If you publish content in any form, whether it’s videos, blogs, or social posts, you probably understand the benefits of a repeatable content repurposing strategy. If this is a new concept for you, get ready to unlock a new content creation avenue with very little extra work.
Whether you manage a large team with a sophisticated content pipeline or you are a scrappy startup or agency that is squeezing as much value as possible from every word, it’s hard to find a marketer that doesn’t intrinsically see the value of a content repurposing strategy.
Here’s the truth: Your audience is all over the place. They’re on social media consuming text, videos, images, and reels. They’re searching Google and YouTube for solutions like yours. They’re in their email inbox, seeing ads on news sites, and consuming long form content to level up their professional skills. Your audience might consist of potential customers and partners, current customers, and industry thought leaders.
Even though you might have a handle on who your target audience is for every piece of content and where you can reach them, it’s incredibly difficult to create enough content for every channel with enough consistency to make an impact across the board. This is especially true for small content teams.
With a repeatable content repurposing and distribution strategy in place, you can embrace a “create once, publish forever” mindset that will unlock the volume, consistency, and quality required to impact your target audience across all available channels.
We asked 14 marketers to share the principles behind their content repurposing strategy, why it’s a critical piece of the content pipeline, and to share some tactical advice behind their approach.
Should content repurposing play a role in your content strategy?
It’s hard to find a marketer that will say content repurposing shouldn’t play a role in most content strategies, but you’ll certainly find marketers that say it doesn’t play a role. Most marketers understand the value of the approach, but simply lack the bandwidth or interest to establish a repeatable strategy.
For some marketers, there’s no time. For others, they actively avoid repurposing
Although content repurposing can save marketers time and money, it’s certainly not a free lunch. Many marketers understand the value of the approach, but simply don’t have the time to develop and stick to a repeatable strategy.
Luciano Viterale, a content marketing consultant with an active newsletter creates a ton of long form content, but said,
1. I don’t always have the time to do it so I just ignore it
2. The content needs to be tweaked for different platforms which seem time intensive
3. I don’t have a good process for any of this so I haven’t even started
I would love to do it but I just have had the time to work through it.
Luciano Viterale, Content Marketing Consultant lucianoviterale.com
This is a common sentiment among small marketing teams, agencies, and startups. The prospect of turning every piece of content into multiple pieces is daunting. However, with a repeatable process in place, the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks of putting in a bit of time and effort.
Automata’s content repurposing platform helps marketers establish a repeatable process to turn every piece of content into multiple others for all of their communication channels.
Tyson Downs from Titan Web Agency expressed a similar sentiment,
In our agency, we don’t focus on content repurposing as the primary part of our content strategy. We place more value in creating new ideas and concepts as we don’t have the bandwidth to devote to repurposing content.
Tyson Downs, Owner of Titan Web Agency titanwebagency.com
Aside from not having the time and bandwidth to implement a content repurposing effort, there are some marketers that largely avoid the approach from a strategic point of view.
For example, if you publish primarily on a single platform and prioritize fresh and new information, content repurposing might not be a valuable technique. Lisa Dietrich from girokonto.io said that although they often repurpose content into multiple formats (blogs into videos and infographics),
We are dedicated to providing our users with the best checking account comparison service available and therefore, we only produce fresh content. We prioritize producing original and timely articles that focus on the latest trends in banking and money management.
Lisa Dietrich, Partner at girokonto.io
Probably the most common approach is a mix of new content and repurposed content. After all, without new content, your repurposed content will start to get stale and will begin cannibalizing itself on your website and on social. Dejan Gajsek from Grow + Scale highlights the importance of focusing on repurposing your highest performing content while keeping up with the demand for new and fresh insights in quickly changing industries.
To keep it simple, content repurposing is an important part of the content strategy however it’s not the main part. For example, if you do a 80/20 analysis of your best performing content you’ll soon find out 4 to 5 content pieces bring you the bulk of the traffic.
Dejan Gajsek, Co-founder of Grow + Scale growandscale.com
I treat those content pieces as golden geese that need to be pampered, fed and updated regularly. These content pieces are the hardest workers in the content strategy funnel.
Now saying that, if you’re in an industry which changes regularly (for example tech) you need to stay relevant by producing top content that is timely and valuable. This is how you keep your readers expectations locked on yourself and bring new readers in.
Whatever the reason for not establishing a content repurposing strategy, there is usually a significant tradeoff. If there’s simply no time for your team to repurpose content, there’s probably a lot of value left on the table. Sacrificing a single new piece of content to repurpose existing high performing content may be a good compromise for many marketers. If your content prioritizes new and fresh information, content repurposing is probably still valuable to spread in multiple formats on additional channels, but when the priority is on fresh content for a single channel, content repurposing may simply be an unwelcome distraction.
