As a marketer, you definitely have a lot of work to do (and not enough time to get it done). You might also feel occasionally struck by writer’s block when it comes to creating fresh, unique content.
Given these challenges, you’re always searching for ways to make your job easier while continuing to produce high-quality content on a regular schedule. Fortunately, content repurposing is here to take some of the weight off your shoulders.
At first glance, content repurposing may seem like a way to cheat the system, but it’s not. You’re reworking your existing, high-quality content and presenting it in a different form on new channels. In this post, we’ll cover the basics of content repurposing, outline the benefits it can bring to your business, and discuss specific strategies to repurpose content you’ve already created. We’ll also talk about how to create new content with future repurposing in mind.
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing, sometimes called content recycling, is re-using existing content and presenting it in a new format to expand its reach and lifespan. As you create new content, you can plan for a variety of different ways to share a new piece with content repurposing.
As I mentioned above, content repurposing might feel like a cop-out if you’re unfamiliar with the strategy. You don’t want your audiences to feel like your content is repetitive, or that you don’t care about creating unique content on every channel. You also may think that content repurposing means taking something that someone else has created and reworking it to fit your brand message. Content repurposing is neither of these things. You’re not being repetitive, you’re using content you and your teams have purposely created, giving it new life, and ensuring that all segments of your audience can gain value from what you have to offer.
Why should I repurpose content?
When repurposing old content, or creating new content with repurposing in mind, you’re saving yourself time. You already have the data to point you towards high-performing pieces of content to reshape and redistribute, or you’re already in the process of creating a blog post that you know will do well as a podcast episode, quote snippet on your Instagram account, or part of an Ebook collection.
Repurposing content can also potentially give you an SEO boost. When you have multiple pieces of content centered around similar targeted keywords, search engine crawlers will generally recognize you as a source of authority. You’re not just creating content for the sake of it — you’re putting out valuable resources, in multiple different forms, that provide value to your users.
Additionally, repurposing content helps you scale, both in terms of content amount and audience reach. Simply creating a blog post gives you a presence, but creating a blog post that can be turned into an email newsletter or a how-to YouTube video gives you three different types of content in one, and a presence on three separate platforms with three separate and diverse audience groups.
Given the benefits that it can bring to your marketing efforts, let’s go over various ways to repurpose your content.
10 Effective Strategies in Repurposing Your Content
Now that we’ve covered the basics of content repurposing, why it’s important, and the importance of evergreen content, here are eight of the best ways that travel brands can repurpose their content.
1. Give Existing Content a Refresh
If you’re looking for a relatively quick way to give content a new lease on life, then it’s definitely worth identifying pieces that haven’t been performing particularly well and deciding whether they could be improved.
This approach works best with blog posts. It can also be really useful if your travel brand offers downloadable content like guides, FAQs, and previous customer experiences.
If a post initially gained quite a lot of interest but engagement has now dropped, updating it is a simple way to renew interest and ensure that everything on your brand’s blog remains valuable.
This could be as simple as updating the title, taking a new angle, or targeting a different segment of your audience to see if engagement improves.
If you have content that makes recommendations, such as the best hotels, restaurants, or tourist attractions in a location, you can regularly update this content to ensure that it is still relevant every time someone views it.
A post’s SEO can also be improved by refreshing the content if you find and add relevant keyword phrases into the text.
2. Republish Old Content
If you don’t think a quick edit, new photos, and a different title are warranted, another way to repurpose older content is simply to republish it.
This is only really effective if the piece you are republishing is quite old, as you don’t really want your audience to recognize it when you share it again.
If the topic you wrote about is no longer relevant, you think a totally different tone and approach would be more effective, or your writing skills have improved and you think you can do a better job now, sometimes the most effective tactic is to delete and try again.
In certain cases, it’s the best way to massively improve the impact of a piece that has already been written.
3. Cut, Copy, Paste and Edit Your Text Posts
One of the easiest ways to start repurposing content is to take text that you have written from a blog post, ebook or email and turn it into something else.
The written word makes up a huge proportion of marketing content produced by brands, and it’s likely that you already have a huge archive of text posts to start working with.
You should never just copy and paste content word-for-word. But with careful editing, it can be relatively quick and easy to create entirely new written content out of existing pieces.
This technique is particularly useful if you’ve spent a lot of time writing up a long-form guide to a destination, holiday type, or travel experience.
Although quite a lot of time will be needed to produce this initial piece of content, you can then:
- Create multiple short blog posts from it.
- Use this text for social media posts and image captions.
- And use quotes or snippets in emails and other customer communication.
