What is Repurposed Content?
According to HubSpot, repurposing content means that “you’re doing one of two things (or both): changing the format of the content, and/or changing the target audience for the content”.
You only want to repurpose your top-performing pieces of content. This ensures that your repurposed content will bring in an audience based on the popularity of the original topic. When deciding on which content to repurpose, you should consider whether it can be transformed with other formats.
Why Repurpose Your Content?
For your content marketing team, generating content ideas is a time-consuming process that is essential to creating engaging content for your company. The goal of generating content ideas is to create a predictable flow of usable topics for outgoing pieces of content. The key to attracting visitors is to consistently publish this content.
However, generating quality content ideas is a time-consuming process. If your marketing team repurposes popular pieces of content, it will actually increase their productivity overall because they don’t have to constantly come up with brand new ideas. Repurposing content helps your team produce more content in less time.
Repurposing content that is already popular will also give you another chance to rank on search engines. Your repurposed content will come in a different format than the original. Repurposed content helps you attract and convert potential customers that fall under different buyer personas.
How to Effectively Repurpose Your Content
How you repurpose your content will vary based on why you’re repurposing the content in the first place. There are a couple different reasons why you would repurpose your content: 1) you want your content to reach people in different stages of the buyer’s journey, and 2) you want your content to reach people who match different buyer personas.
1. Repurposing content to reach your target audience in different stages of the buyer’s journey
The buyer’s journey happens in three different stages: the Awareness, Consideration, and Decision stages. The content your company produces should target buyers that are in all three of these stages.
Repurposing content for different stages of the buyer’s journey requires you to consider what the potential buyer would want to gain from you company’s content in each stage. Content for buyers in the awareness stage is usually more introductory, while content for the decision stage is meant to drive the buyer to make a decision about a product or service.
If your potential buyer is in the awareness stage it means that they have just identified that they have a problem. Your content should help them learn more about a solution to their problem. Repurposed content can come in the form of a helpful infographic or a blog post.
If your buyer is in the consideration stage it means that they have defined a goal and are considering your company’s product or service, among others, to help them achieve that goal. Your content should be help nurture those buyers into the decision stage by showing them how your product can help them. Repurposed content can come in the form of a product webinar or a demo video.
If your buyer is in the decision stage it means that they are going to come to a decision about whether or not your company’s product or service will help them achieve their goals. You want your content to have a strong call-to-action and nudge them in the direction of purchasing your content.
Examples of Content for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
Content for buyers in the awareness stage should be lighter pieces of content that introduce them to your company. At this point in the buyer’s journey, the buyer wants to find information that would be helpful in solving their problem. Content pieces like blog posts tend to provide educational and engaging content for buyers in the awareness stage.
Blog posts, ebooks, short videos, and infographics can provide simple answers for the buyer’s problem and motivate them to learn more about your product or service. Your blog posts can be repurposed into an ebook for a longer piece of content that still provides easy access to educational content.
You could also turn your blog posts or ebooks into short how-to videos that the buyer can watch to learn more. Infographics are a great way to provide content to buyers in a more creative and engaging way. All of these types of content will help nurture your buyer into the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey.
Content for buyers in the consideration stage should provide a little more promotion for your company’s product or service than the information for buyers in the awareness stage. The buyers who are at the consideration stage are considering potentially using your product or service to help them solve their problem. You want your content to show them how your product can help.
You want your content to present the same level of education, while also showing how your company is an expert at solving problems like the one the buyer is experiencing. You want your more educational and introductory content to be repurposed into webinars, guidebooks, or demo videos.
These types of content can be used to not only educate your buyers, but push them in the direction of making a decision about your product or service. Your content should show off what the advantages are of using your product or service and how it could help you better than some of your leading competitors.
Content for buyers in the decision stage should help the buyer reach a decision about your product or service. This content tends to include a strong call-to-action that pushes them in the direction of your product. Your buyer has all the information they need, they’ve seen how your product stacks up compared to the competitors, and now they have to decide if what you’re offering is right for them.
You want your content to promote your product or service and it should provide the right offer to the buyer. Your content could provide calls-to-action for a free trial or a demo of your product. You want your content to drive your buyer to buy your product or service so you should try to provide some incentive for the buyer to make a decision.
2. Repurposed content allows you to reach your target audience in different buyer personas.
Not only is your target audience in different stages of the buyer’s journey, they also fall under different buyer personas. You want your content to be equally educational and engaging for each of your buyer personas. Instead of creating completely different pieces of content for each persona, you should just repurpose your content to fit each buyer persona.
Different personas require different content to nurture them through the different stages of the buyer’s journey. The way you present your information can affect how effectively your different personas absorb your content. Certain personas might respond better to blog posts or infographics than webinars or a podcast. So you want to alter your content to fit your buyer personas.
Examples of Repurposing Content for Different Buyer Personas
The first thing you want to do when repurposing content is look at your best performing pieces. Then ask how you can alter your top performing pieces to reach your different buyer personas.
For example, let’s say that one your top performing blog posts gave readers various tips on how to strengthen their social media marketing and online presence. Now let’s say that your Persona A is up to date on the basics of social media marketing, but is eager to go more in depth about social media marketing to increase their following. This is where you might consider altering your original blog post and expand on each tip more fully to create a social media guidebook.
Now let’s say that Persona B is in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. They’ve identified that they don’t know much about social media and aren’t really sure which platform best suits marketing for their business. This is where you could slightly alter your original social media tips blog post to include information about how to choose the best social media platform for your business.
When using repurposed content for different buyer personas, you should also keep in mind what stage of the buyer’s journey they could be at. Your content could change based on the different stages of the buyer’s journey.
Did you write a product comparison white paper for Persona A in the Decision stage? Figure out how you can break it up into a series of blog post for that persona, or another, in the Awareness stage.
Do you have a webinar recording gated on your website? Take the best quotes from it and use them to build a downloadable guide.
Repurposed content not only benefits your marketing team, but your company overall. By repurposing your top-performing pieces of content you’ll be able to expand your target audience. More specifically, repurposing content will help you engage different buyer personas and different stages of the buyer’s journey.
