Making More of Your Marketing Content

When it comes to modern-day marketing, content continues to be the single most powerful tool for attracting leads and driving conversions. In fact, it’s responsible for generating three times more leads than both paid search and advertising. However, while valuable, quality content takes a lot of time and resources to create. And for smaller marketing teams, finding the time to do this amidst an already busy schedule can seem like an impossible feat. 

I’ve personally witnessed how difficult it can be to prioritize content creation with limited resources. For the majority of my career, I’ve worked on small marketing teams of three or fewer people. Although we fully understood how important content was for generating new business, we struggled to find the time to create it, between setting strategy, supporting the rest of the organization’s initiatives, delighting existing customers, and managing the promotion of already existing campaigns. And that often meant the creation of new content was put on hold. 

Unfortunately, my story isn’t unique. A recent survey found that an overwhelming majority of respondents work on marketing teams of five people or less, while only 5 percent work on larger teams between 11 and 25 people. 

The good news is that your content marketing initiatives don’t have to sit on the back burner, even if you are working with limited resources. In this article, I uncover some of my tried-and-true marketing hacks for getting the most out of your existing content and turning them into new sources of lead generation.

The Basics of Repurposing Content

Before we can dive into the nuts and bolts of how to repurpose your content, there is a very important clarification to make: Repurposing content does not mean simply copying and pasting an existing asset across various channels. Instead, each piece needs to have a different angle, present new information, and align with the specific channel it will be published on. Additionally, although copying your content may seem like the simplest, most straightforward solution, doing that will end up causing you more trouble in the long run. That’s because Google penalizes websites that publish duplicate content, and these penalties can seriously harm your domain authority and keyword rankings.

Although repurposing content may seem like more work than you originally thought, I promise it will be well worth it. 

Here are just a few benefits that repurposing content can provide: 

Get more out of your research: Creating quality content takes a lot of time. In addition to simply writing the piece, you must also select a compelling topic that will resonate with your buyer persona, spend time researching that topic so you thoroughly understand it, and find stats to support your claims. Although this time investment can be challenging for a team of any size, it can be crippling for those who are confined by a tight budget or limited staff. By repurposing content, however, you are able to make the most of your time by leveraging that same research throughout multiple pieces of content.

Experience an SEO boost: As mentioned earlier, publishing duplicate content online can be detrimental to your SEO efforts. However, by taking a new angle on the same topic and publishing it on the web, you create new opportunities to rank for a desired keyword. Additionally, if you post to a channel that is not your website, you can use it as an opportunity to beef up your backlink profile. 

Reinforce your authority as a subject matter expert: Have you ever heard of the Rule of Seven? Prospective buyers will need to interact with your brand at least seven times before they are ready to make a purchase. Repurposing a piece of content that already addresses your buyer persona’s pain points further supports the idea that you’re a force to be reckoned with. It also brings you one step closer to building trust with your prospects. 

Connect with more prospective buyers: Although a solid understanding of your buyer personas can help you hypothesize the types of content that will perform best, the reality is that you won’t reach everyone with one broad stroke. For example, some of your prospective buyers may prefer reading while others enjoy watching short videos. The same applies to the channels in which your target audience finds content—some may prefer to find content via a Google search while others browse social media. By diversifying your portfolio of marketing content and leveraging it across multiple channels, you are essentially creating a menu of options to satisfy the masses. 

Hacks for Repurposing Content

Ready to make the most out of your marketing content? Here are five of my tried-and-true hacks for repurposing content into new sources of lead generation: 

1. Turn Your Written Content into Infographics

Infographics are an excellent way to break down a lot of information into simple, easy-to-digest formats. And they’re incredibly effective. Consider these stats:

• 40 percent of people respond better to visual information than plain text.
• People remember 80 percent of what they see and do, and only 20 percent of what they read.
• Infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than an article. 

In addition, infographics tend to generate a lot of social shares and referral traffic to your website. This will further enhance your backlink profile and increase your domain authority. 

The types of content that translate well into infographics include list-style blog posts, e-books or white papers that include a lot of facts, or dense pieces of content that contain key takeaways you don’t want your audience to miss. 

