Welcome to Marketing Labs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you're a business owner or marketing professional looking for straightforward non-salesy tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this podcast is for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Marketing Labs podcast. I'm your host, Tom Haslam, and today we're talking about a crucial aspect of content marketing repurposing. Did you know that 60% of marketers reuse content two to five times repurposing your content can help you save time, increase engagement, and reach new audiences. In this episode, we'll explore the art of content repurposing and how you can breathe new life into your existing content. Joining me on today's blob, I've first of all got Melissa Healey with me. How are you doing, Mel? Hi
Tom.
I love introducing you to the pods. Hi Tom. At least I got eye contact last time you went. Hi Tom.
It's really awkward saying hello to somebody that you've been sat with for most of the day,
But people might not think that you might have just come in and
Just for the part.
Yeah. Anyway. Hello.
Hello. Good to see you.
It's good to see you too. And we also have a content marketing executive, Emma Nunns.
Hi Tom.
Hi Emma. How are you?
I'm good, thanks. How are you?
I'm very well, actually.
I know.
Ready for the weekend. You've been working with me all day as well.
I have.
Hello. We've also got Matt Janway. Hi Tom. This is going to be fun editing for Shaza, but hello everybody. I'm waving everybody. Wave. Shall we get started anyway? Yep. On the pod. Let's
Do it.
And I'm going to, that was really aggressive. Let's do it right. I want to start with some benefits then, because obviously we all know to some degree I'm assuming that people know what repurposing content is. Why would people consider repurposing their content? What are the benefits of that?
My benefit is efficiency. Produce one piece of content, use it multiple times, multiple channels. Join an example. What's your come onto those after?
Yeah, go for it.
Okay. Blog post. You could probably turn into 20 social media posts.
20.
Yeah, well, it depends how many posts you can make out of it, but yeah, a hundred,
That's a challenge. Do you reckon you could make a hundred social posts from one blog? It
Depends. Whose blog doesn't
It?
Yeah. Your last one, like 15,000
Words,
Do you reckon you could do it
One to one of your blog posts into an infinite number of
Social
Media posts? I reckon I could squeeze a couple of hundred out of it.
Nicks you could
Probably
Mine as well, to be fair.
Yeah, Nick level there, only NASA would understand them, but
I think I'm the top blogger at Marketing Labs now. Do you? I
Think actually that's a good point. We should have a league table.
I'm top of the league table. How is it measured
Though? I haven't time to do that because that might encourage Josh to step up a bit.
Yeah, that's a good shout. So I'm at the top,
Josh, if he thinks he's losing,
I'm going for promotion to the Premier League. Let's do it.
Yes, we could have a premier league. What's the one down from that?
Championship? Championship? Swear, Tommy's at the moment.
And what's the one down from that
League one,
Right? Where's Sheffield United
Championship Championship
Because they got bumped off,
All
Bumped down,
Relegated they call it. That's the one.
Anyway, going off topic, bringing us back to focus. Have we got any other benefits of content repurposing?
Another really great one is being able to use the same content across lots of different platforms, which gives you an opportunity to reach more people because if somebody doesn't reach, read your blog post, but they do follow you on social media. They have an opportunity to see it there, so you're not confounding it to one space, one area, one type of reader.
It comes back to the different channels. What we were saying in the previous blog, where does your audience hang out? You might have different audience channels
And they might need slightly different content angles. So when you repurpose, you can get the same point across, but just in slightly different ways
And people consume content differently and prefer to do that. So somebody might watch a video but not want to read 1500 words, or they might actually prefer to listen to a podcast while they're at the gym, but wouldn't see you on social media and prefer to consume their information that way.
Interesting. Got
Another one.
Have you got one?
Yeah,
You've probably got like 10, aren't you?
I've got a few hundreds. Yeah. I think the main one really is expanding the lifespan of your content as well though. So you can turn something into, once you start reusing it, you can turn it into something that will last a lot longer. So it comes back to the efficiency a tiny bit because you're doing it once and using it multiple times, but actually it expands how long you can continue using it for nice
Gif that keeps on giving, isn't it?
Yeah, it is.