Many marketers are prioritizing distribution and repurposing
Many marketers find content repurposing to be an invaluable part of their marketing strategy. Sreeram Sharma, Head of SEO at Qik-chat says that content repurposing
…is a great way to maximize our content output and reach a larger audience. We use repurposing techniques such as turning blog posts into videos, podcast episodes, infographics, and more. This helps us to make the most out of our content, which in turn helps us to better engage our audience.
Sreeram Sharma, Head of SEO qik-chat.com
Every marketer has their own reason for establishing a content repurposing strategy. Some prioritize volume on a single channel. Some prioritize reaching an audience on multiple channels. Others like to dig into the analytics to repurpose content that is working. Matt Giaro, a business coach for content creators shared his three reasons for actively repurposing content and encouraging his clients to do the same:
1. People don’t remember (I even don’t remember what I’ve posted yesterday)
2. People didn’t see the first content (because of the reach or what’s going on in their lives)
3. People weren’t here one week ago (your audience grows)
Matt Giaro, Business coach for content creators mattgiaro.com
To sum it up, Matt doesn’t hesitate to repurpose content even on a single channel (for example, LinkedIn or Twitter) because only a fraction of your audience sees each piece of content. As a general rule, if something is worth saying once, it’s probably worth saying again. This is especially true for platforms with short-lived content visibility like most social media platforms.
Harry Boxhall, an SEO consultant, expressed a slightly different set of reasons why he focuses on content repurposing as a key component of a successful marketing strategy,
1. reach a new audience
2. drive additional traffic to the page
3. potentially turn the piece of content into a more linkable asset.
Harry Boxhall, SEO Consultant harryboxhall.co.uk
Content repurposing also doesn’t only mean repackaging content from one channel to put on another. Updating and refreshing existing content is another manifestation of the same content. Ashley Cummings, a freelance marketer and the CMO of Reading with Rik, shared her thoughts on why updating existing blog posts is key to the success of her marketing efforts,
URLs age well in the SEO world, even if the content doesn’t. It makes much more sense to update outdated content on an old URL than to create new content on the same topic with a new URL.
Ashley Cummings, Freelance marketer & CEO freelance website
Anu Ramani shares three great points as to why he prioritizes content repurposing in his marketing strategies:
1. It saves time and effort, and in these days of tight budgets, it should be on everyone’s marketing strategy.
Anu Ramani, Founder of isolinecomms.com
2. Google ranks fresh content, so it’s worthwhile ensuring that original content is refreshed and reflects best practices.
3. If your old content is still receiving hits, it’s likely that your audience is still interested in the content, so refreshing it can provide new value to them while boosting the content’s searchability at the same time.
Content repurposing isn’t a revolutionary idea. It squarely fits into the timeless, albeit goofy mantra, “work smarter not harder.” Marketers are not strangers to identifying possible efficiency gains in everything they do, and designing content to be repurposed is a great example of this.
Tactical content repurposing strategies
Now that the value of a content repurposing strategy and how to evaluate whether it is a good strategy for you have been established, let’s get into some details. How do you actually do this? Where do you start? What channels should you pick for distribution and how do you choose the content to repurpose? We asked a few marketers to share their tips and tactics.
Repurposing long-form content to short form content
This is one of the most straightforward approaches to content repurposing. Do you have a 3,000 word blog post, e-book, or book from your CEO? This is an absolute goldmine. Every section of this content can be diced up into a shorter format on your blog, LinkedIn page, or into sales sheets for prospective customers.
Alex Lindley, the founder of Law Firm Content Pros shared his thoughts on turning long form content into a plethora of smaller bite-sized pieces for multiple platforms,
Content repurposing should begin with the longest or most in-depth piece of content. Usually, that’s a longform blog post, but sometimes it’s a podcast episode, video or similar. From there, you break off bite-sized pieces of the comprehensive content and use it on your various other channels.
Alex Lindley, Founder of Law Firm Content Pros lawfirmcontentpros.com
If it’s a blog post, take one subsection — that’s a great LinkedIn post or Twitter thread. Or take a bulleted list from the post and turn it into a graphic to share on social channels. You could even take a much longer section and turn it into an email newsletter or informative video.
Before long, you’ve distributed your single piece of content in dozens of different ways across six or seven digital marketing channels. In many cases, that’s a lot more effective — and a better use of time — than creating an entirely new piece of comprehensive content.
Often times, long form written content is already structured in a way that can easily be divided. For example, take the chapters in a book to create short standalone pieces. Take the sub-sections of a blog post to do the same. Quickly you’ll see your long piece of content turn into many on-brand marketing assets that can communicate insights to a new audience in a new format.
Repurposing multiple short-form pieces into a single long-form piece
This is a bread-and-butter application for us at Automata. We operate a services arm of our company that analyzes a company’s entire content archive to identify topical clusters and combines them into single, expansive long form pieces of content. This is a challenging content repurposing task, but provides a huge amount of value.
