Repurpose Old Content (Without Anyone Knowing)
Posted 10th June 2016 at 05:45 AM by MalamaxMarketing
Content creation is hard. Coming up with something new and relevant to write about every week, or even every day, is a huge challenge.
If this is something you do professionally, you likely have invested the time in creating your own editorial calendar and have already created titles and topics for months to come. It’s the best way to ensure you’re focused and able to deliver on your creative promises. But what happens to all the stuff you’ve written over the years? Countless posts and stellar content is too often lost in oblivion.
It doesn’t have to be that way, nor should it. If you’ve invested the time and energy into creating rich, unique and valuable content, there are ways to bring it back from the dead. There is no reason to waste all of that effort, and repurposing old content that was popular is a sure way to boost your SEO benefits and gain more traffic.
What exactly does repurposing content mean?
This is something we should get clear on. You’ll often hear the terms repurpose or revamp used synonymously. But, it’s important to distinguish the major difference between the two, since today we’re just talking about repurposing.
If someone is revamping content, they’re essentially updating an existing piece of content. You’re using it for the same purpose as it was originally intended, and simply updating the information or adding some additional resources to it. This is best when you’re trying to reach the same segment of the market, and you just want to freshen things up to re-engage your customers, or provide them with the latest stats.
When we talk about repurposing, you’re changing and modifying older content for two main reasons. You’re either completely changing the format, or changing who the target audience is. You are doing this to reach different segments of customers, perhaps through a different marketing channel. You may have a really great blog post that you decide to turn into an infographic for use on Pinterest. Or, maybe you created a guide for entrepreneurs that can be modified to suit SMB’s. Whatever the reason is, you’re doing more than updating. You’re using what you’ve already created but completely modifying its structure or purpose.
Reasons to Repurpose
While there are many obvious reasons to repurpose your content, there are some reasons that are strategic, and these are where you can really hit it out of the park and create insanely targeted content.
BUYING FUNNELS
While there are a few different models of marketing and buying funnels, I like to keep it simple and use:
AWARENESS leads to CONSIDERATION which leads to final DECISION.
The reason this is important is because consumers behave differently, depending on which stage of the buying cycle they fall within.
When consumers are at the awareness stage, they are aware that they need something and are starting to become aware of possible solutions. They are at the top of the buying funnel, and you want to create content that pulls them down towards the next stage. When people have made it to the bottom, they are likely comparing a few different options, and exercising scrutiny with everything they see and absorb.
You can see how a piece of content can be modified to better suit each stage of the buying funnel. Perhaps you wrote a really great blog post a year ago that was educational in nature. You sell software that is similar to DropBox, and the piece you created was really meant to let people know about the software, so they would know it exists and what type of benefits they could expect to receive from using it. A year down the road, many people have heard about you. You’d now like to create something for people that are on their way from the Consideration stage to the Decision stage, so you decide to create an infographic that directly compares your product features with DropBox’s. The content about your company is all there in that original post — so you’re going to take what you already did, put together some stats about DropBox, and put it all into a stunning, engaging template that is now a sharable infographic. Voila!
CUSTOMER PROFILING
Targeting different sets of your customer personas is another great reason to reuse your older content. If you’ve invested heavily in a content marketing strategy, you’ve already taken the time to develop these customer profiles, and have a deep understanding of who these people are and what type of content they want to consume.
For example, let’s say you run your own small digital marketing agency. Your primary focus is on offering SEO solutions to small businesses. But, you’ve noticed a big need for education within this industry. You’ve come into contact with many small businesses who want your knowledge, not your services. They want to learn how to do this stuff themselves, and are willing to pay a one-time fee to learn, rather than pay someone else long-term to do the work. So even though you’re focused in one area, you have two different customer personas because they both want very different things from you.
Last year, you were blogging a lot about all the changes happening in SEO and how people needed to modify their approach. Why reinvent the wheel? Now is the perfect time to turn that information into a presentation or e-book that you will use to teach your SEO students. It’s the same basic content, but it’s been modified so it suits the needs of a different group of people.
OTHER BENEFITS OF REPURPOSING
Aside from these two strategic approaches, there are also lots of other benefits that come from reusing your old content.
SEO can be hugely impacted by getting new traffic to your old content. When you’re reusing old content, there is always an excellent opportunity to link back to your original post. This will get new eyes on old content, which is exactly what sends signals to the search engines that your content remains relevant and valuable.
Connecting with new customers is an obvious objective with any content marketing strategy, but you can also use repurposed content to connect with new people as well. With social media in particular, if you’re reusing something that was extremely popular previously, but continues to be relevant, you are going to get new traffic from it. It’s also a great way to re-engage with your current or past customers. If something got a lot of engagement before, it’s likely you can spruce it up, make it seem new, and get that same level of engagement again.
