Repurposing Content: How to Do More with Less in Marketing

Content repurposing is a process by which you take one piece of content and adapt it into other formats. With how time-consuming it can be to come up with new topics and pieces of content, repurposing your content is a great way to keep publishing without overextending yourself. This post will explore some ways to succeed with this strategy.

It can be overwhelming and intimidating to see how much content your competition churns out every day. While steady content generation can be great for brand building, lead generation and SEO, the process can be taxing and expensive.

So, how do you keep pace with what others are doing in your industry without burning out your team or blowing up your marketing budget?

You don’t need a massive team of content writers, designers and other creative contributors to produce endless amounts of content. The trick is to be strategic about what you create so you can maximize your output while minimizing the amount of work and money spent on it.

One of the most effective ways to do this is by repurposing content. In this post, you’ll find six tips to get great results from this marketing strategy.

Tips for Repurposing Your Content

Repurposing content means you take a piece of content and transform it into other formats. For instance, you might create a blog post from a podcast episode or an infographic from a data-driven article.

To repurpose content, though, you don’t copy and paste from one content format to another. There’s an art to it. Here are some tips to help you succeed as you get started:

1. Get Creative with Choosing Repurposable Content Formats

There are more ways to repurpose content than to create a video from a blog post or an infographic from a report. Here are some examples of the kinds of content you can repurpose and what you might do with them:

Just make sure that you choose content formats your users will find useful and valuable. And share them on target platforms where they’ll find your repurposed content.

Another way to get creative with repurposing content is to bring something older back to life. For example, you could redo a once-popular 2021 infographic with 2025 data. Better yet, you could redo or simply update that infographic every year.

If you know it works, why spend time trying to figure out another way to approach the subject?

Something else you might do is turn popular content into a series. Even if you published the original piece months ago or years ago, it might be worth pursuing so long as it continues to perform well. For example, you could turn a video or ebook into a step-by-step course or an email series.

2. Pick-and-Choose Which Content You Repurpose

Consider the nature of what you’re planning to create. Not everything you publish will be evergreen as it can be beneficial to cover time-sensitive or viral topics on occasion. However, it’s probably going to be more worthwhile to repurpose evergreen content that has staying power.

For example, let’s say you run a popular inspirational travel website. You’ve published a post with recommendations on the top places to see New Year’s Eve fireworks in Seattle.

The post is doing well in the lead up to the holiday in terms of impressions and engagement. But does that alone justify adapting the post for other formats?

Aside from social media posts and a promotional email, there might not be much more you can get out of this one. Because, once New Year’s Day comes, no one is going to care about where to find local fireworks displays.

While repurposing content can certainly save time in content marketing, it can also cost you if you don’t spend your time repurposing the right kinds of things.

Another thing to consider is what the post will do for your business goals. Content doesn’t always need to bring in leads or generate sales. However, what if this post were on a website for a local tourism company instead of an inspirational travel website?

In that case, it might be worth repurposing. The trick would be to create the repurposed content well in advance of the holiday.

For instance, let’s say your company offers water-based tours. That informational post on fireworks viewing spots would be a good one to increase business. You could turn that “Top Spots” post into a related video, showing off the fireworks over Lake Union from last year. You could also create a downloadable and printable map of all the best stops to watch the fireworks from.

3. Use Your Data to Drive Your Repurposing Strategy

Your analytics can help you decide which content to repurpose.

For starters, let’s say you’re looking to repurpose already published content. Your Google Analytics account could help you identify pieces with a good amount of impressions and engagement.

A large volume of impressions tells us that the subject is a popular one—whether that traffic is coming from your platform or from referring sites and search engines. However, impressions aren’t enough.

To get the biggest bang for your buck when repurposing content, you need it to be engaging as well. So, for instance, blog posts with thousands of visitors but an average session duration of 10 seconds probably won’t be worth repurposing.

The same goes for other kinds of content on your site. For example, let’s say you want to generate more interest in your baby stroller products. You might be eager to repurpose a page for one of your least popular strollers as you’d like to increase its visibility on other platforms. However, if the product doesn’t have top-seller potential, this could be a wasted opportunity.

Instead, your best bet would be to target a more popular product. Then come up with ways to repurpose it.

For example, you could create a three-minute explainer video on how to set it up (since that’s a common question from new parents). You publish the video to the product page photo gallery. You upload it to your YouTube channel. You also create a blog post for it that allows you to share it—along with extra pointers—via email and social media.

Bottom line: Repurposing content is an effective way to scale content marketing. However, if your goal is also to maximize the results you get from this increased content output, you need to choose content your audience is eager to see. And your analytics will help point you in the right direction.

It’ll also be useful in determining what kind of repurposable content to create in the future. As I’ll explain in the next point, you can create content with the intent to repurpose it into other formats from the outset. By planning ahead, you’ll reap additional benefits.