4. Combine Blog Posts to Create Ebooks
Ebooks and other long-form pieces of content are often the most time-consuming to create, and yet they’re also often the most valuable.
Whether you’re using them as a lead magnet, showcasing your expert knowledge of a certain location or type of holiday, or want to offer incentives for potential customers, it’s a key format that is used in numerous marketing strategies.
If you run a blog for your travel business, you likely have sets of blog posts that all focus on similar themes.
A great way to create a new piece of longer-form content is to identify which posts work together thematically and then create “ultimate” guides from these that can be shared in ebook form.
5. Make an Email Newsletter From Blog Content
Email marketing is a particularly effective strategy for engaging your audience and moving potential customers down the buyer funnel . However, it can sometimes be tricky to decide what you’re actually going to share in these messages.
A great content repurposing technique is to use existing blog posts as inspiration, condensing the subject of these down into a couple of paragraphs and then including a link to the full article to generate more traffic to these pages.
This is a particularly effective strategy if you’re publishing several pieces of content a week on your travel company’s blog. It enables you to create a newsletter that rounds up all this content every week and ensures that your audience isn’t missing out.
It can also be a vehicle for sharing any other news, offers, or content from your brand.
6. Condense Topics Into Social Media Posts
If you’re struggling to think of what to post on your travel brand’s social media accounts, consider recycling ideas from your blog posts .
Maybe there’s a particular piece of advice that you want to share with a wider audience, or you’ve offered unique insight into a destination that you know your followers will find valuable.
You can either take direct quotes from your blog posts and turn them into Instagram graphics or edit down paragraphs to a condensed form that can be shared as a Twitter thread or Facebook post.
Bonus: Include a link back to the original post to encourage more engagement and get your audience reading as much of your content as possible.
7. Create Video Scripts From Written Content
Video is one of the most effective forms of content in maximizing audience engagement, and this is particularly true of the travel industry.
There’s no better way to inspire wanderlust and show potential customers what they could experience by traveling with your company than through video. It’s also a brilliant tactic for adding a personal touch to content that will build brand affinity and have a more emotional impact on the viewer.
Trying to come up with an idea for a video from scratch can be really difficult, but if you use an existing blog post as a script then all you need to do is sit down and press record!
This can be a great way of explaining a topic, showcasing a customer testimony, or just condensing a post into a short video that can then be shared on social media or as part of an email marketing campaign.
8. Turn Transcripts Into Text Posts
To turn that last piece of advice on its head, another great method of repurposing content is to take transcripts and then edit them into text pieces like blog posts.
Whether your brand hosts a podcast or you’ve just produced lots of videos, you can use software such as Descript to quickly create text files that can then be edited and merged to create new, unique pieces of content.
Quotes can be turned into graphics, small clips of video or audio can be animated with their text, and you can easily create blog posts that feature the highlights and key takeaways from interviews.
9. Update Older Content
Let’s face it: things change.
Could some of your older posts use updating? Probably. There may be new developments or advice you can share on a topic you’ve already written about in the past. So, take your old post, make some adjustments and additions, and re-publish it. You shouldn’t have to do a complete overhaul,(although that’s also an option) just make sure that it appeals to today’s audience.
Another trick is to analyze your content and identify top-performing blog posts. If you notice that a blog article isn’t as up-to-date as it could be but is still generating a ton of traffic, leads, or is ranking highly for a competitive keyword, don’t publish as a new post.
Instead, update the content within the same post so you keep the existing URL and SEO value, and promote the updates you’ve made. Some blogging platforms even allow you to change the publish date, enabling to display it on your blog as a brand new post.
It’s also worth considering updating (or adding new) calls-to-action to articles that are still generating traffic to increase lead generation potential.
You can do the same with Ebooks. Whether you’ve published it last year or five years ago, make some refreshing updates and re-promote it! This will save you the time of creating a blog post or Ebook from scratch while you still obtain the benefits that a new Ebook has to offer.
10. Extract Quotes from Existing Content
I mentioned this earlier on, but the strategy of extracting quotes from top-performing content, especially when they contain insight from industry leaders, is particularly impactful on social media channels like Instagram or Twitter. Extract these quotes, create social media posts, and re-use them on all your favorite social platforms.
Leverage Your Existing Content to Drive Further Engagement
All-in-all, as a content creator, you do what you do because you know you can provide value to your audiences. Unfortunately, creating high-quality content doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes time, care, and resources — which can sometimes be a tedious process.
Repurposing your existing content isn’t meant to be an alternative to creating new content, but rather a supplementary strategy. You can continue to create new content while at the same time giving new life to your existing, high-quality pieces and providing your audience with relevant, timeless information.
