, those are great snippets of content to use for an informative email with a catchy call to action at the end. Or even a short-form video series on Instagram or TikTok.
REPURPOSING YOUR BLOG POSTS
One of the biggest mistakes I see clients make when running their content programs is viewing their blogs as “one-and-done” content pieces.
If you are writing informative posts about your services or offering up tips and resources for your clients, as long as they aren’t time-sensitive, you can share them over and over again in different ways, and they can be a great source of inspiration for creating new and different content pieces your business can use going forward.
Turn Your Blog Into a Video
Video is one of the top-performing content formats today and there are plenty of great platforms and resources out there that can help you turn your written content into social media-ready video content.
Pull out some of the highlights and key takeaways from your blog post and create a short video using those. Consider it a readers digest version of your long-form blog post.
Once you create the video you can add it to the original blog and even link the blog in the video post online, to help connect the dots of your digital experience.
The video will be a fresh take on the same information and is a great way to revive things from your archives to make it feel fresh and new again. It even gives you an opportunity to provide a fresh perspective on topics you covered in the past.
Need an example of what this looks like? Check out this original blog post and then see how we converted to a video here.
Create an E-book
If you are looking for a way to generate some leads, consider taking some of your top-performing content, expanding on it, and creating an e-book or downloadable resource that you can use as a lead magnet in a pay-per-click campaign.
This allows you to capture information about potential new clients or customers in exchange for more in-depth and helpful information from your business. This one might require a little extra writing but it will be worth it to provide something truly valuable for your audience.
Create an E-mail Series
For many people who are regularly writing blog content (even if it’s just once or twice a month), you likely have a few blog pieces that you could string together to make an email series that tracks along with your process and helps your clients prepare to work with you. Here’s an example:
- Email 1: share a quick note and overview with the link to a blog post you have written about what to look for when shopping for a vendor like you or service like yours
- Email 2: share a quick note about what it’s like to work with you and a link to a blog post about your processes for a specific service
- Email 3: share more about the benefits you bring to the table and then link to a blog or case study that shows the results you’re creating
- Email 4: close out with a testimonial from a client who had a great experience and great results from you and then include a strong call to action
Write a White Paper
If you do a lot of research or collect data to help you write strong content for your blog, consider turning some of that into a whitepaper that other people in your industry or in parallel industries can use as a resource or link to online.
This will help position you as a thought leader and also provides a little extra domain authority in the form of backlinks if you can get it published online in trade journals or even featured on other blogs or websites as a resource.
If you think outside the box, there are plenty of ways to build “new to your audience” content by just dusting off and refreshing things that already exist in your content library (in print and online).
The Content Marketing Boost You’ve Been Looking For
If you’re struggling with how to get started with something like this, don’t sweat it. Our team of writers, designers and content creators is here to help you build robust and easy-to-manage content programs for your business!
Shoot us an email and let’s get brainstorming!