That's a good point actually, because there is no time limit to it either. So if you've written something that did really, really well a couple of years ago, you can go back to it and you can then two years on take it and carve it up and make social posts from it. There's no time limit if you've done something that's evergreen on when you can use it. Have
You got any benefits, Emma?
Well,
Yeah, they said that's
The easiest way to summarise it to,
I was going to come back and just go back to the using it in different ways. So going what Mel said about if you wrote something like a year or two ago, but it's still relevant, but video is really big at the moment. You could easily turn it into a script to do a video with. So
Yeah,
Work smarter not harder. Yeah, that's a good shout.
To be fair. I wouldn't know how to go about a written blog post into a video. You'd probably have to edit it properly and structure it. Think about the S could s structure use
Ai. I think you could do it quite easily with ai, do you think? Yeah, I think you could take the highlights, get AI to create a bit of a script. If you wanted to be completely voiceless and you didn't want to be in the video from a voice perspective or even a video perspective like your face, you could probably even use AI to read out the script and use AI to create some nice images for backgrounds. You could do that quite easily. I think
That's not a bad shout to be fair.
Yeah,
Interesting. What types of content do we think are most suitable for repurposing, but do you think social shares and things like that?
Social, it gets the main benefit, doesn't it? I think social, but you can turn, so can turn blog posts into social posts. You could turn blog posts into videos. That's always a good one as well. But then videos are great on social. I think there's so many things you could repurpose
Other than what about white papers and things like that? I mean we're talking specifically about blogs, but how would you take a white paper perspective, for example, or a guide into a post for example? How would you approach
That? A guide could easily be a video, couldn't it?
Yeah,
A white paper could easily be an infographic where you take in stats or the output of the white paper into something that's more visual. One thing, so we repurpose this podcast, we turn this podcast, we take the transcript and we put it on the page, and then we've got a page of the content we're talking about, which is great for SEO. So not only is it good for readers of our website, they can either listen or read it, but it's fantastic for search and performance of our website. So that's repurposing as well really.
I guess then coming back to ai, you can use that transcript to ask it to come up with the key points, which then could come into a social post
Or
Multiple social posts,
But you can do it the other way around as well. So if you've done a webinar, you could turn that into a blog post really easily, and again, that would be great for social. So yeah, I think it does depend on where your audience hangs out. We always say this, but it's obviously super important, but if you can repurpose something, you already have to capture the audience knowing the channel they hang out on. If you can repurpose it and push it towards the channels where your audiences are hanging out, then it just makes perfect sense to do it that way around.
We've talked about blogs and how we can turn them into multiple social posts, but what about something that is already visual, like an infographic? What would we do with that? Could make that not a reel, but like a carousel or something
Or slides or you could even do a deck from that. I mean people go round to the slideshare.com and websites like that where people go looking for particular topics, so you could turn that into a deck quite easily.
I guess another point is, an example should I say is that our podcast, we've changed it and we're doing video format now just by simply adding the video visuals to it. It's not like any, well say any extra work. It's not much extra work. We are already doing the pod. So yeah, it's a great way to repurpose that content and get it on YouTube and do shorts for Instagram.
Shorts are actually a perfect example of our pod. We sort of take key points of what we discuss in the main labs and then dissect them into
Shorts. Yeah, it's just another form of repurposing, isn't it? And when it comes to, if you can repurpose visual content, visual content's 20 times more likely to be shared and ought to be engaged with. So taking something that's audio like we have with the podcast, which is great in itself in its own channel, but if we can repurpose that for video, it's just going to encourage more engagement.
Yeah, it's been a while since I've seen a decent infographic actually online. I used to do 'em all the time, but I haven't. Them
Seems to have slow down infographics. Yeah,
I think they might had a day. I think they're coming back
Maybe. Yeah, they need to come back. I like a good infographic. I love an
Infographic. I saw one on LinkedIn explaining how to make a good infographic. And I think people have got lost into, I guess this is really relevant, is if you're taking a white paper or something that's quite a beefy amount of writing. There's an art to making carousels and infographics. You don't want to overwhelm people. The whole point of it is it's short, snappy information that people can read and take it and digest. So it's repurposing it into an easier way to digest
Into an easier format. Yeah. Yeah. I
Definitely digest infographics and pictures.
You do, don't you? That's how you consume information, isn't it?
