As a businessperson of the 21st century, you are well aware that you can no longer be a successful marketer without constantly providing your target audience with new and fresh content. Being great at content marketing implies abandoning some obsolete techniques such as pushy selling and focusing your efforts primarily on content delivery. However, although you might be a fantastic content creator, you cannot always be at the top of your game and produce stellar material.
In fact, content creation can be a pretty nerve-wracking and time-consuming experience. Even if you devote sufficient time and effort to it, sometimes you will lack the key ingredient – inspiration. While that’s perfectly normal, you don’t have to wait for the Muses to lend you their hand. Instead, you can help yourself by taking your old material and breathing new life into it. We’ll explain why and how you can repurpose your old marketing content and reap multiple advantages by doing so.
Why is Repurposing Beneficial?
Repurposing your old content is not just a way to compensate for a lack of time or inspiration – it can also be an efficient strategy for improving your overall online presence. Here are several reasons why you should do it:
Appealing to a new audience. As your business grows, so does your customer base. When you reuse your previous material, you allow your new audience to see it. You also satisfy different tastes, as different people prefer different formats.
Reinforcing your message. You created your earlier content because you wanted to communicate a certain message. Now you have a chance to make that message echo all over again.
Making the most out of your previous efforts. If you decide to repurpose old material, you will reap the same benefits as if you produced new content, but you won’t have to spend as much time and apply as much effort. You will save time, money, and nerves.
SEO boosting: Refreshing old content is an opportunity to retarget some previously used keywords, thus giving your website a new SEO boost.
Does it sound convincing enough to try? We think so too.
How to Repurpose Your Old Content
Before you start looking for your old material, keep in mind one essential thing – your content has to be evergreen. That means you cannot use yesterday’s news and outdated information that no one will want to read. Instead, you have to find material that stands the test of time and is always relevant. With that key point in mind, you can begin looking for old stuff to repurpose.
While there are many different ways to reuse your previous content, we will provide you with several efficient examples of what you can do. Let’s see what those are.
1. Refresh Your Printed Material
If you’ve been in the business long enough, chances are that you have tons of old printed material – banners, brochures, business cards, and so on. Although those items have probably lost their purpose by now, you can always get creative and give them a new lease of life. After all, you spent money producing and printing them, so why not use them again?
For example, maybe you have a worn-out yet interesting trade show banner. Instead of throwing it away, you can use it as a profile picture or a background image on your social media accounts. Or let’s say you’ve dug up an old brochure about your company – think twice before opening that trash bin! The information in that brochure might be a great source for your “about us” page.
The possibilities are numerous, and great things can happen if you allow yourself to think outside the box when it comes to your printed material. In fact, although most companies have switched over to digital marketing, that doesn’t mean that the paper medium is dead. The following example demonstrates this point spot-on:
Take a closer look at this business card. What do you see? While the front side is quite common, the back side comes as quite a surprise. The lawyer Ken Hardison thought of an excellent idea to redesign his business card by adding a freebie, a compelling title, and a link to his site. Who would not be hooked?
2. Revive Old Articles
a) Remake
Let’s say you are constantly trying to keep your company’s blog alive and fresh with new articles. Here’s how to help yourself when the inspiration dries out or you simply need a time out. Suppose you published a well-written and popular article “Ten Useful Tips for an Effective Social Media Campaign”. What you can now do is break that list into ten new posts, each containing a different tip from the original article. For example, you can have new titles like “How to Plan Your Social Media Campaign” or “Engage Your Social Media Audience with a Killer Content”. Add a little, tweak a bit, and see your old content come to life.
Conversely, you can use an old series of thematically related articles and turn them into a new post, summarizing the key points of each article. You can also revive your previous posts by adding bits of new information and updating facts and figures to match the current circumstances. Either way, by reusing your old articles, you will extend their life and utilize your previous work.
b) Repost
Sometimes your best work lies under a pile of other articles, buried under pages and pages of subsequent posts. Since the chances of someone unburying your hidden treasure are slim, you’re going to have to do it yourself. However, the solution is quite simple – just post links to your old content onto your social networks. That way, you will both remind your old readers about your excellent piece and present it to new followers who haven’t had the chance to read it. Do this with all the pieces you find timelessly relevant, and enjoy the fact that your site will teem with new readers.
In addition to giving your old articles new exposure, you can also post some of their parts to different social media for different purposes. To illustrate, let’s assume you have an old article that is laden with images. For example, you are an owner of a travel agency, and you posted “8 Breathtaking Places to Visit in Southeast Asia,” each of those places being accompanied by an image. Now, you can extract those images and create a Pinterest board based on your article. If your article is, furthermore, laden with statistics related to some aspect of life in that part of the world, you can repurpose those statistics as a series of Tweets. Social media actually give you quite a few possibilities, so get creative, and use them to your advantage.
