For content marketers, there’s nothing worse than spending hours writing a great blog post or designing a creative infographic and hearing crickets. We’ve all been there. We get that childlike anticipation after hitting “post” and spend the remainder of our day refreshing and waiting for the likes and shares to come pouring in. 

And when that doesn’t happen, we start brainstorming new content ideas — not considering the fact that our problem isn’t the quality of our content, but the distribution of it.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, why not try repurposing your old content and distributing it to different channels? You’d be surprised to see that a piece of content that failed miserably in one channel, thrives and flourishes in another.

What are the benefits of reusing content?

You might be asking yourself, “Why should I reuse old content?” It may sound like more work for your marketing team, but in reality, it saves them the time they would be spending brainstorming and creating new content. 

When you repurpose your posts, you can yield more output with the same amount of input, while maintaining quality. Still not convinced? Here are some other benefits to reusing content:

• It lets you redeem unsuccessful content: Your unsuccessful content may have failed because of the context in which it was presented. A blog post that didn’t capture many leads might make an attractive infographic to post to social media. Or an interview that you posted to YouTube that didn’t get many views could be transcribed into a more detailed blog post. 

• It helps you reach a new audience: By repurposing your content for different channels, you can reach new audiences that might not exist on other channels. Also, new social media users are creating accounts every day, so content that you posted a year ago hasn’t been seen yet by your new followers.

• It improves your SEO: Another benefit of repurposing content is that having more content online helps to improve your SEO, or search engine optimization. Additionally, sprucing up your old blog posts also improves your Google rankings since SEO best practices are always changing. In fact, HubSpot saw a 106% increase in monthly organic search views after optimizing old posts! 

• It enhances your knowledge and sharpens your skills: Reusing content and thinking about topics in different ways helps you to reinforce the knowledge you already have in your head, add to it, and become even more well-versed in what you do. In addition, it allows you to familiarize yourself with different platforms and content formats, making you a more versatile marketer.

If you’re ready to start repurposing your old content and see your followers and conversions go way up, check out these 6 ways you can reuse and distribute one piece of content:

1. Share on multiple social media channels

Let’s start with an easy one! If your idea of good content marketing is sharing your blog posts on LinkedIn and Twitter and calling it a day — you need to rethink your strategy. By sharing your content on multiple social platforms, you have the potential to reach a whole new audience.

However, you can’t just copy and paste your content into every platform. Different platforms require different messages. For instance, you can’t share your blog post directly to Instagram because it doesn’t have that same linking capability as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. 

Instead, you can use the caption to point your audience to the link in your bio, or utilize the swipe-up feature for Instagram stories if you have over 10,000 followers. 

You can also leverage Twitter’s bite-sized messaging to create dozens of tweets about a single blog post. 

Additionally, different platforms have different features that you can use to switch up your content. You could take a topic from a blog post that you posted to your website and turn it into a LinkedIn poll to engage your audience or take quotes and statistics from a case study and summarize it for an Instagram story. The opportunities are endless!

2. Update your old posts

Another simple way to repurpose your content is by updating your old blog posts. Most marketers focus on churning out new content, but you can actually generate more results from tending to the content that you’ve already published. 

Because even though you might not be checking in on your old posts, there’s a possibility that your target audience — and Google — are visiting them regularly. And if they’re not up-to-date, they could be hurting your content marketing strategy and organic search traffic.

In fact, a recent study discovered that it takes about two years for a blog post to reach the maximum number of its impressions. So, it’s probably not a good idea to post your blog and then forget about it.

Reviewing and updating your old blog posts can also raise your SEO rankings. If you posted a blog in 2018, you should take a look at your headings, structure, links, and images to make sure that you’re meeting the ranking factors that Google is looking for. The industry best practices are ever changing, so reviewing old content, and bringing them up to modern-day standards is a great way to ensure they’re SEO-friendly.

3. Create an infographic

Did you know that half of our brain is dedicated to our visual function? Human beings are biologically wired to pay more attention to visuals. Using the most important statistics and data from your blog posts and turning them into attractive visuals — like an infographic — could be one of the most effective ways to repurpose your content. 

In fact, visual content has taken up such a huge chunk of the digital marketing space that Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images. Therefore, infographics have emerged as one of the most sought after content marketing tools to engage audiences.

4. Send your content in a newsletter

Taking your high-performing posts and sharing them over email is a great way to reach a wider audience and help you fill an email newsletter! This is especially helpful for marketers who need to reach a more mature audience. 

Older generations tend to prefer email communication to receive their content since they aren’t typically on social media. So if you’re only posting your blog posts and other important information on social media and your website, chances are, they’re not seeing it.

5. Turn written content into a video

In an age where everyone is spending hours of their day watching Instagram reels and TikToks, it’s no secret that video is a must-have for your content strategy. In 2020, 96% of consumers increased their online video consumption, and 9 out of 10 viewers said that they wanted to see more videos from brands and businesses. In fact, as of 2021,  an average person is predicted to spend 100 minutes per day watching online videos.

So, try taking a popular blog post and turning it into a fun Q&A video with a guest or another member of your marketing team. You can even repurpose your old videos by taking snippets of a certain topic and posting them to Instagram as a story, reel, or IGTV video.

6. Try out a podcast

Podcasts can be quite valuable to audiences that prefer to listen while driving or exercising. You could repurpose the audio of an old interview or tell your listeners about some of your favorite blog posts that you’ve written.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing you should take away from this blog post, it’s that content distribution shouldn’t be an afterthought. With the right content strategy in place from the beginning, your team can more effectively put your content to work for you, reach a wider audience, and drive results. And remember, Garrett Moon of CoSchedule said it best:

 “Content repurposing doesn’t just mean that you reuse an old piece of content again and again. True repurposing requires that we alter it to make it fresh and appealing to a new audience.”

If you’re ready to start repurposing content but you’re not sure where to start, our team at Agency 102 can help! We can assist you with content strategy, content creation, and implementation. Get in touch with us today to discuss your content needs.