3 Models for Repurposing Content

When you’re in business, productivity isn’t enough; you also need efficiency. This is especially true for small business owners, who often don’t have the staff resources they wish they had. No matter what size your company is, you need marketing, and the more efficiently you can market your business, the better. Let’s look at some ways to save lots of time by repurposing content.

When it comes to creating content, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Some people feel better writing articles or creating documents, while others speak naturally and comfortably on video or as a guest on radio or podcasts. The first thing we want to make clear is this: play to your strengths. Don’t spend a bunch of time trying to get better at something that you’re not good at and you hate doing. Instead, do what you’re good at and then find ways to get more out of what you create.

Repurposing content is a great way to get more mileage out of what you already have, and can even help you reach new audiences. That podcast you appeared on? It can turn into a whole bunch of other content. That article you wrote for your professional association? It can inspire all kinds of new content! Here are our three favorite ways to take source content and repurpose it into more content.

Take Something You Wrote and Make Lots More Content Out Of It

Think about a blog post or article that you wrote in the past—perhaps something that’s been particularly successful or resonated with your audience. Once you have this article in mind, consider how else you can use it.

For example, if the piece is especially long, consider breaking it down into several short social media “mini blog” posts. You could also take the short sections and let them become your “script” for recording videos that explain the ideas the article communicated. You could even take single sentences from the original article and make them into quote posts on social media.

Alternatively, if the piece is quite short, create an infographic summarizing its main points or turn it into a slide deck presentation for an event or webinar. This way you can still give your original content due attention while also creating something new that will fit different formats and platforms. Never made an infographic before? You can get lots of free templates over at Canva.

Take Something You Recorded and Make Lots More Content Out Of It

Videos are becoming increasingly popular as a way to engage with audiences online—and why not? Video is accessible, versatile, and fun! If you’re already producing videos as part of your content creation strategy, then why not get some extra mileage out of them?

Consider taking snippets from longer videos and turning them into Shorts on YouTube or Reels on Facebook and Instagram. This requires looking for the real “soundbite” moments that are highly quotable or create an “aha” moment.

You could also use just the audio from those video snippets to create what’s called an audiogram. Audiograms came from the podcasting world. The content piece might have a wave form that moves as the voice speaks, or perhaps a background image, but audiograms focus on the audio to convey a sense of voice.

And don’t forget about text either! You can take the original file of your recording and drop it into a transcription program, then look at the transcript of your videos, webinar, or podcast appearance and consider how to repurpose them into blog posts, articles, white papers, and more.

Take An Idea And Generate Content With An AI Program Then Go Further With It

The possibilities with artificial intelligence (AI) are endless when it comes to generating fresh ideas for content marketing campaigns—and they just keep growing! For example, there are now AI programs available that can generate basic outlines of articles based on given parameters such as topic area and tone of voice—so all you need to do is fill in the blanks with further research and your own personal input!

We love to take our clients recordings, have them transcribed, then take the best parts and plug those sentences or short paragraphs into an AI program and turn them into entire articles. The AI doesn’t write articles perfectly, but it gets the ideas flowing and saves us a lot of time so we can get more done for our clients. By starting with the clients own thoughts from the transcript, we keep the clients “voice” and language patterns in the article, which is good for maintaining their brand messaging.

The amazing thing about AI right now is how quickly it takes an idea and generates much more for you from that first idea. If you know that your customers care about eating sustainably sourced food, you can plug that idea into an AI program get it to generate articles, outlines, video scripts, sales copy for your website, email copy for your sales funnel, newsletter text. You just need to get clarity on that initial idea and plug it into the AI properly, then follow up with the repurposing prompts so it keeps re-writing for those other formats.

Repurposing existing content is a great way to save time while still delivering fresh ideas for engaging with your audience online. Remember, the main idea is to improve efficiency. When you’re doing it well, repurposing should produce more content for you with only a little more work, instead of continuing to create new original content from scratch.

We’ll write another article soon that lists some of our favorite repurposing tools. If you don’t want to take the time to learn about how to use new tools and produce more and more content, you can always reach out to us and have us do it for you. We love helping businesses with their content marketing as efficiently as possible by repurposing content. If you’d like to learn more about our approach, and how we could save you a ton of time, set up a strategy session.