Episode Transcript
Ashley Segura:
So I’m going to be diving into how and why to repurpose your content and the different strategies to do but first, let’s discuss why you should even repurpose content to begin with. Repurposing content is all about working smarter and not harder.
It’s really about taking something that you’ve already created. You’ve already put time resources, sometimes money and budget too, and stretching it for the absolute most you can. And it’s really powerful because it’s going to save you time. It’s going to help maximize your ROI by leveraging a single asset instead of several different assets.
You’re going to reach a bunch of new audiences who Prefer different formats. So some audiences really resonate well with video while others need just audio while they’re going on their morning walk with their dog. Others need that typical blog post structure. They want to read everything. By repurposing a piece of content, you’re going to be able to reach audiences in the format that matches them best.
And it’s going to help keep your content alive and really relevant long after the original published date. So for example, when I record a podcast like this episode, this single episode doesn’t just say a podcast. We publish the audio to podcast networks, which is probably where you’re listening right now.
And then we publish the video on YouTube. We create a bunch of different social media roles that are. Anywhere between 30 to 90 seconds long for the followers that we have who prefer really bite sized content. And then we do a blog post recap page on our website that includes the transcript, it’s gonna have optimized content on there, it has a meet the guest section, it has key takeaways, it has all of the resources mentioned.
So if we have an episode that mentions tools or links or resources that you should go back and actually check out, we’re able to hyperlink those inside of this blog post. So this blog post is Encapsulate everything that the episode was about, and then we also create a whole another blog post that really dives deeper into the topic that was discussed, and then we share this through our email newsletter, we share all the blog posts through social media, like we keep the distribution going through these multiple content formats.
So the very first step when you’re like, okay, this sounds great. I definitely want to repurpose my content. I want to save time and resources and get the most, let’s say squeeze the most juice out of the lemon of the piece of content. The very first step is to audit your content. Not all content is worth repurposing.
So start by auditing your existing content library to find what the best candidates to repurpose are. When I do this, I’m going back to the past year of data and seeing what are my high performing content pieces, what are the blog posts, the videos, the podcast episodes, which topics really drove significant engagement or traffic, and what was the content medium?
So was it a social media post that went, quote unquote, I don’t want to say it. I’m going to say it viral. What was the email newsletter that got a bunch of clicks for open rates? Identify what that piece of content was in terms of the highest performers and the best topics. The next thing I’m going to look for is what pieces of content are really evergreen.
What pieces of content can really remain relevant over time? And then what are the hidden gems? What are the older pieces on page 2 5 of SERPs that, search engine results, that could be refreshed for better performance and opportunities? Sometimes when we don’t hit page 1, it’s not necessarily that the content that we produced was bad.
It’s not necessarily that it’s hitting the mark, or it’s missing the mark. The reason could literally be as simple as it’s in the wrong content medium. You’re providing great info, but that’s not the way users want to absorb it.
So you need to change the medium or you need to change how the content is being presented. It’s not necessarily that you need to rewrite the info or get completely brand new info. So for example, we regularly audit older podcast episodes to identify which topics are hitting our personal goals the most.
And let’s say a previous episode about SEO trends, for example, had a really high amount of downloads, but really low social engagement. So we’ll take this. The transcript for something like that, we’ll research any kind of trends that are happening and create a new blog post or social media posts to really breathe new life into that episode.
Once you’ve audited your content to identify, okay, these are the pieces of content that are worth repurposing and I should repurpose. The next step is figure out how to do it. Like what ways should you repurpose it? You really want to get creative here and re imagine this piece of content for different platforms.
So how we do this with a blog post, or how we do this with a podcast, is we’ll take transcripts and turn them into detailed blog recaps, adding guest details, video embeds, optimized keywords. We’ll take the social media reels, which are short 30 to 90 second clips that highlight the most impactful moments and tag the guest profiles.
We’ll take the YouTube videos and on. So we’re taking a singular piece of content, a podcast episode. Let’s take the popular one SEO trends, for example, and we’re squeezing everything we can out of it. We’re not just publishing the episode on Spotify and Apple podcast. We’re recording live with a video, as you can see, if you’re watching on YouTube, hello.
And then we’re making multiple blog posts out of it. We’re doing several different social media posts. And when we put together reels, we’re creating anywhere between six to 10 different reels. We’ll only promote a single episode for the two weeks after that it came out. And then we’ll wait for a month or maybe two months to go by.
And then we’ll promote it again, using reels from that six to 10 library of reels that we have. So at the beginning, when you’re first creating a piece of content, That’s really the best time to repurpose it and put it into a bunch of different formats and kind of store it in your backlog of your catalog of content that you have that you can then schedule out over time.
Of course, when you first publish a new piece of content, you want as many eyes on it as possible because that’s how you can get the data to figure out if it worked or if it didn’t work. One workaround to that though, is to keep some of that content library. Unused, untapped in that you haven’t published yet or haven’t talked about in your email or social or blog or whatnot and wait until a month, six weeks later, this timeline is going to look very different for every brand based on where they’re sharing it, what their engagement levels are like and whatnot.
But the point is to save some of that content and recirculate it. This way it gets the conversation going again, it gets traffic going again towards this blog post for this podcast episode, it gets social engagement going in, it gets people talking about it again, especially those who may have missed it the first time.
So the third step is measuring the success of it. So you’ve audited your content to identify which pieces of content you want to repurpose. You got really creative and figured out a bunch of different ways on how you can take that single piece of content and make it a ton of different pieces of content.
