How to repurpose content to increase your reach - top tips and examples
Repurposing content is all about taking information that you’ve already used and emphasising it in new ways.
The aim is to improve your content’s reach in order to stay top of mind for your target audience - but without spending excess time and energy on new research and creation.
By spending far less time putting a fresh spin on old content, you can see just as much if not more web traffic or social media engagement.
Why repurpose content?
With every piece of content you repurpose, you should ask yourself what your goal is when changing it up. Your aims might impact how you change it (more on this further below).
For now, here’s a few reasons you might switch things up:
Emphasise good content
Perhaps you’ve spent a long time creating something - an article, a blog, a video - and it’s seen really great engagement. Or maybe you have a message that’s important and is worth reiterating to your audiences.
Either way, you have something that you don’t want to go to waste. You shouldn’t post it once and ignore it but, you also can’t post the same thing repeatedly - your audience will get pretty bored.
This is a great reason to repurpose your content - to hammer home key messages whilst keeping your audiences engaged. After all, people are unlikely to get the message if they only hear it once.
Freshen up old information
Unless you’re content is evergreen (content that isn’t relevant to a specific time period or context), it’s likely that it will become outdated after a while.
For example, if you wrote a blog on HR technology a year ago, it’s likely that the information won’t be relevant even a few months later so won’t be useful to your audiences and won’t leverage any engagement for your site.
However, this doesn’t mean your content isn’t good. It might just need a refresher with updated information.
Reach a new audience
Some content is great for one group but may not be quite right for another. If you want to reach new people, you need to alter things up. By giving some content a new lease of life and focusing on the new audience’s needs, you can draw in different people.
Present information on a different platform
Not all content works on every platform. You may have data from a webinar that you want to post on social media in bite size text or images - but even individual social channels require you to present your information differently. A post on Instagram, for example, needs a different layout and tone than LinkedIn.
Repurposing content is great for making sure your information is suitable across platforms.
Ways to repurpose content
Once you know why you’re repurposing content, this will help you decide how you’re going to repurpose it. You may consider...
Using the same information but changing the angle
Using the same information but changing the format
Combining both these methods - using a new angle and a new format
Same info - new angle
Sometimes, repurposing a piece of content can be as simple as switching up the angle of something. Say you have high engagement on your blog, and you’re targeting the same audience as before, you don’t necessarily need to switch up the format. However, you still need to refresh messages to continue promoting them successfully.
For example, you may take an old blog and give it a new hook. So say you have a blog post about some research you’ve conducted, you can use this in several ways...
Knight vs Dragon
You could repurpose it into a ‘knight vs dragon’ piece. In this style, the writer presents a common problem that the reader empathises with (the dragon), before the writer presents a solution to it (the knight). (We’ve got a whole blog post on why these problem-solving stories are so great for audience engagement so check it out for more information).
How-to
Alternatively, you could turn it into a ‘how-to’ blog post. This style helps people learn new skills and usually offers a step by step guide on how to complete a specific task.
Examples
Repurposing content in this way means you could take an original, research focused blog post:
The 5 ways furloughing has increased employee anxiety
And turn it into…
A knight vs dragon piece:
Why employers should adjust staff communications to reduce furloughing anxiety
And then...
A how-to piece:
How to talk to staff: 3 ways to help employees cope with furlough anxiety
When doing this, you may need to add in a few new insights, but largely you can take information from the first research blog and adjust it slightly - adding a few extra tips and further explanations.
Same info - new format
If you want to target a new audience or platform or just present information in a new eye-catching way, you may consider repurposing it by switching up the format.
With most forms of content, you can repurpose them into pretty much any format you like. Here’s six formats that are straightforward to convert…
1. Blog → Journalist pitch/news release
Information from a blog is very easy to turn into something that journalists want to hear about. If you have new research, expert insights or interesting company news, the HR media may be interested.
Take a look at our blog on how to get media coverage if you want to know how to approach journalists with your news. From here, all it takes is converting your original blog using these tips.
2. White paper → blog post
Taking long form content such as a white paper and turning it into a blog is an easy way to repurpose something. Pull out the key findings from the white paper and add a hook to start.
Depending on how detailed the research is, you may be able to make several blog posts from one white paper. This is a fantastic way of making long form content more easily digestible to increase audience engagement.
Of course, you can then take your white paper or new blog post and create a pitch for a journalist to get some news coverage as well.
3. White paper/blog → infographic
Infographics can make for some attention grabbing and very shareable content. This is why it’s great to take longer pieces and convert them into easily consumable chunks.
For great infographics...
Keep the text to minimum
Make it mostly visual - use graphs, icons, images
Stick to a colour scheme so it’s easy to look at
Don’t overcrowd them (they’re meant to be simple and eye catching)
4. White paper/blog → social media post
To keep up social media engagement, you want to post fairly regularly. But it’s not always easy to know exactly what to post.
However, taking key statistics, data, quotes or tips from white papers and blogs is a really simple way to stay active online and reuse content.
5. Blog → Video
Videos are great ways of leveraging audience engagement online (nearly a third of time spent online is used watching videos).
So, if you want more people to see your content, converting your blogs to videos is a good way to go.
Videos on Youtube can be longer and can explain concepts in more detail. However, videos on other social channels should be shorter, ideally under a minute. For this, you want to take the key bits from your blog and present them precisely in a video format.
You could film a spokesperson from your company, conduct a short interview or use animations to get across your key points.
6. Case study → award entry / award entry → case study
Successful work you’ve done with customers can make incredibly educational reading for other employers, helping them understand how to solve specific business issues and promoting your expertise.
In turn, if these best practice examples involve great innovation and incredible results, they can be entered into industry award programmes - perhaps HR Excellence, Employee Benefits Awards, Personnel Today or the CIPD People Management Awards. In turn, these can be repurposed into media angles.
Of course, these are just a few simple ways to repurpose your content and it can be done using so many other formats (webinars, podcasts, downloadable guides, ebooks etc.)
If you need further help making your content visible online then get in touch. Or, get your free PR audit with us and we’ll let you know just how visible you are in the HR market right now.