Every marketer dreams of maximizing their content’s reach without spending time and resources creating new material. Content repurposing makes this a reality!
Instead of letting valuable content fade into obscurity, repurposing breathes new life into it by turning it into a new format. A comprehensive blog post can be turned into an infographic, an X thread, or a YouTube script—allowing you to reach new audiences with minimal effort.
But how exactly does it work? This article will explore what repurposing content is, its key benefits, and strategies to make the most of your existing content.
What is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing, also known as content recycling, is the practice of taking an existing piece of content and adapting it for a different platform. But it’s not just about reposting—it’s about reformatting the content to suit the audience and style of the new platform.
Instead of spending time and effort creating a piece of content from scratch, marketers rework their best-performing posts into new mediums. These include social media posts, infographics, podcasts, or email newsletters.
For example, a 2000-word blog post can be repurposed into a shorter, to-the-point LinkedIn article or an Instagram reel. Similarly, a webinar can be turned into multiple YouTube Shorts or podcast episodes. This way, repurposing helps brands reach new audiences of varying channels and get more value from their existing content efforts.
Repurposing Blogs vs. Reposting Content: What’s the Difference?
When it comes to the concept of repurposing marketing content, another term that frequently comes up is reposting or republishing content. Reusing content without modifying its elements or format is called content reposting.
For instance, instead of converting a long-form article into a reformatted shorter post, you publish it in full on the same platform. The goal is to resurface older content for the newer audience and maintain its visibility. On the other hand, repurposing adds a new life to the content by presenting it in a new way that best resonates with the audience.
The Key Benefits of Repurposing Content
Whether you want to repurpose written or visual forms of content, the key benefit is the ease of scalability. Instead of investing in crafting new content, you can reuse the same content for various channels. With that in mind, here are the more expanded benefits of repurposing content.
1. Reach Diverse Audiences
Regardless of your best marketing efforts, your content will only reach a portion of the current platform’s audience. That means you’re missing out on the opportunity to drive millions of potential views from other platforms.
Each platform’s audience also consumes content differently. For example, your YouTube subscribers will comfortably sit through a 30-minute-long video of you talking about any and everything. But your Instagram followers won’t be as patient.
Repurposing allows you to cut down your long video into a snappier Instagram reel. This way, you can engage the audience of this platform and drive meaningful interactions.
2. Extract the Maximum ROI
A recent survey by Referral Rock shows that 65% of marketers believe repurposing is the most cost-effective method of creating content.
How? Repurposing helps you boost the return on investment by allowing it to reach a larger target audience without investing more time and money. Repurposed content refreshed for the current user intent also lasts longer than older content.
Instead of reinvesting each time, you can take a high-performing piece and turn it into social media snippets, threads on X, or video series. This keeps your content fresh and lets you make the most of your original investment.
3. Boost Your SEO Efforts
A recent survey by Referral Rock found that up to 94% of marketers repurpose their content—and for good reason. In fact, 46% believe repurposing is more effective at driving results than creating brand-new content.
Repurposing content gives search engines more opportunities to index your work. When optimized for SEO, it can help your content rank higher in SERPs, attract more backlinks, and target additional keywords. This not only boosts your domain authority but also increases traffic to your website.
When Should You Consider Repurposing Content
Not all types of content are good candidates for repurposing. Here are some key signs to look for to make the most of reusing your older pieces of content.
- Changing Goals for the Content: Before reworking your posts, ask yourself, “Why do I need to repurpose this content?” As your brand evolves, your content goals will shift, too. For example, suppose you originally created an in-depth blog post to drive traffic to your site. Later, you decide to use the same content to generate leads for a webinar.
- High-Performance Metrics: Does Google Analytics show that your blog posts are driving the most traffic to your website? That means your content is already resonating with readers. Repurposing these articles into other formats can help you reach and engage audiences on different platforms as well.
- Joining a New Platform: If you’re new to a platform, posting frequently is key to boosting your visibility. But coming up with fresh content all the time can be challenging. A simple way to keep up the pace is by repurposing content from your older platform and sharing it on the new one.
After knowing these key signs, you just need the right marketing content repurposing strategies to guide the process.
How to Repurpose Content: 5 Best Strategies that Work
Your repurposing strategies should focus on older and newer content that can easily adapt across various channels. The type of content you select depends on your goals for repurposing.
Do you want to bring back lost traffic to your website? Focus on older content. Are you aiming to spread brand awareness across multiple channels? In this case, your focus will be recently published content.