Now you need to measure, was it worth it? Did any of it stick? And so whenever you’re going to track the performance of something, You always want to make sure you have KPIs established first, like before you even begin to create a new piece of content, before you put resources towards any new content, you always want to outline what is the KPI, what is the primary goal, secondary goals, what are just some measurable KPIs that we can associate with putting resources towards publishing a new piece of content.
So some metrics that we’re going to track is engagement, especially those podcast reels that we’re putting out there. Are we getting likes shares comments, which social media networks are we getting the most engagement on that can really tell us a lot about, all right this audience on Tik TOK loves these snippets from our podcasts.
Whereas on Facebook, we get a lot more engagement when we share the blog posts or on LinkedIn, we get a lot more engagement when we just share a copy about the podcast. So Take all of that data and organize it to really tell the story of when you’re repurposing a piece of content into different mediums and you’re sharing it, you’re distributing it across different platforms, you need to identify what’s working really well.
Another metric that we look for internally is traffic, especially because we’re doing multiple blog posts per podcast episode. So which Pieces of content that we’re reusing are giving us new page views have a high time on page, have really low bounce rates. Like people are sticking to that content.
Where are they going afterwards? What does that pattern look like? And what kind of traffic are we generating from this reused content? And then of course, conversions for us, conversions are new clients, new customers, but we also measure conversions from newsletter signups. This could also look like downloads to you for those who make money from ads, traffic is going to be like your biggest conversion level.
So when you’re repurposing content and for my example with how we repurpose every single podcast episode, we have several individual KPIs for each piece of content that we’re repurposing. So like the blog posts is focused on traffic, socials focused on engagement podcasts is downloads and listens.
And so we’re collecting all of that data to really be able to tell the story of, how many views and shares did each episode and get what’s the watch time on YouTube? Are we getting inorganic traffic growth or new keyword rankings from these episodes? I do want to know a couple common mistakes when reusing content because I feel like reusing content is really exciting, but it’s also very buzzwordy.
It’s a lot of work to reuse a piece of content. Yes, you’re not having to reinvent the wheel with a brand new topic idea or brand new information, but you are packaging it differently. And so there’s a lot of ways that people mess up this process. And one of them is being over redundant, like sharing the exact same points on every single platform.
If you’re trying to see if a 60 second reel on TikTok is better than a 60 second reel on LinkedIn, that’s one test, but then don’t go throw in a 90 second reel on Facebook into that test and be able to be like, Oh, okay. One of these are going to be the winners. You need to be able to measure the success by really identifying what each reusable piece of content’s goal is and without saying the same exact thing across all platforms, across every single piece of content that you create.
That’s why for this example with a podcast, what works really well for us is that we create two blog posts. Yes. But one is the episode recap. It has all of the source info for that episode. And the second is diving deeper into that topic. It’s more how to, it’s more informational. It’s going to be two completely different types of information, even though they’re both blog posts.
Another mistake is not tailoring to a platform. So Reels should feel really native to social media. Blog posts require a lot more in depth value, a lot more information, like you can literally publish a reel and your copy could just be the hands up shrug emoji and that could be sufficient and do so great.
But if you publish a blog post and you’ve got 200 words and then the shrug emoji, It’s probably not going to do so hot, so make sure that the different types of content that you’re planning to reuse are created in a way that makes sense for that platform, and it’s going to really meet what the user wants in that platform.
If you don’t know what your user wants in your platform, the much bigger conversation where you need to do a lot of persona research, a lot of just testing and posting and creating to see what sticks, what doesn’t stick until you start to gain momentum and get data. It can be a shot in the dark as you’re publishing content, but do it anyway, you have to start somewhere and you have to be able to identify what your audience really likes.
Another mistake is ignoring SEO opportunities. So for these blog posts that we’re creating, like this is a great opportunity to rank for keywords, whether new or old keywords. This is also a great way to take advantage of Incorporating sales enablement content into these blog posts. So if we’re talking about how to do link building that’s a service that ContentYum offers.
So we can actually incorporate in the blog post how we do link building and actually like from an authoritative mindset of here’s what we do. As a quote unquote expert in the industry, this is our process. So don’t be afraid to add a little bit more to this content that you’re repurposing. It doesn’t need to tell the same exact message.
And this is where you’re also going to get a lot of great SEO opportunities. So to conclude when repurposing content, it’s. Really a great way to maximize your efforts to reach new audiences and extend the life of your work. There are so many benefits to repurposing and I personally have a 60 40 rule when it comes to content marketing.
60 percent of time and resources should be focused on updating and optimizing your existing content. And 40 percent of time and Should be focused on creating new content. So within that 60%, this is the great opportunity that you have to reuse some of your top performing pieces or refresh some of those ones that, got really close to page one, but just isn’t there yet or did okay on social media, but maybe instead of it being an image, it should be a video, like literally repurposing the content medium To better understand what’s going to work for your users and help you reach your KPIs.
Think of your content as an investment because it is. If you’re not spending money on your content creation, you’re spending time, like so much time and resources. So your content is an investment and it’s a big part of your marketing journey. So by repurposing content strategically, not just being like, okay, I’m going to repurpose everything.
That’s also a mistake. Definitely don’t do that by repurposing strategically. You can turn one piece into a multi platform powerhouse. So I want to leave you with what’s one piece of content. Just start with one that you can repurpose this week. Don’t feel like you need to dive into the content audit.
Identify like 15 great performers and go figure out how to repurpose all of them. Just start with one, see what worked, see what didn’t, and go from there. That’s all for me on this episode. Thank you for tuning in. And I do want to mention we’re going to take a little holiday break, which I hope you are too.
So we will see you in the new year and be prepared to hear a lot of great new episodes coming your way. Bye bye.
