Think Beyond Distribution: Reimagining and Repurposing Content
Published October 17, 2024
After graduating from college, I worked as a content writer.
I created a piece of content from scratch every day. Long-form blogs, pages of eBooks, whitepapers… you name it, I did it.
After a year of writing full-steam, I realized something:
I invested hours into research, discussions with sales and customer enablement, and writing into every piece I created. Each was promoted once on social media and in our newsletter… and then nothing after.
If you lack a solid repurposing strategy – adapting existing content for a new purpose – you might feel the same.
A marketer at a startup or growth-stage company doesn’t have the luxury of creating content just to exist somewhere in the ecosystem. They wear many hats with many goals to achieve by the end of the month, end of the quarter, end of the year. Every second and ounce of energy matters. It’s a disservice to your team to overlook the value of repurposing content.
Before we go any further… I’ve heard all the same foundational advice as you. Distribute your blog post on social media, turn your webinar transcript into an ebook, and so on. That’s all well and good, but we won’t discuss any of that today. I prefer to go deeper.
Distribution is NOT Synonymous with Repurposing Content
Let’s get something straight: Repurposing is not the same as distribution.
While this might seem obvious, there’s a murky, gray middle. You could take an idea from an older piece of content (repurposing), insert it into a new blog post, and link to the older piece (distribution).
So, for the purposes of what we’re discussing here, let’s define both.
Distribution: The act of sharing the content you’ve already created with audiences via channels such as social media, newsletters, website, podcasts, advertising…
Repurposing: The strategic reimagining of ideas and research from a pre-existing piece into a different piece of content, whether it’s in a new format, shared with a new audience, or used to update an older piece.
Not all marketing teams do both, though they might believe they do. Some might have a great distribution strategy, but stop there. The information, research, and ideas from hard-earned pieces sit and gather metaphorical Internet dust. Yikes.
In my opinion, that’s a complete waste of potential energy waiting to be unleashed.
Jess Cook, Head of Content and Comms at tech company Island, calls her team’s repurposing strategy the “12x content repurposing multiplier.” Why? Because an average of 12x more viewers find Island’s repurposed content versus the original.
Your repurposing multiplier might not be 12, but it could be two. Or three — and that’s two or three times more people finding your content from the second version than the original.
If you’re trying to…
Encourage engagement with a current audience? Can we repurpose?
Create more content faster? Can we repurpose?
Target different audience segments? Can we repurpose?
Reach new audiences? Can we repurpose?
And when you’ve nailed both repurposing and distribution… think of your multiplier then.
Setting the Scene: Improving Engagement Within an Existing Audience
On LinkedIn, entry or mid-level marketing and communications professionals make up two-thirds of our audience. These individuals want to become better at their craft and are interested in the sustainable PR and content tips and tricks we share.
In 2023, we launched a new LinkedIn video series called “How’d You Get That Hit?”
We wanted to share the extensive thought and strategy we invested in pitches that led to top-tier coverage in publications like Fortune, Business Insider, and Digiday. The first video featured Lockly, our consumer tech client, on the television show The Price is Right.
The videos earned engagement, but not as much as we hoped to see based on our audience's pain points – like struggling with new creative ways to pitch reporters – and knowing we had a unique idea to package that value. So we began to think about repurposing video content for the series to improve engagement.
Our Content Repurposing Example: Look at The “Roots” of Existing Content
Thinking about one piece of content reminds me of a tree. You see the leaves, branches, and trunk, but there’s an entire network of roots under the ground not visible on the surface.
Can you make something from the “roots” of your content?
In each “How’d You Get That Hit?” video, we spent time on the overall pitching story, but there were many underlying parts we didn’t mention:
We could dissect the original pitch and why it caught the reporter's attention.
We could dig into why the PR pro that pitched the opportunity made the choices they did and share advice about specific pitching scenarios.
We could address any questions about the industry and relationships with reporters we’ve heard from potential and current clients.
All of these would make for an interesting story.
What we had in mind was perfect for a newsletter.
But it wasn’t perfect for our email newsletter audience, which leans more mid-to-senior level. A VP of Marketing wants to know how PR contributes to their holistic marketing strategy, not get in the weeds of a successful pitch.
But our LinkedIn audience? They’re the boots on the ground who want to understand the ins and outs of securing a good national story. Even better, we know sharing our insights with them contributes to a more sophisticated industry. And you never know where those entry-level audiences will end up one day…
Repurposing video content led to our “How’d You Get That Hit?” LinkedIn newsletter, intended to engage those professionals.
It worked — in the quarter after we launched, 37% of our website traffic from LinkedIn stemmed from this newsletter. The newsletter itself gained 182 subscribers from the first edition and grew subscribers by 70% with the first three issues.
Applying this framework to your strategy: Think about…
The “roots” of broad topics you’ve already covered: for us, it was behind-the-scenes of pitches.
The target audiences that might find those topics most interesting: entry and mid-level marketing and communications professionals.
Which channels those target audiences frequent regularly: LinkedIn.
Setting the Scene: Creating “New” Content, Faster
There’s never been more pressure on marketers to create new content, all the time. It’s an expectation.
