5 Best Practices for Repurposing Content

As most content creators very well know, creating fresh content all the time requires a lot of work. Repurposing content comes handy when you are not in the mood to create fresh content. Repurposed content serves about the same purpose as fresh content if well handled in line with best practices. These here five best practices are highly recommended. 
  
1. Start with High Performing Content

Experience shows that only a small fraction of published content tends to drive most of the traffic. Meaning, these relatively small set of high-performing pieces of content tend to do most of the work. So, if you notice a blog post that is generating strong traffic, engagement, and product clicks, and it’s closely aligned with your target market and keywords, such post is a strong candidate for repurposing, as it’s already proven to connect with your audience.

However, when refreshing the post, you must keep the URL, title tag, and H1 the same, as these are already indexed and ranking. Just update only the content, not the structure. Update stats and dates, add new examples, and cut what’s no longer relevant. The goal is content freshness, not a full rewrite. That saves time but still delivers good results.

2. Adapt Content for Different Platforms

Different platforms have different formats, expectations, and audiences, so, tailoring your content ensures it works more effectively in all the platforms. B2B-oriented content for instance tends to perform better on LinkedIn, where a high volume of B2B social leads originate. Meanwhile, Instagram or TikTok may reach a more consumer-focused audience, particularly among younger consumers. Social media platforms are not only hugely popular, they tend to attract different demographics. Smart marketers target these demographics with their content. In addition, each social media platform requires a different approach to formatting. For example, Instagram is geared for visual-first social media content, while LinkedIn is oriented toward professional written content, and TikTok is suited to short, engaging video content. Your content performs best if you take these peculiarities into consideration when repurposing content for each platform.

3. Use AI to Scale Repurposing

You can effectively use AI smart tools to streamline your content repurposing workflow. You can for example select a blog post and ask AI to generate multiple social media captions, email drafts, or even infographic ideas. It is possible to take the captions from your video, feed them into ChatGPT, and then have it write excellent newsletters for you. With AI smart tools now readily available online, there’s no reasonable excuse for you not to be able to turn one piece of content into several other posts on different platforms and in record time too.

4. Align Content with your Marketing Goals

You can repurpose your content into your marketing strategy for best results. If you rank your marketing goals, you can then decide which content to repurpose first. If for instance, your goal is to drive organic traffic, you can repurpose video or social content into SEO-focused blog posts. If however your goal is brand awareness, you can turn blog posts or long-form content into short-form social media posts. This puts your content in front of new audiences through social feed discovery. Additionally, if your goal is conversions, you can repurpose educational content into product-focused pages or email campaigns that guide users toward purchase. Significantly however, most online businesses strive for all of these goals at the same time. But, you must avoid doing everything at once. It is best to choose which content will move the needle the most now then work through that first.

5. Diligently Track Performance

Diligent tracking is of utmost importance in content marketing. You can use tools like Google Analytics or YouTube Analytics, or Instagram, TikTok, and Meta Business’s native analytics tools to measure content performance. You can therefore effectively track clicks, views, saves, and follows and/or subscriptions. These tools can also track engagement, traffic, and conversion rates, thus helping you refine your repurposing strategy over time. With diligent tracking you’ll know which content is performing and which isn’t. 

If for instance a blog article was performing and now isn’t, it’s a clear signal to refresh it, then repurpose and reshare it. Whether you choose to update high- or low-performing content first depends on your content marketing goals. If you’re trying to reach new audiences fast, opt to repurpose high-performing content first. If however your goal is steady organic growth, opt to refresh low performers first.
 
With analytics, you can easily find out what’s really working once you’ve repurposed your content. You can compare the engagement rate of a repurposed clip against the original to see which format your audience prefers, then double down on the higher performer. If you find that a repurposed short clip performs better than the original long video, it’s a sign that your audience prefers short-form content. You could then repurpose longer videos into shorter clips on purpose. 

Some Practical Ways to Repurpose Your Content

If you’ve ever been involved in content creation, you’ll no doubt be aware that blog posts, video content, and social media posts take time and effort to create. To get the most value out of your content creation efforts, it means posting your content more than once on one platform. Sometimes, even in multiple platforms. If any of your content is doing very well, you can repost and reshare such content for maximum effect. That is where content repurposing and resharing strategy becomes hugely important.
 
A content repurposing strategy helps content creators to get more value from what they’ve already created in the past. Instead of constantly trying to create content from scratch, you can adapt your high-performing content into different formats and distribute it across multiple channels. That is practical content repurposing. Content repurposing is the practice of adapting existing content into different formats for use on multiple platforms. The idea behind this strategy is to increase the value you get from a single content asset.
 
Technically, repurposing aims to reach audiences regardless of how and where they consume content, whether it’s watching short-form video clips on TikTok or Facebook stories, reading blogs they discovered via Google or ChatGPT, or watching video podcasts on YouTube. If you adapt a single piece of content for these different channels, you can reach audiences who may otherwise never see the original piece.

Here are practical ways to repurpose content if you want to continue to get more value from your past work. 

Turn Video Content into Written Content

Video is a highly versatile format for content repurposing. You can adapt it into written content using transcription tools like Descript. If you so decide, you can transform a YouTube video or webinar into blog articles, email campaigns, or written content for your website. Technically, turning video content into blog posts can have an additional advantage. It gives search engines text to crawl and rank, opening up traffic from queries your video alone couldn’t capture. That simply means more organic traffic.

Refresh and Update Old Content

Technically, not all repurposing involves new formats. Sometimes, it’s about improving what you already have by refreshing it. If you refresh a blog post, for instance, it builds on existing equity, such as backlinks and search history, rather than starting from scratch. Google has various “query deserves freshness” signals that surface fresher content for queries where recency matters (such as seasonal content). However, for evergreen topics, refreshing blog content once a year is still a good idea to signal recency to search engines and keep content accurate and up to date.

You can therefore, update outdated content with new products, updated recommendations, or new insights or industry trends to keep content fresh and relevant. You can also update the year in the meta title and reshare the updated blog article with your audience via email or social media.

Break Long-Form Video Content Into Short Clips

Long-form content, such as podcast episodes or videos, can be broken into smaller pieces like Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. You can film all of your podcasts so that you can put them up as Reels, or on TikTok. You can also take some of the conversations and repurpose them into blog content.

Turn Blog Posts into Social Media Content

You can easily turn a single blog post to become several social media posts for Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, or TikTok. You can for instance pull key insights into LinkedIn posts. You can also share a single infographic from a longer white paper and link back to the white paper for those who’d like to learn more. You can summarize a report in the form of an Instagram carousel to produce reports like annual impact report for instance. 

Additionally, you can create quote graphics or static images. You do this by taking some of the most memorable quotes from an interview for instance published on your blog and turn them into graphic Instagram or LinkedIn posts. 

You can also turn tips into short-form content. You can take tips from a longer guide on your website’s blog and turn it into a single short video then share it across two different media.