If you want some more information on this subject and some solid ideas to get you started, check out this post from WordStream.
What ways do you repurpose your old content?
If this is something you do professionally, you likely have invested the time in creating your own editorial calendar and have already created titles and topics for months to come. It’s the best way to ensure you’re focused and able to deliver on your creative promises. But what happens to all the stuff you’ve written over the years? Countless posts and stellar content is too often lost in oblivion.
It doesn’t have to be that way, nor should it. If you’ve invested the time and energy into creating rich, unique and valuable content, there are ways to bring it back from the dead. There is no reason to waste all of that effort, and repurposing old content that was popular is a sure way to boost your SEO benefits and gain more traffic.
What exactly does repurposing content mean?
This is something we should get clear on. You’ll often hear the terms repurpose or revamp used synonymously. But, it’s important to distinguish the major difference between the two, since today we’re just talking about repurposing.
If someone is revamping content, they’re essentially updating an existing piece of content. You’re using it for the same purpose as it was originally intended, and simply updating the information or adding some additional resources to it. This is best when you’re trying to reach the same segment of the market, and you just want to freshen things up to re-engage your customers, or provide them with the latest stats.
When we talk about repurposing, you’re changing and modifying older content for two main reasons. You’re either completely changing the format, or changing who the target audience is. You are doing this to reach different segments of customers, perhaps through a different marketing channel. You may have a really great blog post that you decide to turn into an infographic for use on Pinterest. Or, maybe you created a guide for entrepreneurs that can be modified to suit SMB’s. Whatever the reason is, you’re doing more than updating. You’re using what you’ve already created but completely modifying its structure or purpose.
Reasons to Repurpose
While there are many obvious reasons to repurpose your content, there are some reasons that are strategic, and these are where you can really hit it out of the park and create insanely targeted content.
BUYING FUNNELS
While there are a few different models of marketing and buying funnels, I like to keep it simple and use:
AWARENESS leads to CONSIDERATION which leads to final DECISION.
The reason this is important is because consumers behave differently, depending on which stage of the buying cycle they fall within.
When consumers are at the awareness stage, they are aware that they need something and are starting to become aware of possible solutions. They are at the top of the buying funnel, and you want to create content that pulls them down towards the next stage. When people have made it to the bottom, they are likely comparing a few different options, and exercising scrutiny with everything they see and absorb.
You can see how a piece of content can be modified to better suit each stage of the buying funnel. Perhaps you wrote a really great blog post a year ago that was educational in nature. You sell software that is similar to DropBox, and the piece you created was really meant to let people know about the software, so they would know it exists and what type of benefits they could expect to receive from using it. A year down the road, many people have heard about you. You’d now like to create something for people that are on their way from the Consideration stage to the Decision stage, so you decide to create an infographic that directly compares your product features with DropBox’s. The content about your company is all there in that original post — so you’re going to take what you already did, put together some stats about DropBox, and put it all into a stunning, engaging template that is now a sharable infographic. Voila!
CUSTOMER PROFILING
Targeting different sets of your customer personas is another great reason to reuse your older content. If you’ve invested heavily in a content marketing strategy, you’ve already taken the time to develop these customer profiles, and have a deep understanding of who these people are and what type of content they want to consume.
For example, let’s say you run your own small digital marketing agency. Your primary focus is on offering SEO solutions to small businesses. But, you’ve noticed a big need for education within this industry. You’ve come into contact with many small businesses who want your knowledge, not your services. They want to learn how to do this stuff themselves, and are willing to pay a one-time fee to learn, rather than pay someone else long-term to do the work. So even though you’re focused in one area, you have two different customer personas because they both want very different things from you.
Last year, you were blogging a lot about all the changes happening in SEO and how people needed to modify their approach. Why reinvent the wheel? Now is the perfect time to turn that information into a presentation or e-book that you will use to teach your SEO students. It’s the same basic content, but it’s been modified so it suits the needs of a different group of people.
OTHER BENEFITS OF REPURPOSING
Aside from these two strategic approaches, there are also lots of other benefits that come from reusing your old content.
SEO can be hugely impacted by getting new traffic to your old content. When you’re reusing old content, there is always an excellent opportunity to link back to your original post. This will get new eyes on old content, which is exactly what sends signals to the search engines that your content remains relevant and valuable.
Connecting with new customers is an obvious objective with any content marketing strategy, but you can also use repurposed content to connect with new people as well. With social media in particular, if you’re reusing something that was extremely popular previously, but continues to be relevant, you are going to get new traffic from it. It’s also a great way to re-engage with your current or past customers. If something got a lot of engagement before, it’s likely you can spruce it up, make it seem new, and get that same level of engagement again.
If you want some more information on this subject and some solid ideas to get you started, check out this post from WordStream.
What ways do you repurpose your old content?
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