Shannon Peel, a brand storyteller at MarketAPeel agency shared a similar point of view,
When it comes to repurposing, it’s more about repackaging. By creating content on one topic using a multiple media approach, I am able to create relevant content over time and then bring it together to package it into a bigger product, like a book, or break it down to small chunks of content to use as teasers. As long as the content is telling a complete story, if it’s a bite sized teaser, a blog post, or an ebook, each piece can work to lead your ideal audience from brand awareness to brand advocacy.
Shannon Peel, MarketAPeel marketapeel.agency
Although turning long pieces of content that are packed full of insights and research into smaller bite sized pieces of content for social is the classic application of content repurposing, the reverse approach also offers enormous potential.
Vaibhav Kakkar shares a step-by-step strategy starting with converting multiple blog posts into an ebook:
Create an ebook from all of your blog entries or short articles. A substantial amount of content on a broad subject? Create a single, enormous ebook from everything. Then, to advertise the book, create an alluring book cover and landing page. A detailed pillar page that connects back to each of the blog pieces that go into great detail about the subtopics is another option for organizing all the content. Your content strategy will benefit greatly from creating such a pillar page. It will assist in establishing you as a subject-matter expert. Your viewers will easily find and browse all relevant stuff on one page. By creating internal links inside your material, you can increase your SEO.
Vaibhav Kakkar, CEO of Digital Web Solutions digitalwebsolutions.com
Converting between different media types for multiple platforms
Video is everywhere on social media, and YouTube is the second largest search engine (next to Google). In addition, video-first platforms like TikTok and Instagram are beginning to show more promise for B2B marketers. Podcasts are continuing to be a main source of information and entertainment for many people. This is all to say that repurposing content across media formats is becoming more and more relevant as a viable content repurposing strategy.
Harry Boxhall shared his point of view on this approach,
…if you have a blog post that performs well and attracts a lot of traffic, you could repurpose that content into a video, podcast, or infographic and share it on social media or other platforms. This can help expose your content to new people and potentially drive more traffic back to your website – all of which can contribute to your long-term ranking efforts.
Harry Boxhall, SEO Consultant harryboxhall.co.uk
Although it many not be a primary strategy for many companies (yet), it is starting to be a more common approach. Ilse Van Rosenberg, Senior SEO and Content Executive at Cognism, shared this,
Repurposing content is not necessarily a key part of our strategy, but it plays a vital role in everything we do. For instance, we constantly repurpose everything we create across paid, our socials, and our website. We record YouTube videos which we embed in our blogs ( this helps us get rich snippets on search) and on LinkedIn. What’s more, we record podcasts that are also embedded in our blogs and shared on LinkedIn, and we write them up for our website. These are just a few examples of our internal repurposing plan.
Ilse Van Rensberg, Senior SEO and Content Executive at Cognism LinkedIn
Externally, we share content on different platforms to help build brand awareness and attract new audiences that might never have heard of us. We use Reddit and Medium for this. We create content with the idea that it will be shared and reused as much as possible rather than just creating content to post on the website.
This demonstrates the enormous opportunities across many channels and formats (video, podcast, social, communities, blogs, and more).
Refreshing and updating existing content
A form of content repurposing is simply updating existing content. By updating content, you are giving it new life, and making it more relevant to current readers. Google recognizes this and considers a frequently-updated site more authoritative and a better source of information.
Ashley Cummings shared that,
When refreshing old content, I update anything that’s old, include new quotes from new subject matter experts, update any outdated links, and update the narrative and analysis.
Ashley Cummings, Freelance marketer & CEO freelance website
It’s a great idea to update statistics, add new and more relevant links, and add new insights from subject matter experts.
How to choose which content to repurpose
There are a few heuristics when it comes to choosing content to be repurposed. You can always choose your highest performing content, as that is often what your audience is looking for. It’s also a great strategy to stick with evergreen content and topical clusters. These are topics and ideas that will always be interesting to prospective customers and you audience in general.
One of the most common types of content to repurpose is research-heavy reports or studies. With tons of insights to share on social and in videos, there’s an almost endless supply of content locked in these documents.
Repurpose research or reports into blogs or articles for your website. You can also reappropriate the information for landing pages or info sections.
Anu Ramani, Founder of isolinecomms.com
Key Takeaways
Most marketers have a similar goal in mind. Support their company and help generate revenue by building awareness, generating demand, driving traffic, and acquiring customers. The “why” is the same for most marketers. The “how” is what is often different. Even with the myriad of marketing tactics that may or may not work for your company, a solid content repurposing strategy is one of the most common and effective ways to squeeze as much value from every word that is published across all of your marketing channels.
