Content Repurposing – How to Scale Your Content Strategy

If you’re an inbound marketer, you understand the struggle of consistently producing high-quality content that engages your audience and drives leads. A successful inbound strategy requires lots of high-quality content, but creating it at scale is a tall order. Especially when we, as marketers, are already stretched so thin.

Imagine a scenario where you could double, triple, or even 5x the amount of quality content you create without significantly increasing your workload. A game-changing solution lies in the art of content repurposing.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the concept of content repurposing and show you how it can revolutionize your content creation process.

Here's what's covered in this article - just click to jump to the section you're most interested in:

• Why Reprupose Content?
• Case Study: How Content Repurposing Works
• Results from Content Repurposing
• Putting Content Repurposing Into Action

Work Smarter, Not Harder

At my former company, a technology association, it was becoming harder and harder to keep up with the demand for new content to engage our audience and generate new leads. We knew we needed more quality content to help fill our pipeline, but as a content team of one, I was suffering from bandwidth issues. 

After carefully examining our process for creating different types of content, I noticed they all shared a few things in common.

First, a topic needed to be chosen. Then came lots of research on that topic. Maybe we would survey our audience, or dig up some stats, or find some unique points-of-view.

After the research, we’d choose the creative approach we wanted to take and sketch an outline. Maybe we would even start looking for images to use within the content.

Between 60% and 80% of the time and effort we were investing in creating content came before we even started writing or designing the piece. That was my “A-ha!” moment.

If we were to create multiple pieces of content from that same initial 60-80% of effort, we could double the amount of content we’re creating without any extra effort. This is what is meant by “repurposing your content.” Once we got going, I was shocked at how far we could push it.

How I Turned a Single eBook Into 5 Pieces of Content 

eBooks were one of the meatier types of content we created. We started here because we figured it was easier to scale a piece of content down than it is to scale it up.

We needed a topic. At the time, the new features of Microsoft’s SharePoint were hot news for our association’s industry and, therefore a perfect focus for content. We knew SharePoint was a narrow topic that our audience had an interest in.

We sent out a survey and polled our audience on their usage of SharePoint to get some benchmarking data. We analyzed the results and wrote a research paper on our findings and recommendations – our starting eBook.

To download the eBook, you had to fill out a form on a landing page. On the thank you page, we had a CTA for the thing we wanted our leads to buy – a training course on how to use SharePoint.

Now let’s see how we repurposed this thing!

Content Asset #1 – A Blog Post or Blog Series

We created a blog post focusing on one of the key findings from the SharePoint research from the eBook. Because a lot of the verbiage was created for the eBook already, this didn’t take too much time to create. At the bottom of the blog post, there was a CTA encouraging readers to check out the eBook for a more in-depth look at the topic.

If your eBook is packed with great content, consider creating multiple blog articles derived from the eBook.

Content Asset #2 – An Infographic

There were a lot of interesting stats in the eBook. We pulled several out and sent them to our designer to incorporate into an infographic. The infographic was posted to the blog, again with a CTA for the white paper.

Content Asset #3 – Social Media Graphics

Each section of the infographic was cropped and turned into a social media graphic to promote the whole infographic on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to drive traffic to the blog.

Content Asset #4 – A Webinar

We took all the stats and recommendations from the eBook, turned them into a presentation, and hosted a webinar. At the end of the webinar, there was a slide advertising the same training course we promoted on the eBook thank you page.

Content Asset #5 – A YouTube Video

The replay of the webinar was uploaded to YouTube and a link to the eBook was added to the description of the video.

Results from Content Repurposing

By aggressively finding new ways to repurpose the content in the eBook, we were able to create top-of-the-funnel content (blog, infographic, webinar replay, and social graphics) to increase the awareness of our middle-of-the-funnel assets (ebook and webinar). This led to more new leads and customers than if we had just published the eBook alone.

What were the results? Here are the numbers for the eBook.

Not bad, but let’s see how our repurposing efforts impacted the results.

With all of the content for this campaign combined, we totaled over 2,000 engagements, 472 new contacts, and 18 new customers! The campaign yielded $17,982 in revenue. When you factor in the average customer lifetime value, we could expect close to $50,000 in revenue in the future!

Here’s how this breaks down by asset:

• Blog Post

• • • 782 Views

• Youtube Video

• • • 116 Views

• eBook

• • • 1,062 Downloads
    • 239 New Contacts
    • 6 Customers

• Webinar 

• • • 591 Attendees
    • 167 New Contacts
    • 8 Customers

• Infographic

• • • 371 Downloads
    • 66 New Contacts
    • 4 Customers

• Totals

• • 2,024 Engagements
  • 472 New Contacts
  • 18 Customers