4. Start Thinking About Repurposing Early

There’s no time limit on repurposing content. If you want to repurpose a piece that continually brings a good amount of traffic and leads to your business, you can do that at any time—so long as you know your audience will value it.

That said, if you can identify topics (and not just published content) that will do well when repurposed early on, it’ll help you maximize your reach and results.

Being able to do this will take time. You’ll need to get a sense for who your target users are and what kinds of content and formats resonate best with them. But once you’ve figured this out, there’s no need to wait to repurpose content. You can make a plan for repurposing before you’ve even started creating it.

For example, let’s say you are a small business coach. For almost a year, you’ve hosted a popular podcast. You share snippets of your episodes on Instagram with your followers, but you’d like to improve reach and engagement. So you’re thinking of moving into written content.

One thing you could do is create a show recap post for each episode on your blog. This would enable you to start a newsletter subscription list. This way, listeners who don’t always get notified about your episodes will learn about them sooner via your biweekly newsletter.

Another thing you could do is publish companion assets to your website. For example, let’s say you have an episode devoted to tax season. While you covered tons of great tips, you’d also like to give listeners a free tax prep checklist they can download and use. So, you add it to the Resources page on your site where it’s free to download in exchange for their email address.

It can be really beneficial to do content repurposing this way. For one, it’s much easier to create interrelated content all at once instead of having to do it days, weeks or even months apart. It also allows for more cohesive messaging.

5. Take Care to Create High-Quality Content

Repurposing content can save you time in coming up with new content marketing ideas and topics. Where you shouldn’t cut corners, however, is in the content generation stage.

Repurposed content needs to:

• Go through the same rigorous creation, editing and optimization stages as the original piece
• Stand on its own as a valuable piece of content and not force users to constantly refer back to the original
• Be suited to the new content format and not just flowed in from the source

For example, let’s say you’re going to repurpose a webinar into a blog post. It would be easy to get the transcript from the webinar, paste it into the post, edit it and publish.

But webinars are great tools for lead generation and sales. Why give all that information away for free—and without the context of what you shared in the video—in a blog post? It will also likely turn off the attendees who devoted 60 minutes to watch you speak if they find out it’s now available online for free.

Instead, what you could do is create a post that touches on one aspect of the topics covered.

So let’s say you have a webinar showing off the newest features added to your CRM software. One of those features is a user segment management tool.

You could write an entire post about user segments: What they are, why you need them and how to create them. You could also explain how time-consuming it can be to manage user segments and to check that your team is using them when crafting sales and marketing content. That’s when you invite people to watch the replay of the webinar (after submitting their email address) so they can learn more about how to integrate user segments with their CRM.

Not all repurposed content will be like this. Some of it can summarize what was covered in the original piece. Regardless of how you go about repurposing, make sure you take the time to make it look good visually, edit the content for clarity and accuracy, and optimize it for search.

6. Analyze the Results and Refine Your Strategy

With content repurposing, you can do more with less. But this isn’t just about producing a higher quantity of content in less time or with fewer resources. It’s also about maximizing your results with a single subject.

Just as you used your analytics to identify content to repurpose, you’ll want to use it after publication as well. And this goes beyond Google Analytics. Email marketing software, social media management tools, course hosting platforms and so on come with their own native analytics. The data you find here will help you figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Just as before, you want to make sure that your repurposed content is engaging. This means that visitors are:

• Spending a sufficient amount of time viewing it
• Clicking on links
• Commenting on posts
• Sharing it with others
• Exploring more of what you offer

It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on how repurposing content helps your lead generation and conversion rates.

You may discover that certain subjects or content types are more effective on certain platforms over others. And, by proxy, with different kinds of users. For instance, your infographics may bring over more engaged readers and prospective clients from Pinterest than they do when hosted on your website’s blog.

Whatever you learn, use it to refine your repurposing strategy. You can use this data to choose what to repurpose, focus your efforts on certain content formats and refine your messaging for specific platforms.

Wrapping Up

Repurposing content comes with a whole host of benefits beyond just time savings. For example, you’ll:

• Have something new to work on and publish even if new ideas dry up
• Be able to create content at scale much more easily
• Provide more value to users as they can approach a single topic from different angles
• Reach different kinds of users who have unique content format preferences
• Expand the reach of your brand by engaging with new users on various channels
• Create more effective and cohesive marketing content and campaigns
• Strengthen your brand’s online authority by repeatedly honing in on certain subjects
• Improve lead generation and sales via content

Repurposed content isn’t a replacement for original content. To stay competitive in your market, you’ll always need to be producing new material and discussing current topics. However, repurposing your content can be a great way to continue and improve the information flow from your brand as you work out these new marketing campaigns and content.