If there were ten commandments of marketing, I'm fairly sure that somewhere in the top five would be "Thou shalt not reinvent the wheel."Of course, we all want to be creative and constantly come up with completely fresh, new ideas all the time - but that's not always possible. Sometimes, whether from lack of time or lack of budget, it makes sense to take an old idea, shake it up and let it fly again.Nowhere is this truer than in the world of content marketing. Repurposing content makes sense because it saves time and money - but also because good content deserves to live forever. If content worked for you and your audiences liked it, then you owe it to yourself to help get that content in front of even more eyes by taking a slightly different approach and putting it out there again.Here are some specific examples of how this can work.
- Start with an article or blog post. For our client DVO, Inc., the leading designer of anaerobic digester systems, we drafted an article about myths and facts in anaerobic digestion. The article made it into the DVO newsletter - but the client liked it so much, we didn't stop there.Next, we pitched the story to one of the top renewable energy trade publications on our media list and voila - the editor was thrilled to run it as a contributed or bylined article. In fact, our contact was so pleased to get a well-written, fairly-balanced article that she is also planning to run a couple of client case studies alongside it. Now we have a great feature coming out this spring that will showcase our client positively, and we've also established ourselves as a solid content resource with the editor. Everyone is happy and it's a win for all.
- Start with social content. As part of our own firm marketing efforts last year (and because we love Columbus), we created a campaign called #ABCbus to showcase hot spots and hidden gems throughout central Ohio. We had a ball finding new and favorite places to visit each week as we worked our way through the alphabet from A to Z. We posted images and a short blurb about each spot we visited - and by the end, we knew we had to do something more with all that content.So, we brainstormed as a team and created #ABCbus blog posts and a video from the original social posts we had shared all year. We also created an #ABCbus Storify page to tell the entire story and capture and share all related social posts in one place. Our #ABCbus campaign was so much fun that we're doing it again this year with our #FHroadtrip across Ohio.
- Start with an infographic. For several clients, we have developed infographics and then chunked them out into bite-size pieces that can be used in social publishing. Quotes or stats from infographics can be laid over top of photos for effective Facebook or Twitter posts. Infographics can also be brought to life and turned into videos very successfully.
The list goes on. There are so many ways to repurpose old, but great content for blog posts, podcasts, webinars, infographics, newsletters and so much more. Spending less time on content creation and more time on content promotion makes good business and common sense.So, what steps will you take to find your best older content and give it a fresh, new life? We'd love to hear in the comments below or over on Facebook.