By Chantel Hall, Marketing Content Specialist
In 2021, 67% of content teams were asked to do more without being given additional resources.1 To meet this demand, marketers can turn to repurposing content, which allows articles and blogs to gain a further reach. As the digital marketing landscape shifts more towards account-based marketing and similar strategies with a heavy focus on content customized for buyers, content marketers need to ensure they’re effectively utilizing the content they’re creating.
Repurposing content allows marketers to reuse and recycle content that has already been written and spend less of their limited time writing content from scratch about the same topics.
Here are ideas on how B2B marketers can repurpose content.
Blogging is a common form of content marketing, and regularly writing and posting content builds a backlog of pieces. Instead of letting content sit on your blog, you can repurpose that content into longer pieces of content like ebooks or guides. If you don’t know where to start, look at your analytics. Which blog posts (or ebooks) garnered the most conversions? Which pieces bring in the most qualified traffic? The data will tell you where to start.
Instead of writing a new piece of content from scratch, utilize what you’ve already written and revise it to fit in a new format. Blogs can become ebooks, one-pagers, fact sheets, infographics, or videos.
Don’t forget to refresh the repurposed content with updated statistics or best practices and include analysis the original didn’t provide.
Webinars are a great way of providing expert insight and new information to viewers, and they often require a lot of work to put together. Once the webinar is over, you can repurpose the webinar’s content, including the slide deck, presentation materials, and presentation recording to stretch its usefulness beyond just the event.
For example, you could package all of the materials from the presentation together and offer them as a guide on the topic discussed in the webinar. Webinar recordings can also be offered as a gated download or posted on social media.
You can even repurpose webinar content as new blog posts by using the copy in the slide deck as the blog’s foundation and flesh it out with additional research and insight.
If your webinar includes a Q&A section or any other feedback mechanism, that can also help you repurpose content, answer additional questions, and provide updated information to readers.
Another potential use for repurposing blog content is translating the copy into videos or infographics. Data-heavy blogs in particular lend themselves to visual mediums and you can repurpose them into attention-grabbing, easily shareable content.
Ninety-four percent of marketers say video has helped them increase understanding of product or service, and 86% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads.2 Video is a popular and effective medium for B2B marketers. Repurposing content you’ve already written into video content can help you take advantage of video’s popularity without developing scripts and content from scratch.
Infographics are easily digestible, highly shareable, and visually appealing to readers, making them another excellent content format. Almost a quarter (24%) of B2B executives say infographics are the most valuable content formats and sources for researching their B2B purchases.3 The research you’ve already done for blogs, whitepapers, and ebooks can be translated into an infographic, allowing you to develop highly visual content without additional research or analysis.
Digital marketing is constantly changing, and after a few years — or even a few months — the content you’ve published begins to fall out of date and become less relevant. But that doesn’t mean the content needs to be removed or ignored. Refreshing old content includes updating old statistics, re-writing low-performing blogs, and providing new information about technology and advances happening in your industry.
Refreshing older content can also help boost your SEO efforts, since re-publishing content prompts search engines to crawl the content again.
Thirty-one percent of B2B marketers say email newsletters are the best way to nurture leads, and can be a great way to reuse and repurpose content to create opportunities for engagement.4 When nurturing leads, you likely have some idea of what topics they’re interested in and can build out newsletters around specific topics to nurture leads at different stages of the funnel. You can collect related content of different formats — blogs, whitepapers, case studies — into a newsletter to prompt leads interested in a certain topic to continue engaging with your website and marketing materials.
Newsletters built from existing content are a way to join the conversation and connect with leads when there is a big event or development in your industry. Without having to develop new content, you can compile information relevant to the conversation and share it with your leads, creating an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and start a conversation.
The digital marketing landscape is rapidly changing, and it can be challenging for digital marketers to keep up. Repurposing existing content to your advantage enables you to develop and disperse content in a more agile way and keep up with the changing preferences of B2B buyers.
Sources
1Content Marketing Institute, 12th Annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2022, 2021
2Wyzowl, Video Marketing Statistics 2022 (https://www.wyzowl.com/video-marketing-statistics/), 2022
3Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing 2020 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: North America, 2020
4Demand Gen Report, Content Preferences Survey Report, 2021