Creating brand new B2B content is time-consuming, particularly when you have a website and social media channels to fill. How can you get the maximum bangs for your content bucks with repurposing?
In February’s It’s a B2B Comms Thing, with co-host Ayo Abbas and guest host Susie Lober, we discussed saving time with repurposing content.
Here are some edited highlights; the full video is at the bottom.
Why repurpose your B2B content?
Ayo: Repurposing is about saving time. We put so much effort into a piece of content, so how do I get the most bang for my buck? As I’ve got busy, it’s harder to keep posting every day, so it’s great to have a vault of stuff that you can go into and just adapt.
Also, you think that people are bored of your messaging and what you’re saying, but people are so busy have they even registered your content in the first place?
Susie: Yes, it’s going to save you time, it’s going to save you money. And don’t forget that it is also good for SEO as well.
Me: If you are putting content out on LinkedIn and Twitter. That doesn’t mean to say that all your connections and all your followers have seen that content. So repurposing and re-pushing your content out is about reaching a wider audience.
How should you repurpose your content?
Me: There are many different ways, but here are a couple of examples. If you think of a content pyramid or a hero piece of content, this could be an article, an event, podcast episode, all sorts of things but let’s take an event.
I wrote a 900-word article from a 10-minute interview. So if you have had a 45-minute panel discussion with three or four panellists, how much content, how many words can you get out of that panel?
And you don’t just have to do one article, you could do a series.
A second example is our It’s A B2B Comms Thing LinkedIn Live. From our first 15 minutes, not even the whole thing, I normally write a 1,300-1,400 word article.
I transcribe it using AI and produce a blog post that then gives me content for the whole of the following week.
We download the video and put it on YouTube; that’s another audience.
And that is just scratching the surface. Ayo has suggested taking the audio of the Live and turning it into a podcast at some point.
Ayo: We could also take the It’s A B2B Comms Thing video and chop it into the three questions, so we have three five-minute snackable pieces of content.
It’s National storytelling week; I thought, what am I going to post? And I updated a blog post from 2019. I shared that direct link to that blog as a post on LinkedIn.
Then I created a Canva carousel with the key points laid out. I released that as a story about how to do storytelling well. Then created an infographic talking through this whole repurposing process. And there’s more I could do in terms of standout quotes.
So from that one blog, there are loads more content and different ways of getting value out of it.
If I’d written a whole new blog from scratch, that would have taken me a lot more time than repurposing what I’ve already got.
I’ve got a client who’s done webinars over lockdown. It’s amazing content – 40, 5-10 minute talks. What we’re looking at is downloading the audio and creating a snackable, bite-size series as a podcast.
And then we’ll have quotes and audiograms and have all of that around it. That content has got a lot more life.
Susie: It’s important to remember that different forms of communication will appeal to different audiences. Some people will be more visual, some prefer audio, some will want to read a longer article, some prefer infographics.
There are so many different routes that you can take in repurposing material.
Me: One area that I haven’t delved into yet with the content from these Lives is all the comments and the questions from our audience. There’s a whole wealth of material to work with that we’re only just scratching the surface.
There are so many different content channels to fill, which is a lot of content to create, but actually, you can repurpose a lot of what you’ve already got.
Should you reused old content?
Susie: Yes, we do need to be reusing old content. But an interesting thing to draw on here is that it’s not just about material that has been created for marketing.
There are lots of different things that you can draw on from across the business, from your day to day work. So whether it’s a carefully crafted statement you’ve made for a design and access statement or a CV or a case study that you’ve reworked for tender documentation, you can bring that into your marketing.
So it’s about reaching out throughout the business and using what you’ve already got in in clever ways.
If you’ve done a webinar or you’ve got some long-form content – a thought leadership piece, that’s a lot easier to then break down into lots of other pieces of content.
But if you don’t have that material, and you’re feeling a bit overcome by that, there are lots of other things that you can do. There are quick wins in terms of repurposing social posts – pinning them to the top of your feed, changing them into slide decks.
It can be more tricky for news posts. So, for example, if you’ve done a planning permission announcement or a site update, you need to be a little bit careful that you are keeping it relevant.
It’s not just a case of just retweeting something that you tweeted last year or resharing an article, you need to be a little bit clever about it, revisit it and make it relevant again.
Me: You will have evergreen content. You may have written about a particular topic that then resurfaces in the news, so there’s nothing stopping you from dusting that off, updating it, maybe tweaking it and reusing it.
It comes back to the first question [about why repurpose]: how many people see your social media feed? How many people will have seen that tweet? How many people will have seen that post?
Just because you used something six months ago, if it’s still relevant, still pertinent, there’s no shame in reusing that piece of content.
Ayo: I did a review for an architectural firm about 18 months ago, and their content is top-notch, beautiful publications, beautifully written. Being digital first, a lot of that content is still evergreen and will always be relevant.
If you start doing digital marketing more you can reuse and start using that in much smaller formats. So it doesn’t have to be a whole booklet, but you can use separate essays or separate guides.
Susie: A great place to start is to make a list of all the evergreen content that you’ve got. So that means your case studies and your projects and the stuff that’s always going to be relevant.
The other great part about digital marketing is you can then look at what’s performing well. So go back and look at your top-performing posts, your articles, and those two things will give you a great starting point of what to repurpose.
Me: It can be overwhelming [the repurposing options]. Take your top of the pyramid piece and work out the next layer down. Then maybe the next time you put out something think: ‘how can we go even bigger on this one’?
I do it with my LinkedIn posts all the time, sorry my secret is out: I repurpose my LinkedIn posts. I keep them all archived, and if I’m short on time, I will tweak, or I’ll turn it into a different format.
I’ve turned a written post into a short video or a carousel. You don’t necessarily have to do everything at once.
Watch the full chat here:
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