Getting More Mileage from your Marketing: How to Recycle Content

Successfully marketing any business requires a lot of effort. There are so many marketing channels out there, and each of them demand unique types of content. A podcast is entirely different to a blog post, which is entirely different to short, snappy, ad copy. Developing the right marketing assets for every channel is no easy task. 

Unless you have an enterprise-level marketing team to throw at the problem, it can be easy to feel defeated. An effective marketing strategy ties together multiple channels into holistic campaigns that work in unison to convince customers of the value your products and services offer. Without the right approach, creating assets for all these different channels can drain your resources, and your marketing team (and budget) can quickly start to run on empty. 

Many businesses are ignoring one of the easiest ways to solve the content scaling problem: recycling core pieces of content across multiple verticals. Today, we’re sharing five ways you can use this strategy to produce great content across different marketing verticals without exhausting your resources. Let’s get started. 

1. Recap Major Events

Hosting conferences, industry roundtables, or even simple webinars can have a huge impact on your marketing efforts. But all too often, marketers view these as one-off events. Sure, they drive a lot of interest and help build awareness of your products and services, but a few days after the event, it can feel as if the event never happened. 

Events like these tend to feature a lot of thought leaders who often produce a lot of great content. That’s content you can––and should––be replicating. Make sure to record all your events so that you can transform these one-off interviews, panel discussions, and conference speeches into content that lasts. 

There are many ways to do this. You might hire a writer to produce a series of articles summarizing different presentations and discussions. You could record live events and turn them into podcasts. It’s often possible to successfully repurpose content like this without doing much work at all. Consider recording your next webinar and then making it free to access on your site if someone enters their email address – that’s a lead generation tool right there. 

2. Turn Blog Posts Into Social Media Snippets

Creating blog articles is a central element of any content marketing strategy. They have the potential to drive a lot of qualified traffic to your site, showcase your value proposition, and cast your people as thought leaders. 

But your customers and prospects are busy, and not everyone has time to read a blog post. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use all the insights, research, and writing that go into creating the blog post to connect with them in a different way. 

Consider grabbing a few pull quotes from different blog articles. Share them on social media: both through your business channels as well as those of your employees. These can highlight the key insights behind the post in a couple of sentences, helping to broaden the audience of people who will consume the content. 

3. Refresh Your Old Content

There’s a good chance that a lot of the content on your website might have become a little dated. There could be statistics in there that are a few years old, or an explanation of product features that’s no longer fully accurate. It could be a ‘state of the industry’ style report from a year ago. 

Going back in and refreshing this old content can work wonders for your SEO metrics. And the process of refreshing content is actually pretty simple. Revisit the article, and highlight elements that are now out of date or inaccurate. Rewrite these sections, and include some more current statistics. While you’re in there, go ahead and add a few new links – especially internal links to relevant content you’ve published since the article was originally written. 

4. Break Pillar Posts Down Into Shorter Articles

Pillar posts act as the cornerstone of the SEO efforts of many businesses. Those using this strategy invest the time and effort into creating a meaningful long-form piece of content, and leverage it to build authority on a certain topic. However, pillar posts can be thousands of words long and not everyone has time to read them: particularly if they’re looking for an answer to a specific question. 

Consider taking the key sections of your pillar posts and breaking them out into their own shorter posts. Here’s an example. 

You’ll often see pillar pieces like “The Ultimate Guide to Buying [Insert Industry Here] Software in 2022”. In that post, you can expect to see a few different pieces of software, along with pros, cons, user reviews, and some additional commentary on each. Give each piece of software its own blog post, and compare it honestly to your own product. Most of the research is already done – it’s just a question of rewriting the content from a different angle. 

5. Turn Content Into an Email Series

When you publish a new piece of content, it’s important to drive traffic to it through content distribution methods like social media and email. But if you’re producing educational content, you can also encourage people to sign up to receive it as part of an email sequence. 

Many companies have newsletters. And if we’re being honest, these are usually pretty boring. You’ve probably got several languishing in your inbox right now: reheated summaries of blog posts that don’t exactly spark inspiration within you/

Instead, why not use the email itself to convey the message of the blog? You’ll need to condense the contents of the blog into a much shorter format that’s suitable for email inboxes. Experiment with different formats and use bullet points, visuals, and infographics to quickly convey information. At the end of the email, include a link to the original blog post where you cover the content in more detail. 

Start Repurposing Your Content Today

Finding a sustainable way to scale your content production is one of the keys to success for smaller marketing teams. Repurposing content across multiple different platforms is one of the most achievable ways for teams to do that, with or without professional writing help. 

Of course, this process is much easier if you’re working with a team of professional writers who have the experience and skills to produce meaningful content that lends itself to this kind of reproduction. Need help with that? Get in touch with us at Hire a Writer – we’d love to learn more about how we can help!