But instead of new content for the sake of quantity, double down on the quality content you already have to make new things faster.
Our Content Repurposing Example: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
We’ve noticed LinkedIn prioritizing video more over the last year, so we began to host quarterly LinkedIn Lives, a “Day in the Life” video from a Carver, and other creative efforts. Many of those videos also live on our YouTube channel.
We came across a newsletter discussing how Shopify grew its organic search traffic and also its YouTube to 230,000 subscribers in 18 months.
As a small agency, we’re always searching for quality backlink opportunities to improve our website’s domain authority and boost organic traffic. What was our version of Shopify’s strategy?
The first steps were obvious — repurposing video content by embedding our YouTube video links into relevant blogs. For example, we dropped our LinkedIn Live on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) into a blog post about preparing for the event.
Side Note: We’ve also cut clips from our LinkedIn Lives to use as audiogram posts to promote our CES blogs on LinkedIn. There’s that murky gray middle of repurposing and distribution...
Not too long after, we started seeing this help improve organic traffic sessions by almost 40%!
But there was still more potential to unlock. So we started repurposing blogs to film short, “Tik-Tok style” videos, inserting them into the blog posts later, and fueling our video strategy for LinkedIn.
EXAMPLE: We repurposed our holiday gift guide pitching blog post to create LinkedIn videos. Later, we also dropped the YouTube link to one in the original blog piece.
One video accomplishes several goals, on top of creating “new” content:
Establishes trust with the author faster with a reader (people trust people, over brands).
Satisfies different reader consumption behaviors (some prefer video over written).
Builds up our YouTube channel.
Helps improve website domain authority for better organic search traffic.
Increase video frequency on LinkedIn so we can test performance.
Applying this framework to your strategy: Think about…
Turning visual content into written content, or vice-versa: Blog posts become videos.
Topics you’ve covered that can and should evolve beyond the moment in time they were originally created: CES LinkedIn Lives become audiograms used for LinkedIn.
Which channels your content can “live” on to continuously drive results after creation: LinkedIn Lives uploaded to our YouTube and website.
Setting the Scene: Niching Down Content for a Specific Persona
When you’re a startup beginning to build your ecosystem, you likely focus on addressing your broad target audiences first versus specific roles. For example, an “enterprise finance” audience versus a Controller or Staff Accountant specifically.
If you want to target a more specific audience persona, take the big-picture content you’ve created and filter it through that lens.
Our Content Repurposing Example: Deepen POV With the Right Spokesperson
Our Martech client launched a podcast featuring interviews with their customers. They shared their before and after stories, tips for successful implementations, and creative ways they expanded their use of the product.
But our clients didn’t want to stop at publishing and distributing every episode. They wanted to grow the podcast quickly and reach their two main target audiences: developers and business users.
So we worked with them to create blog posts from every episode. But instead of creating generic posts from the interviews, we chose to deepen the perspective. And who better to speak to developers than a CTO, or ruminate with business professionals than a CEO?
So we interviewed them both tied to each episode topic. We asked about the CTO’s experiences with the issues the customers faced. Was there anything he would have done differently? Likewise, we asked the CEO about her experiences and how they applied to the episode.
From there, we worked with both to transform those responses into two, separate blog posts filled with developer or business-specific thought leadership content to be promoted on their own and the company’s LinkedIn feeds, while driving podcast subscribers.
Applying this framework to your strategy: Think about…
A relevant audience you’d like to reach: developers and business users.
Any topics executives in your organization have taken a clear stance on that might appeal to the aforementioned audience: derived from our interviews with both executives.
The “connective tissue” between that stance and your existing content: executive experiences with podcast content.
Using the executive’s POV to build on your existing content with the chosen persona in mind: blog posts written by the CEO and CTO, drawing on podcast content.
Setting the Scene: Reaching Wider Audiences in New Channels
This is what many of us think about when repurposing comes to mind: how can I use our existing content to acquire new audiences in different channels? I won’t spend too much time here, but I do want to offer some ideas.
Our Content Repurposing Example: Fuel Pitching Strategy with Owned Content
One of my favorite things about the Carve content ecosystem is that it’s starting to feed itself. Hopefully, you can see that in the repurposing opportunities I’ve highlighted above, but I haven’t discussed how your owned content channels can fuel your pitching strategy.
One of the ways we accomplish this for clients is by using LinkedIn as a testing ground for ideas. Posts that perform well might indicate that we’re skimming the surface of a topic that could play well for a larger audience. Could you layer a popular story from LinkedIn into a reporter pitch?
Also, pay attention to the comments. They might help expand on the original content.
That’s just one example; Carver Mariela Azcuy created a useful framework for using those channels for your media strategy. Check that out here.
Applying this framework to your strategy: Think about…
Breaking a byline down into 3-4 differentiated LinkedIn posts.
A media interview that inspires a newsletter topic.
Pulling from spokespeople interviews or speaking engagements to put together media quotes.
Turning a LinkedIn post into a media pitch.
Remember, repurposing content isn’t just about reusing and rehashing — it’s about expanding on your original work, giving it new life, and enhancing your authority on the topic. So before you dive into your next piece, ask yourself: can we repurpose instead?