The Art of Repurposing: Maximize Your Content Marketing Investment

Communications professionals often speak about content in binary terms, as either evergreen or tied to a specific moment in time. But in the world of marketing, the lifecycle of great content can extend beyond this dichotomy. 

A piece of thought leadership about a recent regulatory action, designed to inform industry leaders on how to adjust their planning, might feel closely tied to one point in time. However, it may include a client anecdote that can be leveraged for years to come. A guide explaining an important health insurance process might feel more evergreen, but maybe its takeaway can be leveraged in a subsequent piece responding to a timely hook. 

Repurposing content can allow it to have many uses beyond its initial publication, being woven and rewoven to respond to the needs of your content marketing strategy. It could mean tweaking prose for a new audience or atomizing a single component, like a statistic, from within a larger article. Think of redeploying a chart as a standalone graphic on social media or reworking a piece of thought leadership for publication as a byline. 

Repurposing can be an effective way to save time and budget, while carrying forward an existing message, thesis, or piece of information to new contexts or audiences. It can also speed up review processes and free up time for your team (or agency) to put to work elsewhere. 

But content repurposing is often easier said than done. Individual opportunities may arise, providing a window to republish or recirculate an article in response to a new development – but an opportunistic approach to recycling content will limit your agility, increasing the time and effort required to augment a piece or causing you to miss a window entirely. Realizing the full benefits of repurposed content requires designing content to be reusable from the get-go by incorporating this mindset into your strategic planning. 

How to Design Repurposable Content for Effective Content Marketing: 4 Key Tips 

Assess your content goals and define how repurposing can help achieve them. 

A chief advantage of recycling content is the ability to continuously reengage around a particular topic. If you haven’t yet experimented with repurposing content at scale, take stock of your existing content program and ask where it could benefit from doing so. If, for example, you are planning a content campaign with multimedia elements, you should identify reusable materials — such as charts, graphics, or statistics — early on. 

Prioritize clear takeaways or theses that can easily be extracted. 

Sometimes it doesn’t make sense to reuse an entire piece, but that doesn’t mean you have to start from scratch. Repurposing a thesis or key takeaway from already-published content can be a solid middle ground. Maybe some specific details have changed, or your audience’s needs have evolved, but if your existing takeaways or value propositions still hold, recycling and building from them can accelerate content development and spur creativity. 

Keep an inventory of data, evidence, anecdotes, and other supporting information. 

Content can also be recycled across mediums. Digestible bites can often be seamlessly spliced into other projects. Callout boxes or charts from longer-form pieces would make great additions to a shorter infographic, a slide deck, or a video. Similarly, graphics originally created for videos can be used to break up the topography in what would otherwise be a wall of prose. 

Think beyond the current project. 

Holistic thinking is critical to any successful content marketing campaign. Whatever you’re working on, it won’t exist in a vacuum. It’ll be in dialogue with media coverage, policy changes, market shifts, and your own brand messaging. Keeping this in mind will help you create content that resonates now and in future iterations. 

When It’s Time to Repurpose Content 

Designing content that can be repurposed is just the first step. The next decision you’ll make is how and when to leverage it. 

This decision will be informed, in part, by the type of content you are reusing. A single graphic, for example, can be easily plugged into a new blog or social post. But repurposing thought leadership — such as tweaking an article to speak to a different audience — requires more planning. 

Timing is everything when it comes to content repurposing. Moving too quickly risks cannibalizing the original asset’s readership. Moving too slowly may risk the overall message losing urgency or relevance.  

Sometimes, external factors can help resolve the question of timing. Is there a holiday or day of awareness tied to the topic, or a breaking news item that you can use as an on-ramp for more content? In other cases, a format change may be in order. Maybe it’s too soon to republish an updated version of an article, but what about a short-form video that highlights its key insights? 

Absent any of these forcing functions, consider establishing a review cadence to assess whether published content is due for, or could benefit from, a refresh. Your assessment tempo will vary based on your specific subject matter and audience, but should account for variables like how the content is performing and whether any hard data or information included is still accurate. 

How to Approach Content Repurposing for Maximum Impact 

Once you’ve identified the proper time to reuse your content, all that’s left is the act of repurposing. 

When creating something new based on an existing piece, the first step is identifying what to keep from the original. Refamiliarize yourself with the piece and how it performed. What initially resonated with your clients and your audience? If you shared it on social media, did readers call out any specific language or themes?  

You’ll also need to assess which aspects are still relevant and useful. Insights and terminology may become outdated due to legal, organizational, or market changes. Consider what still rings true and feels insightful. Consider what you like about it, too. Remember: This won’t always be a purely objective process. Maybe there’s a unique phrase that you want to keep. 

If you’ve hit a block, try to reverse this strategy by identifying what to cut. If any parts are outdated, did not resonate, or performed poorly, it’s worth asking why and potentially removing them if they cannot be changed to better meet your needs.  

If you’re porting content into a different format, determine what will and won’t translate. If you’re repurposing prose for a designed infographic, you don’t want to keep long passages of text. Data points or pithy insights work better in this context.  

The End is Just the Beginning 

The conclusion of a content piece doesn’t have to be “the end.” 

Just as recycling saves resources by turning an old item into something new and vital, content repurposing is a smart and savvy way to make the most out of your time and investments. 

The next time you design content, think beyond its initial application. If you keep the considerations above in mind, you can design a piece that keeps on giving.