Content marketing is a machine that needs a constant input of new content to get a linear output of views, visits, and leads. It’s hard to scale results without an equal amount of work.
It’s hard to scale results without an equal amount of work. That is unless you reuse elements from one piece of content to create dozens of new assets you share across many channels.
That’s precisely the type of content repurposing our panel of marketing experts shared with me for this guide. They showed how to turn a single blog post, case study, or brief interview into dozens of assets that generate months’ worth of awareness and conversions.
Even better, they gave real-world examples so we can all step off the content marketing treadmill and get more out of every piece of content.
Contents
What is content repurposing?
In case you’re new to the concept, content repurposing involves taking elements from an existing piece of content and using them to create new assets for other channels.
For example, I may take a few of the experts’ quotes below, add them to carousel slides, and publish them on LinkedIn. I could also have recorded the interviews and published snippets of the conversations to Instagram Threads or Reels.
There are three main benefits to repurposing content:
- Save time: Create several assets quickly from one root piece of content.
- Scale ideation: Fill your marketing calendar without having to come up with a new idea for every post (which is often the hardest part of content marketing).
- Increase footprint: One root piece of content can find an audience on multiple channels when you repurpose it.
Content repurposing acts like a lever, allowing one piece of content to do a lot more of the heavy lifting in your marketing strategy.
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8 expert content repurposing examples
Most of us are familiar with repurposing a blog article into a few social media posts. The ideas our group of marketing pros shared go way beyond that. They explain how to amplify the effect of a single piece of content in a dozen ways, including how to get other people to do it for you (for free!).
1. Use unpaid channels for unlimited ROI
The content repurposing calculus is pretty simple: get the greatest reach from the fewest resources. That’s how you scale marketing while staying on budget.
Brittany Wren, Chief Wordsmith at Stingray Writing, nailed that equation by turning a single 30-minute interview into a ton of no-cost engagement, earned PR placements, and countless impressions.
“This example comes from one of my nonprofit clients, Lincoln Literacy, which offers free English language and job-related classes to adults in Lincoln, Nebraska,” Brittany explained. “Nonprofits don’t always have huge budgets, but with a little creativity, you can make a big impact by repurposing a few ideas on unpaid channels.”
To do it, Brittany used excerpts from an interview with the nonprofit’s executive director to:
- Pitch and place a feature article in the Lincoln Journal Star and another in 55+ Magazine.
- Write email newsletter content.
- Create several social media posts that generated thousands of impressions and an 8.43% engagement rate.
- Land two guest spots for the executive on two radio programs (Nebraska Public Media and KLIN’s The Dan Parsons Show).
- Include a quote in the non-profit’s annual report.
Brittney Wren turned a single 45-minute executive interview into countless free impressions.
There’s a lot to learn from what Brittany accomplished here. One standout takeaway for me is to open your mind to all the places you can repurpose a great idea. Using quotes in an annual report is such a smart way to get a little extra payback from a root piece of content.
2. Lead with the concept, not the content
When a recent court ruling shook up the healthcare marketing industry, Mark Rogers, Director of Content Marketing at Freshpaint, could have simply written a blog post describing the fallout. Instead, the Freshpaint team invited a healthcare lawyer to join them on a webinar—then turned that talk into several assets to help their audience understand the repercussions.
A blog post is fairly easy to publish; an expert-led webinar takes more effort. But for Mark, successful repurposing is built on thoughts worth sharing.
“Here’s a fundamental truth of content repurposing: it has to start with a great idea that is turned into a great piece of content,” he said.
The concepts shared during the webinar became the seeds of several new pieces of content. First up was a series of social media posts that featured spliced portions of the video.
Mark also wrote a Q&A-style blog post with embedded video clips. This is a brilliant way to present information in multiple formats so people can consume it however they like. It’s also a great way to grab some incidental SEO benefits.
Finally, Mark used the webinar transcript as the basis for several more blog posts, which relieved him of a lot of content-ideation burden.
Slicing up long-form videos for short-form platforms is an efficient use of time. So is using one big asset to guide several blog posts. But Mark said that what you share is always more important than how you share it. “If you take an average SEO blog post, repurposing it won’t get you very far.”
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3. Have a repurposing-first mindset
Content strategist Ryan Baum takes the top prize for sharing the most ambitious content repurposing example I’ve ever heard of.
“When I think of a ‘case study’ for content repurposing, my first thought is the way Justin Simon and the Metadata marketing team packaged and distributed their DEMAND conference when they were still there,” Ryan said.
