The goal of content marketing is to produce an abundance of rich, relevant material with which to engage your target audiences. This content will help you to establish yourself as a leader in your field, provide the information your target audience needs to make buying decisions, educate others about your industry, and help to build brand awareness. However, obtaining this material and achieving these goals does not mean creating something entirely new every time your editorial calendar calls for the release of content. Instead, you can choose to repurpose content by taking old blog posts, infographics, listicles, podcasts, white papers, and so forth and using them in different contexts. Far from harming your content marketing campaign, doing so can actually benefit your campaign in a number of ways. Here are just a few reasons to consider repurposing your content in order to build an effective content marketing campaign.
Repurposing content can save you time when implementing your content marketing strategy.
Time is usually of utmost importance in a business. Being able to complete tasks efficiently is necessary if everything is going to get done. When it comes to implementing a content marketing strategy, efficiency is equally important. Unless you can find a way to produce content in a timely manner, you may find yourself unable to create the material you need to adequately communicate with your target audience. For example, if you find yourself needing a white paper, a blog post, two social media posts, and a podcast all in one week, it can be challenging to adequately prepare each of these pieces of content within the required amount of time.
This is why repurposing material as part of your content marketing strategy can be not only useful but essential to a successful strategy. It takes less time to turn a blog post into a social media post or LinkedIn article than it does to build a new article from scratch. It takes less time to break a white paper down into a series of blog posts than it does to create that blog series from the ground up. And this saved time can mean an ability to put out more high-quality content for your target audiences.
Repurposing content can improve your search engine optimization performance.
Repurposing content as part of your content marketing strategy can help you to improve your SEO performance as well. Reusing content is helpful to your search engine optimization efforts in a number of ways.
Repurposing your content produces more material around important keywords.
Once you know which keywords are useful for your business (through the help of keyword research and SEO experts), you can use them in your content marketing. When you repurpose content, you make it easier for search engines to perceive your brand as an expert in those search terms. A white paper and a series of blog posts, for example, will use give you more exposure than will a single white paper.
Repurposing your content earns you more links.
Links are essential in a successful search engine optimization campaign because they build the perceived trustworthiness of your brand in the eyes of search engine crawlers. The more links you enjoy from reliable sources, the more reliable your content and your business will appear. Repurposing content can help you to build these links by encouraging people to share your content in a variety of ways. For example, an article shared on your blog and on social media will likely receive more links than will an article shared just on the blog.
Repurposing content can improve your brand awareness.
Improving brand awareness should be one of the goals of any content marketing strategy. However, achieving this goal requires a steady flow of content to your target audiences. The Marketing Rule of 7 states that a person must hear a message about 7 times before they are willing to become a customer. It is far easier to repurpose a piece of content a few times in order to get it in front of your target audience than it is to create 7 different pieces of material.
Consider a listicle you put on social media. You can turn that listicle into several different blog articles. Then, you can build those blog articles into a series of emails. And then, you can take one or two of those blog posts and rework them into guest blogs on another website. With a single piece of content, you will then have developed four different types of material for your content marketing strategy, making it possible for your target audience to read your message several times along their journey to becoming a customer.
Repurposing content allows you to reach multiple target audiences with your content marketing.
Typically, every marketing campaign has specific target audiences. These audiences are groups of people whom you wish to reach with your marketing message in hopes of converting them into customers. However, if you have more than one target audience, you may find that each group requires different things in order to respond to your marketing. This is especially true when it comes to content. The audience you reach through social media may not be the same audience you reach through webinars and ebooks.
When you repurpose your content in order to produce a variety of material for your content marketing campaign, you make it easier to reach multiple audiences with the same material. Instead of needing to create new content for every group you wish to reach, you simply need to rework the material you already have. Repurposing content can be a useful strategy for making the most of the material you have already created. With a little tweaking or refreshing, you can often produce several different types of material from one article, blog post, listicle, or white paper. By saving you time, improving your SEO performance, improving your brand awareness, and helping you to reach multiple target audiences, this strategy can make for a more successful content marketing strategy overall.