Like most people, marketers love shiny new toys. It happens all the time when a new tech platform or tool launches. From mobile apps to Facebook ads to Snapchat to TikTok, we keep chasing trendy new technology in the hopes that it will generate more traffic, leads, and sales.
But there’s a reason 73% of marketers publish content at least weekly and 46% of companies want to expand their investment in content marketing programs: Content marketing is a proven winner in a competitive space, with far better outcomes than conventional marketing techniques.
For B2B companies, content marketing can be one of the best ways to grow authority, trust, and loyalty with your customers. Quality content can answer your audience’s questions, help you develop relationships with prospects, generate leads, and improve conversions.
That said, many B2B content marketing teams are strapped for time and resources. They must over-deliver, even while under-powered…or even understaffed. Creating consistent, quality content on a regular, ongoing basis is a challenge.
Even if you figure out the resource constraints and create a library of wonderful B2B content, it’s inevitable that over time, your blogs and other content will stagnate and stop delivering the organic (SEO) traffic it used to.
That traffic fall-off can come from changes in your industry, changes in how your audience consumes content, or changes in the volume, cadence, or quality of content you’re producing. Sometimes, blog posts that seemed forward-thinking a year or even a few months ago might simply be irrelevant today.
That certainly doesn’t mean old work needs to go to waste. Revisiting, refreshing, and repurposing content can re-engage your audience and revitalize its SEO potential.
What Exactly Is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing is the practice of reusing elements or the entirety of existing collateral to extend its reach. More than just updating stats, figures, dates, and references—which you still may need to do—repurposed content often involves redeveloping existing assets in new formats. This allows you to extend the value of your content by transforming it to serve a different audience or suit a different distribution channel.
Most importantly, content repurposing saves your most precious resource: time. It helps you drive valuable ROI while increasing workflow efficiency for your B2B marketing team. Instead of constantly developing new content from scratch, you can take something you’ve already created, pull it apart and put it back together in new and different ways, and then introduce it to a new audience on a new platform!
A few examples of content repurposing include:
- Changing a longer blog post into an article structured as an easy-to-digest list: “Listicles” always perform well and are an easy marketing lift, delivering above-average ROI.
- Turning a case study into an infographic: Forty-five percent of marketers use infographics in their content marketing mix.
- Chopping up a webinar into smaller bite-sized videos for social media: After all, short-form video platforms like TikTok and Instagram are some of the fastest growing marcom platforms out there.
- Expanding upon a popular blog post in a podcast episode. You can use the format to turn the article into a conversation, with guest speakers, updated facts, a topical twist, and so on.
Of course, these are just a few examples. Planning how a given piece of content will be distributed to a new audience over a new channel should drive the specific transformation each piece of collateral undergoes.
Three Reasons to Use Content Repurposing as Part of Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy
Aside from saving you time and resources, there are some quantifiable benefits to repurposed content:
1. You Can Reach New Audiences
Limiting your content to one format or channel can curb its potential. When you reshape and update it, you can capture new audiences (readers, viewers, listeners) you may have missed. Personalizing content and packaging it in a way that matters to different customers can help it connect more impactfully.
Additionally, you can drive more B2B brand awareness through content syndication by republishing this new content to one or more different websites or channels to expand your reach even further.
2. You Can Reinforce Your Message
The marketing rule of seven states that a potential customer, on average, needs seven touchpoints before they’re compelled to take action. So, repetition is the name of the game. You can consistently deliver and reinforce your message to your audience through content repurposing.
3. You Can Improve Your SEO
By optimizing your content through content repurposing, you can grow engagement. And an assortment of content types around the same topic can generate additional opportunities to associate desired keywords with your brand. Bonus: if you syndicate your repurposed marketing content outside of your own website, you can receive quality backlinks to your site, further driving SEO and organic traffic.
Best Practices for Content Repurposing
If you’re interested in enhancing your B2B content marketing strategy with content repurposing but aren’t sure how to jump in, here are three ways to get started:
Go (Ever) Green
Start with your blog archives and identify the evergreen pieces—content that’s retained its relevance for months if not years, is not time-sensitive, and continues to drive traffic long after its original publication date. You could also pinpoint articles that may be out of date but could be made relevant by removing outdated references. Focusing on timelessness and quality will also ensure the content is relevant across new formats and channels as you repurpose it further.
Let Data Lead the Way
Use analytics to determine your top-performing assets. One of the top content marketing mistakes is thinking you already know what your customers want to read, instead of tracking actual results. By ignoring analytics when selecting what content to repurpose, you may inadvertently take a low-performing blog and turn it into an equally low-performing listicle, infographic, or brochure. Repurposed assets from top-performing content are more likely to drive top performance as well.
Emphasize Your Authority
Leverage repurposed content to highlight industry expertise and domain authority. Compelling content not only builds trust in your brand, but also establishes (or reinforces) your authority as an industry leader. Identify previously published content you can improve upon by adding current thought leadership to demonstrate you’ve developed a more nuanced understanding and compelling vision of the topics at hand.
Content Repurposing—Make the Most of Your Marketing
Content repurposing is an essential tool in a successful B2B content marketer’s kit. Not only will it save your team much-needed time and lessen the burden of continually creating content from scratch, but it can also be one of the keys to growing trust, consistency, reach, and authority with your audience, wherever and however they consume content. And pairing content repurposing with content syndication is a super-charged way to reach a larger audience, generate leads, and get more clients for your business.
Learn more about the content marketing hack of content syndication by downloading our white paper, “A Marketer’s Guide to Effective Content Syndication.”
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