Reusing old content has become more valuable than ever in 2020. On top of that, there’s no better time to revitalize old posts than during the holidays. Between the stresses of dealing with COVID-19 as a business and planning time away from work, pulling content out of the vault can lift many burdens.
Depending on what your business produces to market itself, there will be different ways to repurpose it. 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 re-posting everything you have, let’s dissect why this is important to do. Understanding the value of repurposed content will help you to decide which pieces to revitalize and how to do it.
Save time/money
The most obvious reason to go about this, is that you’ll save time and possibly money. Repurposing old content can often take a fraction of the time and effort it would take to create something new.
If you’re working with a third party such as an agency, you probably are conscious of both time and money. Your agency can help identify good content to reuse, based on how well it performed. The agency can then transform that at a faster pace and a cheaper cost than producing something original.
The process can even be automated. If you have timeless content, meaning it wouldn’t need any rewriting or additions, you can set up a system to automatically republish content. This is great for the holiday season once you start to take time off. This can be done through something as simple as using social media to post links to your content. Or on a deeper level, set up your website to push old, but relevant blogs to the top of the page.
Boost SEO
Your content can only truly boost the overall SEO of your website if people are visiting and spending time viewing your content. So don’t let your old content go to waste by hiding it in the past.
Giving people a fresh reason to visit your page will add to the existing SEO power that it built up originally. Whether you decide to update your existing content’s page, or copy the contents to create a new, fresh page, the SEO benefits will be great. You can attribute your new content back to the old post. More pages on your site means stronger search engine value.
Reach new audiences
This boost in SEO is also one way that your repurposed content will attract new audiences. Perhaps your content didn’t’ achieve its full potential the first time. Giving it a second chance will do nothing but positive things for your brand’s reach.
Times have changed dramatically in 2020. People are living their lives in ways we never saw coming, due to quarantines and social distancing. Chances are high that your business can play on these life changes in some way. Take a look back at your history of content marketing. You might just find something that is now relevant to a wider audience.
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.
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 to doing so.
Blogs
Blogs often rely on data to back up points, which builds up your brand’s expertise on a subject. One straight-forward approach to reusing 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. This all adds to SEO and brand image.
You don’t even have to keep the blog in written form to reuse it. Consider ways to turn your writing into podcasts or videos. Come up with new ways for audiences to digest your content. Not everyone engages with content in the same way.
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. So if you’re refreshed an old blog for 2021, share that out on social media. You can do something as easy as taking the original image you used to post about the blog the first time, and add an “updated for 2021” text stamp on it.
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.