3. Compile an E-book
Another great way to repurpose your old blog posts is to turn them into a guide or an e-book. Although such a format is a bit more formal, it will be of great benefit to the readers who seek a more detailed education on a particular topic. Among the brands which recognized this need is Zapier, a company that provides a web automation app. Every now and then, the marketers at Zapier compile a certain number of articles that are thematically related and turn them into a more comprehensive guide. This is their first such endeavor:
The table of contents shows chapters that actually pertain to their previous blog posts. By adapting and editing those posts to fit the new format, the Zapier marketing team did a great job and offered their readers “The Ultimate Guide to CRM Apps.” Not only did they thus give their old content a new purpose, they also saved themselves the time and trouble of writing the guide from the scratch.
Now, there is another tactical component to their effort. E-books can be an excellent marketing tactics – you can offer their free download in exchange for an email subscription, which is exactly what Zapier did:
Of course, gathering more email subscribers usually means more audience for your blog so, in the end, the benefits of compiling an e-book are really multiple.
4. Create a Slideshow
Whatever type of old material you have – articles, research reports, ads, or something different – why not play a bit and turn it visual? One way of doing so is by creating a slideshow that covers the main points from your old documents in a visually appealing and presentable way. For example, if you are getting ready for a business meeting with valuable prospects, you can create a PowerPoint presentation with the most important statistics from your research report. Add some graphs, charts, images and colorful items, and your presentation will be nothing short of amazing. People love visual clues and are thus more easily engaged.
You can also make a presentation that covers the main arguments of your old article. Suppose that, a few years back, you wrote an article entitled “Top 5 Tricks that Encourage Customer Loyalty.” Considering the evergreen nature of such a topic, you should definitely not let it go to waste. Therefore, you can create a presentation, with each slide covering one listed trick. To give it a wider reach, upload it to Slideshare, an online site for sharing PowerPoint presentations, and embed it to your website. Old content – new application – new audience. That’s the way it goes.
5. Consider Infographics
No one likes too much text that deals with tedious business data – it’s tiring for the eyes and exhausting for the mind. For that reason, you can never go wrong with presenting your facts and figures visually. What you should definitely consider, aside from the mentioned slideshows, is the relatively new format of infographics.
Due to their simplicity and aesthetic appeal, infographics have become very popular in the last few years. With their interesting shapes, images, colors, and letter fonts, they are able to capture the attention of a wide readership. Unsurprisingly, people love to share them. Do you need more reasons to convert your old content into infographics? Probably not.
Anything can be turned into an infographic – old articles that are full of statistics, marketing reports, ads, slideshows, and so on. Although they contain textual elements, infographics can sometimes convey the intended message better than just text. Look at the following example from Inboundli, a successful digital marketing agency:
Now, would you rather read a long report about content curation or would you go through this blue infographic with presentable statistics? Statistically speaking, your answer is not unexpected. If you are interested in the rest of this graphical story, feel free to see for yourself.
To create compelling infographics, you can hire a designer or use some of the available online tools such as Piktochart. Either way, you will provide content that people will be eager to share.
6. Make a Video
Of course, you can discard using text altogether and make a video. Whenever you decide to do that, you will not go wrong – video is a very popular format that people incessantly share on social media. In fact, no other format can ever go as viral as a video. Create a good one, upload it to your YouTube channel, and wait for it to drive some traffic to your site.
For instance, you can use your old blog entry, get creative, and turn it into a script. With that script as a basis, you can make an exciting video that covers the most important points of your article. Although this seems like a task that requires a lot of time and effort, trust us – it will pay off. There are also other ways to leverage the power of video. Let’s imagine that you had a top-notch webinar that was considerably attended. By turning it into a video, you can extend its great success and present it to the people who missed it. This is precisely what Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist, and chemistry blogger, did:
By turning his webinar into a video and uploading to YouTube, he generated more than 4,000 views. This means that several thousands of new people “attended” his webinar subsequently. Consider doing the same – it´s a great way to breathe some new life into your old material and gather new followers.
Conclusion
When you repurpose old content, not only do you save your time and nerves, you also create multiple benefits for your company. By giving new life to your old marketing stuff, you can attract a new audience, reinforce your previous messages, maximize your efforts, and give your website the much-needed SEO boost. These are all good reasons that should be enough to compel you to give your previous work another chance.
There are various options to consider when it comes to reinvigorating your old marketing stuff. You can give your old printed material another look and see how you can make use of it. You can create new articles out of old ones, or extract some of their elements and post them on social media. Old articles can be turned into a new e-book. Consider employing visual elements, and creating a slideshow, an infographic, or a video. While this list is far from exhausted, you can use the described examples to get you started. As long as you choose evergreen content and apply some creativity, you cannot go wrong.
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