Don’t set it and forget it: The Marketer’s Content Repurposing Guide for being everywhere online

Imagine creating a single piece of high-quality content that speaks directly to your target customer’s wants and needs. They see your value in a paid social media ad and hit follow. They begin to pay attention to your posts and head over to your website to learn more. This potential customer sees a form on your site to subscribe to your email newsletter and they hit submit. After a few emails and engaging with your content, they press that ‘buy now’ button.

This scenario is any marketer’s dream. Taking a stranger to loyal customer through providing quality content is why we’re here. The customer journey is what we want to understand, study, measure and utilize so that we can meet our ideal customers where they are.

And to do that, we must consistently publish valuable content that connects back to that ‘buy now’ button. That’s why 82% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. We know that consumers need to see the same content multiple times before taking action. It’s not easy being everywhere online, though. Constantly creating original content and dispersing it across channels takes a lot of time and effort.

What if I told you there’s another way? A way that will save you and your marketing team hours of work every week?

Your company needs a content repurposing strategy that starts with the customer in mind and uses a single piece of content to drive your social posts, emails, graphics, videos and more. With our guide, you can set up this process no matter what your company does or who you serve. Let’s dive in so you can meet your current and potential customers where they are.

STEP 1: Give Your Target Customer What They Want

Before you dive in and start writing blog posts or filming videos, take the time to understand what form of content will resonate best with your ideal customer. Having a clear vision of exactly who that person is will guide you in what kind of content you should create and what topics you’ll cover. You’ll want to know everything about your target customers, from their name and job title to their hobbies and how they like to consume content.

Taking the time to discover this information upfront will save you time in the long run; instead of guessing which social platform your customer uses most, you’ll have the data to confirm where you should be spending more time and effort.

To get started, take a look at your website analytics and your social media presence. Take note of the top sources that send traffic to your website. Is Instagram much higher than LinkedIn? Is there a popular content page on your website where people spend more time? Do certain types of posts on Facebook get more engagement than others?

This insight should lead you to understanding the types and topics of content you’ll want to hone in on going forward so that you get the best ROI for planning, creating and publishing content. Once you have this down, it’s time to focus in on your main content piece that will be repurposed and reused across channels.

STEP 2: Set Up Your Content Pillar Page

Your next step is to establish your main piece of content you’ll consistently publish for your current and potential customers. This could be your blog, video series, weekly podcast, live video, etc. Once you decide which makes sense for your company, you’ll need to create your content pillar page on your website to house your main content piece.

What’s vital to your success is staying consistent. Publish your main piece of content with your audience at a set frequency (we recommend weekly) and on a set day and time. For example, if your company provides financial advice as a service for teens and young adults, your main form of content could be a weekly 30-minute podcast that goes live every Monday morning. Setting up this precedence not only helps your listeners and customers know what to expect an when and how to consume your content, you’ll also set your team up for success by creating a process you can repeat each week.

The key to a great content pillar page is making it *the* hub for everything your audience will want to consume to get to know your brand and purpose. Make it easy for them to navigate, sign up for more content and information from your company and link to your other channels and forms of content. This helps to create a holistic overview of who you are and what you can do for your customer.

STEP 3: Plan, Produce, Promote

Once you have a good understanding of who you’re talking to and where your content will live, it’s time to work on your “what.” To make it easy, you can use this 3-step process: Plan, Produce and Promote.

Often, marketers aren’t sure where to begin when it comes to which topic to cover first within their industry. This is where the Planning takes place. Use this as a chance to think creatively while using your data and insights to back up your ideas.

Plan: Start with an ABC brainstorm. This exercise will help ease writer’s block and get your wheels turning. It’s all about getting ideas, good or not-so-good, out of your head and onto paper. Start by writing out the letters A-Z on a piece of paper and put your industry at the top of the page. Working your way through the letters of the alphabet, jot down any and all ideas that come to mind that relate to your industry and what you want to educate your audience about. You might not love all ideas, but you’ll end up with a variety of topics to cover over the course of the quarter or year. Circle the ones you think would be most valuable to your target audience and take note of any overarching themes you see. These broad themes can be your categories for your blog, videos, podcast, etc.

Produce: Now it’s time to take action and create your content. There are four forms of content you can create: Text, Graphic, Video and Audio. It’s best to choose just one for your main content piece, but that doesn’t mean you have to stop there. Part of repurposing means you can take one piece of content and create a new form using the same information. For example, if your main form of content is your weekly blog post, you can use your text from the blog to film a video using the same information. From there, think about creating an audio file with captions to share on social media. Take it a bit further and design a quote graphic for your social media platforms using text from that same blog post. Using this strategy, you’ve spent the majority of your time creating a blog post that can then be repurposed into different forms of media for several platforms. Simple make small tweaks to your social media captions, such as adding in emojis for Instagram or hashtags for Twitter, so that your copy is unique to what works for each platform.

Promote: The last step is to get your content out there for the world to see. Remember that while you want to prioritize your main piece of content and the top channels where your audience spend their time, you’ll still want to show up everywhere online to make the biggest impact with the repurposed content pieces you’ve created. The key to promoting your content is to do it more than once. Don’t set it and forget it, keep track of when and where you’ve posted your content and decide when you’ll reshare it again. This mostly will depend on how frequently you post, specifically on social media. If you post twice a week, you’ll need to wait longer in between resharing posts. If you publish content five times per week, you won’t have to wait long, as your followers and customers will see fresh content more often.

Using the three P’s, you’ll easily be able to ideate, create and distribute original content to a wide audience in less time.

The most important part of establishing a process that works for your company is using data to guide your decisions. Take the guess work out of it and feel confident in your content pillar page and the audience you’re targeting. When you get those two right, it’s easier to repurpose content into new forms and reshare at a cadence that’s sustainable and meaningful for your team.

Check out a few pieces of content we have recently updated on our site that are still timely and relevant. If you want to discover more about your customers and create impactful content that reaches them where they are, get in touch with us so we can help.