How to Repurpose Content to Make the Most of Your Marketing Efforts

Creating content is time-consuming. It requires teams to be constantly involved in finding new ideas, researching, and creating content from scratch. But do you really need to go through this process over and over for every piece of content for each platform? The answer is no. You can do more with less, and that’s where repurposing content comes into play.

Sometimes a piece of content only makes a buzz with a small part of your target audience. When you repurpose content and share it across multiple channels, you reach the audience where they are.

Wondering how to repurpose content to make the most of your marketing efforts? Keep reading to get time-saving hacks to scale your content marketing strategy.

What is repurposing content?

Taking key points from existing content, putting them into new formats, and promoting these different versions across multiple channels is the very concept of repurposing content.

There are endless possibilities to repurpose content, such as turning a blog post into an infographic, a report into an ebook, a video tutorial into a flowchart, etc. Repurposing content is a time-saving initiative that boosts marketing content strategies because when you share top-performing content across multiple channels, one platform supports each other, as we will see.

Before going deeper into types of content, let’s see how to find content worth repurposing.

How to identify the best content 

There are plenty of tools you can rely on to find the most successful content, depending on where you are looking for and where you want to share it. If you are looking for top-performing blog posts, you can use Google Analytics or Ahrefs. If you’re going to start from a social media post, each platform has its analytics tools.

Alternatively, you can go through Google Trends to find popular topics in your industry and then find which topics your existing content meets. After finding out content you want to share across other platforms, it is time to plan how to do it to lead to more conversions and engagement.

Five Ideas for repurposing content 

Once you’ve found top-performing content, you can adapt it into many formats to boost engagement on social media, drive traffic to your website, get more leads, and more. When it comes to repurposing content, the options are potentially endless. Here are five methods to try out first.

1. Create ebooks from blog content 

After finding valuable content on your blog, you can stretch an article and turn it into an ebook that goes deeper into a subject your audience is already interested in. In-depth, long-form content build trust in your expertise and help you become an authority in your industry. And you also can turn an ebook into bite-sized pieces of visual content, as we will see later.

Creating ebooks may seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be since you’re leveraging topics and content you’ve already written. Once you have found a topic and outlined the key points in your blog posts, you can rely on templates and visuals to create a compelling ebook that will engage your readers. 

Using charts, for example, will make data more digestible, as they draw attention to key information and make numbers meaningful and memorable. If your ebook contains numbers, statistics, or data, try to work in visuals, such as a pie chart, to help your readers visualize complex data at a glance.

How to create an ebook in six easy steps

While we can’t go into detail in this article about how to create an ebook, here are some simple steps to get you started.

Outline your ebook

Before diving into actually building your ebook, start with an outline. Establish the chapters, section headers, and general flow of the content based on the content you’re repurposing.

Additionally, you’ll need to decide if the content will rely more on visuals or be a more traditional text-heavy format. Keep in mind that the more visuals you include the more ready-to-use assets you’ll have to promote it. If you’re creating an ebook yourself, it may be best to leverage ebook template tools to streamline content creation. 

Choose a color palette that fits your brand’s voice

For readability’s sake, stick to a light background and mostly dark text, use accent colors for headlines or highlights, and don’t use more than four colors. If you can, stick to your business’s branding guidelines to help reinforce that this is your content.

Pick fonts suitable fonts

No more than three fonts, one for the headlines and one for the body text. If you want to skip this part, sticking to the template fonts always works well. 

Vary the layout

Walls of text are not for ebooks. Readers’ attention spans are shorter when reading off of a digital screen. So leverage visuals and design elements such as boxes, headlines, lists, photos, graphs, icons, bullet points, and illustrations and add captions to your images. Even if your ebook is mostly text-based, find ways to break it up and make it skimmable.

Visualize data with graphs

Instead of just plop some numbers into your ebook, rely on graphs to make your content more engaging and persuasive (just like the infographic on child labor). You can use a free graph maker to create graphs to help your audience visualize data in a memorable way.

Add a call to action (CTA)

Tell what you want your readers to do: buying a product, sign up, subscribe to your newsletter, etc. You can do this in the “key takeaways sections” by including links to your landing pages, blog, or social media profile.

2. Turn long-form content into infographics

According to visual content marketing statistics, original graphics are the most effective type of visual. One of the best ways to bring your data, proprietary visuals, and branded elements together is by creating infographics. You can always create these from scratch or identify opportunities to repurpose long-form content like articles and ebooks.

Turn articles into infographics

When turning blog posts or reports into infographics, you have two options: summarizing the entire content or just a section of it with a short infographic. The first choice will make more sense if you want new content for your newsletter or a new blog post, while short-form infographics work well for social media posts. If your blog post is organized using section headers, your task is straightforward, and you only need to find the key points and group them according to their subjects, such as quotes, statistics, lists, and tips. 