DEMAND is a full-day digital conference featuring over 20 educational sessions for demand-gen marketers. Ryan explained that the conference was designed to generate content for blogs, social media feeds, email, and more.
The Metadate team designed their 2021 conference as a source for future content repurposing, Ryan Baum said.
“The conference was built to end up in these different formats, so they planned it accordingly,” Ryan said. “You can see this in their structure and line of questioning, pre-recorded sessions, picking speakers with audiences, etc.”
It makes sense. You’re recording the best ideas from dozens of the smartest people in your industry. What the Metadata team did really well was systematize the whole process so they could create months’ worth of content from the event with minimal effort.
“Justin and Mark Huber cover it all really nicely in a podcast episode,” Ryan said. That episode itself was another creative way to repurpose their event experience, which, Ryan joked, “put the meta in Metadata.”
A podcast episode about repurposing content as a way to repurpose content is the ultimate content repurposing strategy.
Although you may not put together an entire conference anytime soon, you can repurpose this idea for any event you host, like a webinar or a panel discussion.
“It’s not repetitive, it’s a system,” Ryan added. “And systems are the only way I’ve ever seen content repurposing or distribution happen both effectively and consistently.”
4. Fill the full funnel with case studies
Case studies are the gold standard of sales enablement content. But they’re often forgotten after a brief stint as newsletter fodder. Stella Inabo, Content Marketer at Float, says that after interviewing 10 customers to create new case studies, she couldn’t “just leave them to gather dust on the marketing site.”
And she certainly didn’t. The Float team mined those conversations for an incredible amount of content that gets shared across five channels and supports every stage of the customer journey.
Float used its case studies across its entire marketing funnel.
For starters, Float created PDFs for the sales team, making it easy for them to use for customer outreach and training.
“We also asked interviewees for permission to use their clips across different channels,” Stella said. “Once we got their okay, we cut snippets of the interviews and sent them over to a creative agency to make videos with Q&A segments featuring them talking about their pain points and how we helped solve them. We uploaded these to our YouTube page.”
Float’s YouTube channel is a handy place to park case study videos, gather more views, and boost the brand’s overall SEO efforts.
Here’s where things get really interesting. The Float team hired an SEO agency to identify keywords from the studies related to the core challenges they solve for customers. Stella said that resulted in over 10 SEO articles “based entirely on our customer stories.”
Then, they updated existing articles with mentions of the case studies and embedded YouTube videos in others. That means they bolstered dozens of existing assets with social proof in just a few minutes!
Next up was social media. “We created a plan that would guide us in repurposing the case studies into carousels, text posts, video posts, and quote posts on LinkedIn,” Stella said. “Since January, we’ve created over 70 LinkedIn assets from the case studies alone.”
And finally, they posted customer stories to their Slack community. “These posts caught the attention of three customers who requested a case study interview.”
I don’t know many businesses that get more mileage from their case studies than Stella and Float. The best part is that none of these tactics are out of reach for most marketers. You can post videos to YouTube and slice them up to LinkedIn for free. If you have access to an SEO tool, you can pull out a few keywords from the conversations. And even if you don’t have your own brand community, you may be able to share relevant customer stories on existing forums.
5. Fuel employee advocacy with case studies
Have a look at your activity on LinkedIn, Twitter (okay, X), or Threads. If you’re like most, you engage with personal accounts way more than brand posts. That’s why employee advocacy is becoming a bigger part of so many marketing strategies.
The tough part is making it easy for your employees to post quickly, consistently, and on brand.
Rease Rios, Director of Content at Qase, solves those challenges by repurposing case studies into ready-to-share social media content for her team.
Rease Rios writes LinkedIn post copy to help her sales team become influencers and brand ambassadors.
The prepared social post copy helps Rease ensure that the messages her sales team shares are in line with the greater marketing strategy. It also saves the team a ton of time since many of them may not be LinkedIn experts themselves.
To get the full picture of Rease’s repurposing plan, here’s what she created during the first round of repurposing for a new case study:
- Five social posts from the Qase account.
- Three variations of text for the sales team to “repost with thoughts” on LinkedIn.
- Five unique posts to publish directly from the sales team’s accounts, each discussing key points from the study.
- Multiple quote images.
- Quotes for a newsletter opener.
Rease said to keep in mind that a lot of good material may not be appropriate for the study itself, but it shouldn’t be wasted.
“A great case study is so much more than the polished finished piece,” she said. “All the insights from the interview, pain points discussed, and quotes that didn’t quite fit into the case study are incredibly valuable. Using all of these pieces allows us to talk about the customer and their work from many different angles on various channels.”
