Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your business – be it any industry. All you have to market is your skill, how affordable your business is and how easy it is to distribute among your customers. Blogging is an important part of your content marketing because it helps your business build and improve search engine optimization (SEO), which plays an important part in improving visibility for your business online. So be it medical SEO or any other, if you want to improve your SEO impact then you need to create optimized content. But for that, regularly creating content that is fresh and attractive is a difficult task. Moreover, it becomes even more difficult to create content for marketing, especially since Google prefers unique content over duplicate content. Instead of building content from scratch, you may need to consider repurposing your content.
What Is Meant by Repurposing Content?
Rather than adding yet another brand-new piece of content to the mountain of blogs that’s already available online, create exceptional content that could give great impact. The solution to create new forms of content from existing material is referred to as “repurposing.”
If you have any existing content that is significant and evergreen, but outdated, then you can repurpose that content by giving it a stylish makeover according to today’s needs. According to Search Engine Journal, repurposing content is simply recycling content into different formats, allowing you to target your audiences again, or to target a new audience.
- Written content can be repurposed to visual content, audio content or video content
- Podcasts can be repurposed to visual content, written content or video content
- Video can be repurposed to written content, audio content or visual content
That is, when you serve up your content in lots of different formats, you reach people where they are. For instance, if one doesn’t have much time to read a full article, but might prefer to see a quick video or an audio that covers the main topics, then repurposing the article to a video or audio content could reach your audience.
Repurposing content is not the same as republishing as you can’t just copy content from one medium and paste into another. Instead, you need to format content in a way that appeals to the audience of the platform it’s posted on. It is one of the well-known growth hacking tactic businesses use to drive traffic without devoting as much time or effort. Such content also has a number of benefits such as:
- Improves organic search results and would provide an opportunity to earn links: Repurposing allows the content to be over different platforms, extend the life of a popular post and squeeze out more backlinks, which in turn helps to improve your SEO and more chances for you to be found in search engines.
- Faster and easier to create: Instead of spending too much time brainstorming new content ideas, you can rework your existing content into new content, because there are already certain elements like images or quotes that need not be changed. Moreover, you have information on hand and all you have to do is give a new angle to the content, which is easier that creating new content.
- Improves your online presence: By repurposing content you get to establish a strong online presence for your business. It will help raise your brand awareness, which is crucial for building your viewership, increasing opportunities and attracting more customers.
- Reaches new audiences: Along with expanding your online presence, repurposed content helps to expose you to an entirely new audience who haven’t been exposed to your expertise before.
- Increases your authority/credibility: Having your content appear in other locations can set you up as an expert, which can increase your authority and credibility. (thebalancesmb.com/)
Before you recycle content, you need to form a plan of action, because not every old post is good for repurposing. The very first step is to find your best performing content or focus on content that is popular by checking your analytics, and then determine the best way to repurpose. There are a variety of ways you can repurpose content, and new options appear frequently.
Here is a list of 10 effective ways to re-use your content:
- Facebook Live: Live video is becoming increasingly popular. You can make your new blog post or other content a live video and share it on various social media platforms for higher reach. When you use your content as the topic of a live Facebook video, you can repurpose that video in more than one place. For example, you can
- Share the video on your Webpage
- Share inside any Facebook Groups you manage
- Download the video and upload it to your YouTube channel
- Take the YouTube link and use it to embed the video back on your content page. For example,
- Podcast: Convert your blog post into an audio format for a good podcast. Providing both an audio and text version of your content is a great way to offer content based on what visitors prefer (reading vs. listening) (www.thebalancesmb.com).There has been a surprising increase of podcast networks these days.
For example, below is a blog posted by Outsource Strategies International, one of the leading medical billing and coding companies in the medical outsourcing space.
This blog is then converted to podcast for better reach
- Webinar: Take a little effort to turn your content into a webinar, as it’s a form of one-to-many communication. A webinar can be created on the basis of a sales webinar; a part of a paid course; a piece of bonus content you offer as an upsell or in addition to a paid product or service. It is offered by various interactive opportunities such as ask a question, chat, poll, survey, test, call to action and Twitter. Moreover, you can repurpose that webinar as a YouTube video, ensuring that your content lives forever.
- Infographic: Your ideas and data are presented in visual stunning forms to make it easy for your audiences to digest complex information easily. With 65% of the population being visual learners, repurposing your blog content into an Infographic increases your reach significantly.
From the above example Outsource Strategies International’s blog, the blog is also repurposed into an Infographic
- Social Media Graphics: Repurposing blog content for social media is a proven growth hacking tactic. Though Infographic is a great way to repurpose content and improve SEO, they are too large to post on social media platforms. So, toincrease your reach on social channels, you have to invest in mini-graphics which is miniature-sized versions of an Infographic.
For instance, check out this blog posted by a leading legal transcription company.
This blog is repurposed to a mini-graphic to post on Legal Transcription’s Facebook page
The content is shortened to repromote the blog.
- Publishing the post in LinkedIn: For many marketers and professionals, repurposing their content for LinkedIn has seen great success and for them it’s been a practical choice to get more visibility in the social network. You can even add videos, your lead magnet and more to your LinkedIn page.
- Visual content to a SlideShare Presentation: If you have a popular Infographic then you can turn it into a SlideShare post, because SlideShare has a big community and you would be able to get new traffic and leads.
- Informational articles into an answer on Quora: According to Search Engine Journal, you can use elements from your previous content while answering questions on Quora, along with linking back to the original article as well. It’s hitting two goals in one tactic: promoting your personal brand in social media and bringing people back to your website, while being helpful to those who need guidance.”
Take a look at this example,
Outsource Strategies International has answered a Quora question on “What are the ICD 10 coding guidelines for hypertension, heart disease, and chronic renal disease?” and have linked back to their website, making it easier for users to visit their site.
- Add to Email Campaign: As a method of repurposing, you can include your popular content in your email autoresponder or a targeted email campaign.
- Break long articles or Spinoff Articles: Revise articles to target specific markets, or break down long articles and turn them into short blogs. This way you win by having material for more than one update and the readers win by being able to digest your data slowly (as the length of an article can often deterrent to many who might find the topic interesting). But you need to pay more attention to linking.
You could also try to create an app and add the content to it, because, these days, more and more people are accessing content on their mobile devices. Having an app to send your content makes it easy for your loyal followers to keep up-to-date on what you offer. However, for your social media strategy that is to improve your SEO, leverage the above ways to repurpose content. The power of repurposing content in social media is endless, and if done in a meaningful way, then the above methods would be super helpful.
Professional digital healthcare marketing companies can help reformat and recycle your content to get more value out of your marketing efforts. This will help you extend your reach to new audiences who enjoy different content formats and also strengthen your SEO campaign.