For reference, check out this example on child labor data from the United Nations:

Here, icons, charts, colors, illustrations, fonts, and shapes highlight data and draw attention to the story in a way that makes the reader interested in going through the entire content. 

This type of infographic is highly shareable as it is visually appealing and contains comprehensive information. This is an example of a one-size-fits-all infographic, and it would work great in newsletter campaigns, ebooks, or presentation slides to fundraise.  

Turn ebooks into infographics

Infographics are also great teasers for long-form content like ebooks. People have limited attention spans and won’t always see your ebook’s value right away and don’t think it is worth filling a form and providing their data to download it. Luckily, you can directly reuse visuals from your ebook in the infographic itself, making this one of the simpler ways to repurpose your content.

A good practice to turn ebooks into appealing visuals is to divide them into as many chapters as your ebook has.

Alternatively, you can create a long-form infographic summarizing the entire content and use that in promotional material for the ebook. These options are great teasers and will help you reach a broader audience and make the time you spent to create an ebook worth it.

How to create engaging infographics

Creating an infographic comes down to choosing the right format to present your data. There are roughly nine types of infographics, but the most popular ones for repurposing content include:

• Timelines are great for showing progress over a time frame; 
• Statistical infographics show data with graphs, tables, and lists; 
• Informational infographics, such as posters, summarize a topic with extra detail;
• Comparison infographics illustrate similarities and differences. 

Now, you don’t have to memorize the types of infographics. Instead, just keep this list in mind and work through the following steps.

Outline your goals 

Start by defining what your infographic is all about and the kind of content you want to share with your audience. Is it providing a quick overview of a topic, tips on simplifying a complex process,  survey data, or summarizing a blog post? To get a comprehensive overview of what kind of infographic fits your content purpose, check this article on types of infographics.

Organize data

Creating an infographic from existing content is more straightforward than starting from zero, as you already know what you want to communicate and have the data you need to share. You only have to organize and summarize information. Try to find the most critical information, the key points, and group them. 

Create your layout using a template

Pick a template according to its structure and, at first, forget about color, fonts, and all design elements. 

Add style to your infographic

To make your infographic pleasing and clear, now it is time to play with design elements. Templates allow you to customize colors, fonts, icons, images, and shapes to organize your information and draw attention to the main points. See how you can make your message more impactful just by changing the colors and adding shapes:

3. Turn infographics into social media content

The entire purpose of reusing content is to increase the value of what you create. Luckily, visual elements are primed to be effective social content, especially if you’ve created an infographic. These are already bite-sized visual interpretations of long-form blogs, ebooks, and even product information that can be sliced up into individual or grouped social content.

If you’re still worried about including too much text in your visuals—separate the two. Use the copy from the infographic in your post descriptions and only showcase the visual and maybe a heading. Lastly, be sure to link to the original article or ebook in your posts to drive traffic to the original content you created. You can even only showcase part of the content on social and tease that they should check out the full write-up to learn more.

Here’s a good example of how to leverage a full infographic as social posts:

4. Host a webinar

Webinars are another great way to repurpose content. They allow you to present information and engage your audience in a direct conversation. Try to find popular topics you have covered many times on your blog and use your existing articles as the starting point for your slides. You can even showcase images you’ve created for ebooks and infographics throughout rather than having to create something new.

To bring things full circle you can also leverage your ebooks in follow-up messaging to those who attend the webinar. Maybe you offer free access to it for signing up for the webinar or surprise attendees with a download after the fact. In either case, look for ways to integrate and cross-promote the content you’ve created to reinforce the topics you’re covering. 

5. Turn your webinar into videos

If you’re hosting webinars, make sure that you are recording them. More than likely, you’re only getting a portion of those that signed up to show up live. However, if you have a recording available you have an automatic opportunity to follow up with those that didn’t decide to attend. This still gets the content in front of them on their own terms.

Additionally, you can even host webinar recordings for those that didn’t sign up at all. Add the recording to a blog post, post it on YouTube and even slice up some of the best sound bites for social media posts. 

Continue to find new ways to repurpose content

Adding repurposing content to your marketing strategy is a game-changing initiative. When you repurpose the existing piece of content people already like, you save time and focus your energy on the most engaging topics. Furthermore, it leads to a more cohesive strategy, as all the channels you use in your strategy support each other.

Sharing the same information across multiple platforms will make your top-performing content reach a broader audience. Turn an article, a video guide, or even a webinar into visuals to boost engagement and save time. Remember, start with what you have, and whenever you create something new, consider how it can be turned into multiple assets. If you have that mindset from the start, it’ll make the process much easier and help increase the ROI of every piece of content.