Top 5 Benefits of Content Repurposing for Business Success
Introduction
I was delighted to be able to offer a work experience opportunity recently, for someone keen to get into content repurposing. Freya Inston did a brilliant job of repurposing an interview I did with Roger Edwards, so I asked her to write me a guest post, which you can find below. If you’d like to know more about her, you can find her here, and email her at freya@intothefrey.co.uk.
The Benefits of Content Repurposing
We all know content is king! Content marketing is one of the most effective methods of growing audience engagement, developing your brand presence, and driving sales. According to CMI (Content Marketing Institute) 72% of marketers say content marketing increases engagement. In addition, 72% say it has increased the number of leads.
Running a business requiring constant high-quality content is a resource-consuming process, so it’s important to make the most of your content, which is where repurposing content comes in.
Content repurposing has many key advantages:
- Expanding your reach
- Optimisation
- Consistency
- Review & redeem content
- It’s easy to delegate
Exploring the Advantages of Content Repurposing
1. Reach
Repurposing content allows you to take existing content and rework it so that it is suitable and engaging on other platforms to best reach an audience. For example, utilising SEO for blog posts, or adding hashtags to Instagram or Twitter posts.
You’ve got all this content in vlogs, YouTube videos, webinars or courses. You spent weeks, months, years creating this content, but you want to branch out into other areas, expand your following or build your email database through email newsletters, blogs or regular written content.
Repurposing your content allows you to transfer your content to different media to ensure you are reaching customers however they want to engage. It also allows you to engage with your existing audience or customers in additional ways to further engagement or the purchase cycle.
Having an online presence is a must for all modern businesses. Facebook has 2.4 billion monthly users, Twitter has 320million monthly users and Instagram has 1 billion monthly active users. 
But this shouldn’t distract people from conventional methods, in 2015 email still generated $38 for every $1 spent in the US (according to emailmonday.com). The more content, and more quality content, you have online the greater your presence, raising your brand awareness and also building your audience.
It’s important to turn your podcasts or YouTube videos into fresh content for Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, as well as re-purposing your existing content as part of your wider content marketing plan for use in weekly newsletters or incentives.
This leads us to the next advantage:
2. Optimisation
Making the best and most effective use of your content and coming up with and creating content is time consuming; it takes a lot of focus and energy. Using content that takes hours to produce only once is extremely inefficient. This is why in 2015, Curata did a study on content marketing tactics and found that 85% of the best in class marketers reused and repurposed content in some capacity.
A single piece of content such as a podcast or webinar can lead to multiple blogs or posts. Good reuse of this content can lead to higher downloads or views months after release. When you repurpose content, you’re putting the best content in front of the right target audience who might not otherwise be exposed to that content, and in a way that they can understand and absorb.
Content repurposing is more involved than just trimming down your existing content. It needs to cater to the audience it will be used for, and if you are taking a vlog or YouTube video as your starting point, then the style of language may want to be adjusted for a blog or newsletter.
Repurposing can also be taken further, by turning your podcast, videos or webinars into an e-book or online course. If you’re turning your content into an e-book you will need to expand upon, refresh, reorganise and build on what you’ve already covered in posts or podcasts.
Or, when considering starting a podcast you can take existing blog content and turn this into a script. You can adlib when recording, but it’s best to have a basis of a content plan to allow you to talk for 30-45 minutes without waffling, as podcasting is a competitive field – you need to start strong.
Even a simple reworking of your most popular content into a list, a “what,” “why” or “how” post or even a video can greatly increase the number of social shares and comments that you get. In this way, optimising your content can help you grow your audience as well as nurture your existing audience to ensure higher conversion rates when you come to sell.
Other Advantages of Content Repurposing
3. Consistency
Consistency is the key to marketing and growing your brand. A study by McKinsey & Company revealed that consistency is the secret to making customers happy across their entire journey with your business. You want to ensure you have a consistent message that you’re delivering to your audience. Repurposing content allows you to ensure a consistent message is delivered across multiple channels.
Your content needs to carry a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across all distribution channels to build trust and set your audience’s expectations. Give some time between posts. An immediate republish doesn’t give Google enough time to index your original article. And always ensure you link back to the original article.
4. Review or Redeem Old Content
You can tackle existing content that wasn’t as successful from a new angle or rework it for a new segment that may appeal better to your audience. Or turn your existing content into an easily-consumable guide, such as a checklist or fill-in-the-blank template. This is a great tool to expand your database, by offering your audience a free tool if they subscribe to your email list.
If you have content that created a huge amount of engagement, make sure you capitalise on this by using it further, in different guises, to ensure the maximum exposure and engagement. Or you can combine your best articles into a roundup post: the best of the best. 
If your content creates an extra-long post, consider dividing it up into smaller posts and turn it into a themed series. A series will build up anticipation for your audience and spreads the idea out over time. You can also turn your content into an infographic, taking the main points from your blog post or other content and use an infographic maker like Piktochart or Canva to create the graphic.
5. It’s Easy to Delegate
Even repurposing content takes time, which is why this is a growing business for Virtual Assistants (VAs). VAs come in many forms, and they can assist your business by providing administrative support, accounting, customer service and the big one people don’t think about: content repurposing.
Content repurposing, SEO and social media have become a big niche for virtual assistants. As the importance of social media, websites and blogs increases within all business, the need for having content on multiple channels is even more important. So why not utilise someone else’s time to grow your presence?
If you’re not ready to hire a VA yet, many websites such as WordPress have some useful plugins such as the Click-to-Tweet plugin. You can pull out quotes and customise the message that you want to have appear and the Click-to-Tweet plugin creates formatted, Twitter-ready boxes that readers can click to share.
These are just some of the great reasons why you should reuse your content. If you have any other repurposing tips, let us know in the comments below. You can listen to the original interview with Roger, download the transcript of our chat, or get my top content marketing tips here.