One of the biggest challenges for marketers today is how to create great content. Quality content is not only an effective tool to acquire new customers, but increase brand awareness and position your organization as a thought leader in your industry.
To develop valuable content means having a content strategy that leverages your brand’s core ideas and the ability to repurpose content allows marketers to produce more collateral with less research.
Here are a few quick strategies to think about when repurposing content:
Create Longevity
The goal of evergreen content is to create something thats lifetime extends beyond the time taken to write it. This means, the time you spend writing will be made up in months of content value.
Start With an Idea
Start with a core idea, usually as a solution to either a common customer question or a vertical target audience. As an example, let’s say the core idea is data and metrics analysis.
Visualize a mind map of all the possible mediums and audiences the idea could be written for. When you create content with the specific purpose of repurposing it, you allow yourself to effortlessly add value each time you re-work the piece.
Leave Room to Build
In theory, if your core idea is large enough you should be able to create follow-up content that explores different niches of the bigger concept. To draw from our data and metrics example, you could expand into how different people in an organization measure data, whether it be marketers, community managers or sales managers. At the end of your extensive research, you should be able to confidently write about a few different niches within your larger research topic.
The idea is to continually revisit your research and use it in new ways, adding value to the content each time you give it a makeover while extending your reach to new communities.
Promote Endlessly
After you have created evergreen content, there are no limits as to how long or how much you can promote it. Cross promotion is key, by rotating which social networks you share content on, you’ll limit the chances of over-saturating your readers with the same content.
Reach Out to Multiple Audiences
More often than not, your business will have a large and diverse community. Whether it’s different languages, cultures, industries or age demographics — it’s nearly impossible to create one piece of content that suits the preferences of your entire community. Instead, a great way to extend the lifetime of a great idea is to repurpose it for multiple audiences. This can often mean localizing content regionally or adapting your ideas for different industry focuses.
For example, if you invested time into researching ways Community Managers are using data measurement, consider the different types of Community Managers within your reach. Could you adapt your research differently to cater to individuals, as opposed to SMBs or enterprise audiences? If so, you may get more value out of creating three separate pieces of content and adjusting the voice as needed.
Expand the Number of Mediums
One core idea has the potential to take numerous content forms, from whitepaper, to blog post, to video, ebook and more. The more mediums your content explores, the more value and return you will get from the work you have put into it. Consider the multiple audiences you can adapt your content to and choose the appropriate medium to do so.
To draw from our previous example, you decide to create an ebook titled “Enterprise Community Management: A Guide to Metrics and Data Analysis.” After completing the project, you might consider repurposing that content into a white paper. Later on, you could create a blog post for SMBs by adjusting the tone and key points addressed.
In the future the same content could be repurposed into a video, media presentation, Pinterest post or social updates. One single piece of content can stretch across multiple mediums reaching and targeting different audiences each time. Creating evergreen content that can be shared across multiple audiences and mediums not only allows you to be everywhere, but significantly increases traffic to your blog properties.
Put the power of social media to work for you. Try HootSuite Pro, free for 30 days.