Great Ideas Stick: How to increase the effectiveness of your best content through repurposing

We (us writers) all have favorite ads, campaigns, or blog posts that we created. It can be hard to know if your next idea will be as effective or if you’ll get a bad case of writer’s block.

Why not get more of each brilliant idea without having to create new content? This way, your strongest creations and designs can reach audiences multiple times and enjoy the spotlight a bit longer.

The rule of seven quite simply states that it takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before a purchase will take place.

Think about your days in school. How many hours did you have to study the same material before you felt ready for the final? 

For myself, I found that some subjects were stickier than others. But by creating flashcards, visiting coffee-fueled study groups, and rewriting lecture notes, I could make the dullest of subjects a bit stickier and end the semester on a good note. 

The key was to engage with subject material in multiple ways. 

Marketing is no different.

Studies have found that as much as two-thirds of the buying process has already taken place before a buyer reaches out to a potential provider of services or products.

So the question becomes, how many ways can you reach your audience to increase the stickiness of your content, and convert them from curious scrollers into eager customers?

The benefits:

Repurposing your best content makes it more likely to stick in your customers’ minds, but it has many other benefits to your business and time as well.

• Enhanced engagement and increased reach: Businesses can engage with their audience more effectively by providing various content formats that cater to different preferences, learning, and communication styles. Content formats may include websites, videos, blog articles, infographics, or social media posts. It’s similar to how some readers prefer hardcover books to paperbacks, or eBooks to audiobooks. The story stays the same, but different format allows readers to enjoy the book according to their own taste and at their own pace. 

• Reinforced messaging: Reusing content across a variety of mediums can help reinforce key and branding by using consistent messaging across different channels and platforms.
• Saves time and resources: We know you have more brilliant ideas inside you, but why not make the most of the ones that are already out there? You can save time by eliminating additional research and becoming a subject matter expert. In this way, you can spend your time developing new strategies for additional clients or campaigns.
• Extended lifespan: Reused content can have a longer lifespan and can continue to attract new audiences, providing additional value over time.
• Improved SEO: You can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) by increasing the amount of content you have around a specific topic, honing in on the keywords you.

Insider tip: Don’t limit yourself to only repurposing your content! Maybe you want to write a book review, a video about a webinar you liked, or blog about a cool podcast you recently found. This can also help grow and broaden your audience.

How do I get started?

When repurposing any piece of content, it helps to break it down into smaller, supporting subtopics. These subtopics need to be strong enough to stand alone, but also complement one another. Then, you can identify the subtopics and platforms that will appeal to your strongest target audience whether they are of a specific industry, have a specific role within a company, or have a nagging business concern that keeps them up at night.

For example, you could split a blog into supporting subtopics and write an email newsletter around each of the subtopics. You could create a landing page featuring key quotes or stats from the blog and drive prospects to sign up for the newsletter. Or you could take snippets of a podcast about the blog and post them to LinkedIn. The combinations are truly limitless. 

Here are a few avenues that you could repurpose content, and some strategies to help you get there!

• Ebooks/whitepapers
• Videos
• Websites/Landing pages
• Blog posts
• Podcasts
• Infographics
• Emails
• Newsletters
• Webinars/Events
• Social:  Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube
• B2B Social:  LinkedIn

Repurposing content doesn’t just involve changing its delivery method and platform, but it can also mean mixing your content with other things to cast it in a new light.

HubSpot recommends using the ACE method when repurposing content, which stands for Adjust, Combine, and Expand.

To start, make sure your content provides a good user experience. How can it be customized? Is it missing anything? Can you shorten it? Consider these when choosing which platform you’ll use to republish it.

Next, you may be able to combine content to provide new value or meaning. Maybe you want to link to another blog or repost last year’s team highlights. Look for opportunities to expand on something you’ve already done to dig deeper into that topic. This is the big-picture stuff.

The wrap up (for extra stick)

Overall, repurposing marketing content offers a unique opportunity to lighten your workload and make your content accessible to your audience over a broader range of platforms and formats. It also allows you to use your strongest, stickiest pieces of content to help your business achieve its goals with super-glue strength.