So, how do you identify the best repurposing opportunities? Here are some key strategies that deliver.
1. Recognize the Right Content Type
Start by identifying the content most appropriate for repurposing. According to Brain Dean, the SEO expert and founder of Backlinko, “Your first step is to find content on your website that’s ripe for repurposing. In general, I recommend that content marketers focus almost 100% of their efforts on Evergreen Content. And one of the reasons for that is that evergreen content is PERFECT for repurposing.”
What makes it perfect? Evergreen content is content that remains relevant over a long period without needing frequent updates. For example, a news article about “Instagram Announces Major Algorithm Update This Week” will lose its relevance the very next week. On the other hand, a blog post about “10 content marketing strategies that always work” will remain relevant for years.
How to Identify Evergreen Content?
Here’s what to consider when searching for evergreen content:
- Look at your performance metrics: Track your content’s performance by using tools like Google Analytics, SEMRush, and Ahrefs. Look for factors like page views and social shares.
- Pay attention to engagement: Find the average engagement rate over a specific duration, such as months or years. Higher engagement shows that the content still resonates with the audience regardless of its original publication date.
- Choose the top-performing content: Select the articles that have consistently driven traffic over the years or even months if you want to focus on recently posted content.
Once you have selected the correct content type, you can scale it by recognizing the most appropriate platforms.
2. Identify the Most Suitable Platform
Whether you’re repurposing newer or older pieces of content, focus on platforms you’re already active on or those you want to target for brand awareness. However, instead of focusing on too many channels at once, it’s best to narrow your focus to two or three channels at max.
The key here is to be consistent and relevant instead of grappling to produce multiple formats of content that may fail to resonate. When considering which platform to choose, ask yourself:
- Does the new platform have the target audience of your business?
- What content type does the audience expect to see on the new platform?
- Will repurposing for this platform help you achieve your marketing goals?
- Do you have the resources to engage the audience on this platform consistently?
3. Repurposing Content Across Channels
The next content repurposing strategy is to tailor content for specific platforms or channels. This means reformatting and adapting your material to fit each platform’s unique style and audience before publishing.
Each social platform has its own content style and audience. For instance:
- Instagram focuses on engaging infographics, photos, and short-form videos.
- LinkedIn posts are more professional and focus on industry insights.
- X or Twitter produces timely, short-lived content relevant to specific hashtags.
- Facebook allows multiple formats, such as videos, images, longer posts, etc.
Depending on the platform, you can work with any format of content, such as infographics, videos, eBooks, podcasts, or slideshows. According to Referral Rock, 69% of marketers turn content into infographics, while 65% repurpose it into videos or social media posts—making these the most popular formats.
One of the best content repurposing examples is Neil Patel’s NP Digital turning his blog post on increasing email click-through rates into a shorter and informative LinkedIn post. The post effectively conveys the key idea of the existing content while respecting the new platform’s content needs.
4. Refurbish or Repurpose Old Blog Posts
Repurposing is not just about distributing content across multiple channels. You can refresh and repurpose blog content that is older and outdated while utilizing the same medium on the same platform.
Here’s what to think of when refreshing old content.
- What is the current ranking of the content?
- Is the content ranking significantly lower in SERP than it initially did?
- Is the information and statistics in the content relevant and accurate?
- Are your competitors targeting the same keywords with more in-depth articles?
- Are there pieces of content on your website covering the same search intent?
- Can you consolidate similar articles into a more comprehensive post?
Once you know if an article is outdated, you can revive it with a new perspective, facts and figures, images, and information relevant to the user’s current search intent.
5. Repurposing Content for Social Media
According to Backlinko, 5.24 billion people actively use social media around the world, and the number is growing by 4.1% each year. Given their massive user base, social media platforms are a powerful way to drive traffic to your business.
One of their biggest advantages is that you can repurpose almost any form of content for these sites, such as blog posts, images, videos, and audio.
For example, you can turn a blog post into a visually appealing and informative carousel to boost engagement. Similarly, audio and video content like webinars and customer testimonials can be reworked into short social media clips.
Final Thoughts
Content repurposing is all about recycling content, whether it’s older pieces or your latest work. You can not only save your time and resources on creating new content from scratch but also generate the most ROI out of the existing content.
While high-performing content should be the focus of scaling your marketing efforts, don’t overlook underperforming pieces—especially older articles that are losing traffic. With a refresh, they might regain traction. Just be sure to tailor your updates to fit your target platform’s style and audience needs so your content truly resonates.