Pro tip: Your new infographic can also be repurposed into smaller graphics that you can turn into a social media series!

2. Create a Roundup of Your Top Performing Blogs

Any good CMS should be able to tell you how well your blog articles are performing. The criteria you use to define success will depend on your goals. If you’re looking to repromote blogs that are popular among your target audience, look for those with a high number of views. If you want to generate more leads, pick a blog with a high CTA conversion rate. 

After looking through these analytics, pick a theme and select four or five articles that you’d like to feature again. Throw them into a new blog, include a brief description of each and viola! You have a new blog post full of internal links to drive prospective buyers deeper into your website. 

You can also apply the same concept to an email campaign. Find your top performing blogs and turn them into an email series that offers tips about a particular topic. End each email with a CTA that links back to your blog so readers can learn more. 

3. Turn Long-Form Pieces of Content into a Pillar Page

When it comes to creating long-form pieces of content, like an e-book or a white paper, it’s no longer enough to simply put the content behind a form and wait for the conversions to roll in. Consumers today want to learn as much as they can about a product and service before submitting their contact information or engaging in a conversation with sales. Because of this, the concept of the pillar page has grown in popularity among marketers.

In addition to building trust with your prospective buyers, putting long-form content on your website is going to provide tremendous SEO value for your site with the keywords you’re trying to target. 

The best way to get started with pillar pages is to repurpose your existing long-form content in this new format. If you have multiple options to choose from, begin with the one that has the highest keyword opportunity. Keywordtool.io is a free resource that can help you determine this. 

Because e-books and white papers are typically in PDFs, this is the only instance where it would be OK to copy and paste the existing content directly into the pillar page. 

The key benefit to pillar pages is that you can link them internally to other pieces of content you’ve created. This will help Google crawl your site more easily, boosting your SERP rankings and increasing the likelihood that people will find your content. Be sure to leverage your top performing blog articles for this. 

4. Make a Webinar Out of Your E-Books

Yes, e-books and webinars both focus on different stages of the Buyer’s Journey. But that doesn’t mean they can’t work together to create a great presentation. 

In fact, leveraging the educational content in your e-book is a powerful way to quickly educate a prospect on a challenge they are facing and then highlight a solution to that challenge (your product or service)—all within the same webinar. It’s an extremely effective way to quickly nurture a prospect toward a purchase. 

Be mindful of what information you are pulling into the webinar. You want to ensure it places your product or service in the best possible light. Additionally, use your e-book content to clearly convey the potential consequences of not addressing their challenges. This will ensure your viewers are bought in by the time you begin the promotional part of the presentation.

Pro tip: Once the webinar is finished, you can easily turn the presentation deck into a SlideShare to expand your reach even further.

5. Rewrite Older Blogs and Repromote as If They Are New

Repurposing your old blogs is easy and a great way to add new life to some of your older content. You’ll also have the added benefit of capitalizing on the organic traffic the blog has built up over time. 

Start by looking for blogs that are more than a year old. The best candidates to consider are those that have a history of driving a lot of traffic and don’t require a full rewrite. 

Most good blogs will contain a statistic or two to reinforce a concept or drive authority to the article. Depending on how old your blog is, these stats, as well as the actual content, may become outdated. 

Once you select a blog, update any of the outdated stats, put a new spin on the introduction and conclusion, and refresh any sections that are no longer relevant. Then, at the top of the post, indicate when the post was originally published, as well as the date when the updates were made. Don’t forget to promote it the same way you would a new blog!

Final Thoughts

When it comes to repurposing content, it is always important to keep your buyer persona in mind. Although it can be fun to brainstorm all the different ways to use your content, you still want to make sure it aligns with how and where your target audience consumes information. For example, if your typical buyer is between the ages of 55 and 65, it might not make sense to repurpose your content for certain social media channels like Twitter or Instagram. On the other hand, if you’re trying to connect with a much younger audience, you may want to prioritize creating short video snippets rather than long-form content. 

Remember, the more ways you can repurpose your content, the more you’ll be able to stretch your valuable marketing resources.