My friend has an old band t-shirt from a show he went to twenty years ago. It’s threadbare, faded, full of holes, has a few stains that won’t come out, and a couple sizes too small…but he can’t bring himself to get rid of it. It’s still meaningful to him, still important. He can’t wear it and can’t toss it, so he repurposed it: cut out the graphic on the front, pinned it to the back of a hoodie. If you don’t want to toss away something important to you, you can always repurpose it and give it new life.

What Is Content Repurposing?

Repurposing your marketing content works much the same way. Blog posts, social media posts, and articles in online publications tend to have short shelf lives. Blog posts tend to get half of their lifetime value within the first week of posting, thereafter slowly slipping into obscurity. The lifecycle of a social media post is even shorter, from days to mere hours. If you put thought and effort into your content marketing, surely you want a better life for your helpful, expert content than to just be seen by a few people and then fade away.

Whether you’re just getting started with content marketing or you’ve got hundreds of posts spanning years on your blog or social media accounts, content repurposing should be part of your content marketing strategy.

How to Repurpose Content

Content repurposing is more than just reposting an old blog. Your content strategy will contain evergreen and timely content; that is, content that’s always going to be useful to your customers and content that is relevant when it is posted but might not be days or weeks later due to changing circumstances. Even evergreen content can use occasional freshening up, either because some of the details of a post have changed or the topic is suddenly relevant.

Find a New Angle. Maybe you framed a post in a way that isn’t so relevant anymore, such as a blog referencing world events that are no longer current or a post positioned for customer concerns that don’t exist anymore. The content of the blog or post is still relevant, but the angle you took on it isn’t. In that case, repurposing the content is about finding a new angle.

It works the other way, too. Sometimes, something happens in the world or in your market to make one of your old blogs suddenly relevant again. No one is going to find your five-year-old blog post on it, so take that old blog, give it a new angle relevant to why people are interested in the topic again, and link back to your old article in the new one.

Update Outdated Content. An old blog might refer to products you no longer carry or regions you no longer serve. If you don’t simply want to retire the pages, these can be rewritten to reflect the current state of your business. In some cases, an explanation of why you no longer serve a particular region might be warranted, as in the case of businesses suspending shipping to the United States due to the end of the de minimis exemption that allowed packages valued at under $800 to enter the country without paying import duties.

Expand a Previous Post. Not every subject can be tackled comprehensively in a single blog post. Maybe there was a particular point in an old post just mentioned in passing that now deserves a more expansive look. Linking back to the old post, you can write a new post expanding on the underdeveloped section. This kind of repurposing also boosts your SEO by creating more backlinks between pages.

Refresh Underperforming Content. Sometimes, you’ll have a post that you know is relevant and timely, but it’s just not bringing in traffic like it should. Compare it to your high-performing content to determine what’s missing. Maybe it’s not addressing customer concerns clearly enough, you haven’t stated the purpose of the blog clearly enough, or it is missing links and images.

Repurposing Different Kinds of Content

The advice above assumes you’re turning an old blog or social media post into a new one, but you’ve likely got all kinds of marketing content going out to customers in different media: written blog and social media posts, videos and webinars, and perhaps even audio in the form of podcasts. The audience for blogs is not the same as the audience for webinars, and the audience for YouTube videos is not the same as the audience for podcasts. To make sure your content reaches as wide a range of people as possible, repurpose content from one medium to another.

Video, Webinar, or Podcast to Blog Post. Videos, webinars, and podcasts tend to be expansive, discursive formats. They move at the pace and rhythm of conversation, taking digressions from the main point, using more colloquial language, and feeling overall more conversational. Just posting a transcript isn’t the most effective way to get these types of content into the medium of writing.

Instead, use a blog post to focus in on just one topic or argument presented in the longer video or audio format. Writing is an opportunity to be more intentional with your phrasing and word choice than is possible in speech. It’s also difficult to say everything you want to say about a topic and say it in an organized way, so repurposing spoken content as a blog post is a chance to expand on one particular point at length or to clarify something you might not have expressed in the most elegant way.

Any Other Media to Social Media. Social media is most effective when it is timely and engaging, providing a unique perspective on a topic everybody is talking about. You might come across people online talking about a problem that your business can solve, and you might think, “We wrote a blog on that!” That’s an opportunity to find the most relevant lines, relate them to the timely topic, and put it out on social media.  

Blog Post to Email Newsletter. For some businesses, a newsletter is more effective than a website for keeping customers informed and keeping your business on their minds. Rewrite and repackage your old blog posts as an email newsletter covering a group of related or timely topics every month.

Give Your Content A Second Life

There’s more to repurposing content than just dropping a blog post into an email or transcribing a video. Different formats have different audience expectations and different ways of presenting and organizing information. It still takes a little effort, but it’s worth it to give a second life to your most effective marketing content.