Videos, pictures.
You hate it when I write words, don't you?
Oh, I don't mind it. I like writing words, but I don't like reading them. You love reading, don't you?
I would prefer to read over anything else. Yeah,
Me
Too. Yeah.
Yeah.
It's weird, isn't it? I listen to podcasts when I go to sleep, so that's how I consume podcast is at bedtime.
Do listen to the Marketing Blobs podcast to go to sleep
Sometimes.
Yeah.
That's how boring we are.
My best man used it in his speech saying, if anyone needs to go to sleep, listen to Tom's podcast. Cheers. Anyway,
Does he listen to it? He obviously has. What's his name
For one episode?
Callum. Fuck you. Callum.
Can we keep that in?
Yeah, a hundred percent. Alright, so what about, I guess it's quite a generic question, but what about measuring the success of your content repurposing? First of all, how often would you come back if you've posted a blog and then three weeks later you repurpose it, is that too soon? Or how do you measure When is good to repurpose and when? I guess
I think it depends on the platform that you're using because obviously they all have different metrics that go with them. So obviously if you're posting something on social media, the metrics are going to be far different from if you're posting something on your own website, a blog posts for example. So you need to decide depending on where the content is and what format of the content you've used. But I don't think I would do that in the course of measuring everything else that you've done on that platform. I wouldn't pull it out as being indifferent from what you do routinely. It just comes in and amongst that,
I think as well, we use blog posts as an example just because it's a great point. It's a nice place to start from to create, I guess various different posts from, but you could in theory do that when you publish your blog post as well. You could say, okay, well I know I've got five social posts here so I can schedule them. But also as Mel said, I think it's probably good to, when you're analysing your data, you are looking at engagement on social and you're looking at what's resonated with your audience, comments, those kinds of things. When you are analysing your social performance, you can just see which posts resonated the most and you can do more of that.
Yeah, I guess the only exception to that is if you're waiting to see if something performs well before you use it for repurposing, which again, obviously you'll not get immediate feedback on something you've posted on the website, but on social media you'll know pretty quickly whether it's done well or not. And obviously there are other examples within that. But if you're waiting to see if it does well before you repurpose, obviously give it a while and then make a decision. And also if you're running a campaign and you are repurposing, if it's a part of meeting a specific objective, so for example, you're creating a cluster of content on a topic repurposing content across lots of different platforms, then you might then choose to that against the objective as one piece of discrete work.
Does it have to be a blog post? I know you said about if you've got a blog post that you wrote two years ago as an example and you come back to it, is there a time limit on that? Could you come back to a blog that you wrote 10 years ago?
It depends on the content, doesn't it? If it's evergreen and still relevant. Yeah, sure. Especially if things change, then it's like Emma was saying a minute ago, our infographics coming back as a tactic, I guess. And if they are, then potentially it's relevant again. So things come in and out of fashion, so to speak. People engage with things in cycles, don't they?
And in any case, I think you should be going back to your content anyway to update it. So if you've got something that worked really well and it's 10 years old, why haven't you gone back to it, updated it and sort of revived it and brought it back to the fore? Because you should be doing that routinely anyway as part of your content strategy.
That's another good point, isn't it? To be fair is that don't just leave your content forever to fester. You can always
Don't leave it on the shelf. Yeah,
You can always come back to it and improve it.
It's similar to the conversation we have about websites, isn't it? One of our very first podcasts was talking about how the mentality of going through the process of building a new website is let's get it perfect, let's click that launch button and then it's done and forgotten about and it's there. And we were saying actually that's probably one of the worst things you could do. Firstly, you don't actually even necessarily have to launch it when it's perfect. It's never going to be perfect. You should always be working on it. But it's a similar thing. Once it's ticked and done, it's forgotten about. And that's probably one of the biggest mistakes people make with content is you should always be revisited. Really?
Yeah. It's like having an Aston Martin in your garage and not putting any fuel in it to drive.
Yeah, not servicing it. Yeah, exactly that. Yeah, it's
Nice.
Would you say that going back to an old post, is classed as repurposing or is that just optimising?
Going back to it, I think is optimising rather than repurposing.
Unless you change it enough that you are changing its purpose,
You
Might have it. For example, we did repurpose one post when we relaunched the website. I think a couple of years ago. There was one about WordPress and Shopify, I think it was that. And basically it was a few years old and some of the things it was saying actually weren't accurate anymore.
Was it something that the CMS had changed what wasn't relevant anymore? Update to the CMS or
Something? Yeah, my memory on this is, I can't remember fully to be honest, but I think we might have even added in a third CMS, so we did. That's we repurposed it slightly because adding a third CMS.
So you're doing sort of a bit of both.
Yeah, you could argue that's repurposing, but generally I agree with Mel, that's mostly just optimising, isn't it?
One thing that probably fall under repurposing there is sort of augmentation. So if you've got lots of blog posts that are on the same topic and you could plausibly put them together to create a bigger fuller guide on a topic, that in itself I guess is repurposing, isn't it? You could take 3, 4, 5 of them and create something like a real long form piece of content that becomes a sort of almost an ebook perhaps if it's long enough. And that I would say is a repurposing tactic.
I was just about to say your book.
Yeah. Well, yeah, shameless plug there. But also I'm also working on that other book, which is a compendium of e-commerce content, whereas it's 15 posts that are very specific to e-commerce. So it is a collection of guides and that is absolutely repurposing. It's already produced, it's there. It just needs, again, slightly bringing up to date, but putting into one book.
Yeah, I like that word though.
Compendium. Compendium. I think a compendium, it means a collection of articles. Nice. Might be wrong.
It's a good word. I like that.
I do. So what about some challenges that people might face when it comes to repurposing content?
I think a big issue is keeping the quality there by repurposing, because obviously if you've got a blog post, I'm going back to blog posts, we like blogs, it's going to probably start affecting your SEO view, like copy the content and then repost it. So there has got to be some work to be done when you're repurposing. You can't just go copy paste off you go. And I think it's something like 56% of marketers struggle with quality when ing their content. So it is a big issue and you've got to make sure that you're doing it right to make sure it's worth your time going back to it.
Yeah, as Emma said, sometimes you're in a situation where you could potentially dilute the meaning of it if you're not actually just putting a bit more emphasis on making it right. You can't just take it and outside of context, it might not fully work, so you do need to put a bit of effort into it.
Another is audience fatigue, so it's great to be able to create lots and lots of different bits of content from one, but if you use them all at once, people are going to get pretty sick of seeing it, so plan them in. So use a couple a week and make them last, because otherwise I think you'll turn people off.
Not a bad shout.
That's a really good point. It's so easy for people to get pissed off online. You will lose followers if you just throw in the same old stuff at them all the time and they lose value in it.
What about time pressures from marketers? Do you think they're so focused on creating new content all the time that they forget to repurpose it?
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I think there's a lot of pressures on in-house marketers to make sure that they're always producing new stuff. It's like churn constantly, like new posts all the time. But I think in reality that it probably makes so much more sense, at least having some of your time focused on going back through old stuff, repurposing and retiming as well, potentially. I know it's not necessarily the purpose of this podcast, but there's a lot of value in that and I think a lot of marketers do struggle to find the time to go back to old stuff and maybe repurpose it.
Nice. Thank you everybody for being on the pod. Have you enjoyed it?
Yeah, super episode.
Thanks, Emma.
You're welcome.
Your second pod done and dusted.
Yeah, getting there, aren't we?
Yeah, enjoying it. Smoking. I'm getting used to it.
Yeah, it's all right. Slightly weird, but the more I do it, it's becoming a bit more normal.
Yeah, it's just like a conversation after you've done a few.
Yeah.
Thanks, Mel.
Thanks for having me, Tom.
It's okay. I don't know what to say. I'm always happy to have you on my podcast, Mel. Course. That's it. Cheers, everybody. Wave to cameras.
Thank you. Bye.
And that's all for today's episode on the Art of Content Repurposing. We hope you learn some valuable strategies for breathing new life into your existing content. Remember, repurposing is all about creativity, flexibility, and a willingness to experiment. By applying these tactics, you can maximise your digital efforts, produce waste, and create a more efficient content marketing machine. Thanks to the ML team for sharing their expertise with us today. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll catch you in the next episode of marketing. And before you go, don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. We love hearing from our listeners. Goodbye.