6. Repurpose through influencers
If you heard influencer marketing a few years ago, you might have pictured makeup tutorials or a food vlogger hyping the next Thai fusion cafe. The practice has grown a lot recently, with experts in nigh on every B2B and B2C vertical helping brands reach broad, engaged audiences.
That’s where Sneh Ratna Choudhary, Chief Repurposor at Scaling Rad Content, sees many repurposing opportunities. “My theory is expert-led distribution works way better.”
The theory is similar to employee advocacy, only on a larger scale. Sneh shared a recent example to illustrate how well it works, even (or especially) on LinkedIn for B2B businesses.
She contributed her writing chops to this article about A/B testing methods for Convert. At least two experts in the space turned the key components of the piece into carousels on LinkedIn.
Influencer posts promoting Convert’s guide to A/B testing generated a lot of engagement.
Collectively, those carousels generated hundreds of reactions and comments—a much better result than if the brand had just shared the content themselves. “The same blog post, when shared on Convert’s LinkedIn company page, didn’t get as many likes,” Sneh said. “The content was great. People who were tagged commented on it. But the algorithm still didn’t pick it up.”
Sneh also said the post format matters. “Repurposing blog posts into carousels for LinkedIn is a great way to get more distribution,” she explained. “Carousels work much better for this purpose, based on my own research.”
The trick is getting expert influencers to do the repurposing for you. Here are a few ways to make it happen:
- Pay them: Find someone in your niche with a sizable, engaged following and offer a partnership. Even if they don’t consider themselves an influencer, they may be willing to share your best content for a small fee.
- Trade with them: Look for people who regularly write guest posts for backlinks. If you have a well-visited blog, you could trade links in your content for social shares.
- Feature them (my favorite): Ask experts to share their knowledge for a blog post, give them a citation and backlink in the piece, and ask them to share snippets of it on their social feeds.
Here’s one final bit of repurposing wisdom from Sneh: don’t make it all about the original piece of content. “Focus on delivering value natively instead of ‘hey go read this thing I wrote.’ And zero in on the unique angle, main POV, or ideas you want to distribute instead of breaking up the blog post into sections exactly as they’re laid out and posting those on social. Distribute ideas, not blog posts.”
7. Turn guest appearances into blog and social content
I like this content repurposing idea from freelance fintech writer Anna Burgess Yang because it draws on a source of ideas most people aren’t leveraging yet.
“Part of my marketing strategy includes guest appearances on podcasts,” Anna said. “While the hosts will usually send me clips to share on social media, there’s so much more I can do with that content.”
Along with being a writer, Anna also advises solopreneurs and small businesses on workflow and automation tactics. She’s created a slick way to make repurposing content even easier. “Once the episode has aired, I feed the transcript to ChatGPT to pull out my main ideas so I can turn them into future social media posts or even an outline for a future blog post.”
Repurposing is a great use of AI because it extracts ideas from something you’ve created instead of trying to generate novel ideas from the tool.
Try using Anna’s technique for any speaking engagement you or your team take part in. That could include webinars, in-person talks, interviews, etc.
8. Lead with SEO
Colby Flood, founder at Brighter Click, has an interesting take on repurposing content. Instead of looking for potential SEO blog post ideas from an existing asset, he creates a repurposing system that starts with SEO keywords.
“At Brighter Click, we’ve crafted a content pipeline allowing thought leaders to invest minimal time in creating video content that gets re-purposed into various mediums,” he said. “We leverage SEO keyword research to craft interview questions for a podcast episode. This interview is then transcribed and turned into multiple blog articles.”
SEO keywords aren’t just useful for helping your content get found on Google. They can also be a consciousness bellwether, telling you which topics your audience wants to understand better. Building your repurposing plan around keywords means you’ll share ideas people are interested in.
Once the blog posts are up, Colby and his team continue to slice and dice the ideas into other formats for more exposure. “The podcast video and blog articles are re-purposed into social media posts across various channels,” he said. “Finally, we create a LinkedIn and email newsletter. This content pipeline allows us to generate 3-4 weeks of content from one 45-minute interview.”
You don’t want to start with very basic 101 keywords here. It’ll be hard to find an interesting angle on “how do I take a screenshot.” But if you look through your keyword research docs, you’ll find some niche-specific options open to spicy takes.
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Content repurposing is your marketing lever
A lever is a simple machine that amplifies your ability to lift large loads with minimal effort. Content repurposing works much the same way. With a little planning and the ideas our experts shared, a single creative effort will do a lot of heavy lifting in your marketing strategy.
I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with experts like these on several topics. If you’re looking for more marketing strategies with proven results in the real world, these guides will help: