Reusing old content has become more valuable than ever as businesses navigate industry changes and evolving audiences. Consistently producing new and relevant content that can keep current audiences engaged while reaching new targets can be difficult to scale (think quality – not quantity). Pulling content out of the vault eases the workload of your internal creatives while also reinforcing your message, improving organic reach, and boosting your SEO score.
There are many ways to repurpose it marketing materials, but the core idea remains the same: take valuable content that has been buried under newer things, add a new spin on it, and push it back to the top of your feed.
Why reuse old content?
Before diving into your past catalog and simply taking a shot in the dark at re-posting archived materials, let’s dissect how this is beneficial to your business. Understanding the value of repurposed content will help you decide which pieces to revitalize and what channels to reproduce it on.
1. Scalability – Save time and money
Repurposing old content can often take a fraction of the time and effort it would take to create something new. If you produce content in house, you’re aware of how thoughtful the production process is and how tedious it is to consistently create high quality content.
If you’re working with a third party such as an agency, you’re certainly aware of how quickly billable hours stack up. Repurposing old content is a great way to optimize your time with an agency and get the most bang for your buck. Your agency can guide you towards good content to reuse based on how well it performed in the past. Then, they can transform it at a faster pace and a cheaper cost than producing something original.
Whether your efforts are through a third party or in house, this is a great opportunity to gather insights on how your content has been preforming and help point you in the right direction for the future. Think of this as a two birds, one stone situation.
2. Boost SEO
Your content can only truly boost the overall SEO of your website if people are visiting and spending time viewing your content. To continuously give your audience a reason to spend time on your site, don’t let your old content go to waste by hiding it in the past.
If the content originally preformed well, giving people a fresh reason to revisit your page will add to the existing SEO score that it originally garnered. Repurposing content is a great passive strategy to achieve stronger search engine value.
3. Reach new audiences
This boost in SEO is also one way that your repurposed content will attract new audiences. Different audiences prefer to digest content in different ways. Giving your content a facelift in it’s deliverability has the potential to reach those stragglers.
Consider demographics, what channels content is being shared on, and what the content is featuring. Some audiences would watch a short video 10 times before considering reading a 2,000 word blog post. And that’s ok. It’s valuable to reshape the box you’re delivering your message in to make sure everybody is opening it.
Just be sure not to overdo it by rehashing the same topics week after week. You don’t want people to see you as a brand with nothing new to say. To avoid this, run analysis on the performance of your content and decide what cadence of repurposing fits best for your business.
How should you reuse content?
Content marketing comes in many forms, and they cannot all be treated equally when it comes to repurposing. Once you’ve identified what’s worth reusing, you have to find the right approach.
Blogs
Blogs content is often supported by a variety of data sources, which develops your brand’s expertise on a subject and general credibility. One straight-forward approach to repurposing old blogs is to update them with newer data. Add new links to externals sources, or even new backlinks to pages on your site that didn’t exist before (Remember: this all contributes to SEO value and brand image).
Consider ways to convert your written content into podcasts or videos. Come up with new ways for audiences to digest your content. Not everyone engages with content in the same way. Then, consider linking the original blog to the podcast or video content to push users back to your site.
Once you have a solid backlog of blog content, you can compile related blogs into a single collection. This can even take the form of a physically published book.
The purpose of blogs in content marketing is mainly to build up the brand image by showing your expertise. Reminding people that they can engage with your content in different ways gives them more chances to see that you’re an expert.
Videos
Video content does not need to be reshot in order to be repurposed. Graphics, text, and animations can be added to transform your video.
Are you proud of a recent award or achievement your business achieved? Commercials or other video marketing pieces are a great place to insert graphics announcing your success.
If you have the time, recording new voice-over narration and adding new music is a great way to reuse videos. You won’t have to bother reshooting footage, and the content will still feel fresh. This is a great way to make new announcements for your business or share anything that has changed since the original video.
This is an important thing to remember even when shooting footage for entirely new videos. Always incorporate some level of timelessness. You can always cut things out, but try to get enough evergreen footage in your content that it can be trimmed and reused.
Social Media
Social media is made for throwbacks. We’ve even dedicated a whole day of each week to it. Engage in the Throwback Thursday trend to reshare old posts with your followers.
Hopefully, your follower count is always growing, so there should always be new eyes to share your content with. This can be done through stories, so you don’t have to clutter up your feed with duplicate content.
The cycle of reusing content can involve every channel. If you’ve refreshed an old blog from 2021, share that out on social media or link it in a newsletter series. Get creative and always consider not only how your audience has evolved, but how your business has evolved. Hey, maybe that newsletter series didn’t exist when the blog was originally shared.
One important thing to remember when updating content that has been shared on social, is to make sure links still work. If you’ve gone back to edit an old blog, or have published a new version of a blog, make sure your posts link out to the new content. And always make sure no posts are linking to a page that no longer exists. Set up redirects to solve this issue.