By Tom Mcloughlin, Founder, SEO Travel
We all know the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling when it comes to waste. But what if we explained that a similar concept could be applied to the way that you create and distribute content, known as ‘repurposing’.
Content repurposing is not a new concept, but it’s one that a surprisingly small number of businesses really take advantage of. The approach revolves around trying to get as much out of every piece of content as you can, and is a particularly useful method for travel businesses with a small team that doesn’t have the manpower to keep churning out new content each week.
With a proper plan in place, repurposing marketing content can turn a meagre content strategy into an engaging and successful multi-channel approach, all without too much extra effort. In this article, we explain what content repurposing is, some key content repurposing examples, and some of the biggest benefits of this approach.
Join us at World Travel Market London
The market leading travel and tourism event brings the whole world together in London.
Join us from 5- 7 November 2024 at ExCel London
What is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing is based on the idea of taking a piece of content and reusing it in a different format to create something else. It’s used in all kinds of different marketing strategies in order to maximise the impact of content that gets created from scratch and ensure that audiences across a range of different channels all see the content shared by a brand.
There’s a difference between repurposing your content and just reposting it. The latter doesn’t require any editing and is literally just taking a piece of content and sharing it somewhere else, whilst the former involves changing the format, size or target audience of a piece so it becomes something new.
Repurposing marketing content is a fantastic approach to use if you’re trying to build out your content strategy but don’t currently have the resources to be producing a lot more new content. Once you start seeing content repurposing as part of the content creation process, you’ll start to realise that one new idea has the potential to be developed in lots of different ways.
Join us at World Travel Market London
The market leading travel and tourism event brings the whole world together in London.
Join us from 5–7 November 2024 at ExCeL London.
How to Repurpose Your Content
One of the most valuable things about the content repurposing approach is that it has so many different applications.
But before we go into some specific examples of how to repurpose your content, we’re first going to go over what you should think about when deciding how you’re going to repurpose a piece in the first place.
First, consider the format of the original content and whether this lends itself to being repurposed. Things like blog posts and videos are fantastic for repurposing in a range of ways, whilst still images and audio are useful but not quite as versatile.
Next, consider the original intentions of the content and who it was aimed at. Often, a simple way to repurpose a piece of content is to keep the same theme but just tweak the audience or message so that you can target another section of your customer base.
Finally, consider the potential channels where you can share repurposed pieces of content. Go further than just posting on different social media platforms, and think about how you can utilise a website blog, email newsletter, paid social ads or even a press release.
With that in mind, here’s a breakdown of content repurposing examples to showcase some of the best ways to repurpose common types of content.
Written Content
Written content might be anything from a blog post or an interview transcript to a longer piece like an eBook or a whitepaper. This is one of the most versatile forms of content with many different repurposing ideas and so is a great place to start when you’re creating a content repurposing strategy.
If you’ve written a longform piece of content, consider how this writing could be condensed to create several shorter pieces of content. You could take the key points from a post offering travel advice and turn them into slides that can be posted as a series on Instagram, or use a condensed version of a blog article as content for an email newsletter.
You could also use content that has been published as text as the basis for a script, and create a video covering the same topic as the original written content. Video as a format is incredibly popular in marketing right now, and if you can condense your ideas into short video clips for YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, you’ll have a new kind of content that is going to be incredibly engaging.
Repurposing content can also involve finding older pieces you have produced and breathing new life into them. Perhaps a blog post from a couple of years ago didn’t perform very well? Consider resharing it or even reposting it (content syndication) and see if your current audience is more receptive.
Alternatively, can you take an older piece of content and rewrite it with a new audience in mind?
One of the best practices for repurposing content is to start big and then slowly cut this piece down into smaller bits of content. Sure, it’s going to be a time-consuming task to produce a 6000-word eBook with 5 different sections. But then you’ve got five potential pieces of blog content based on each section, a summary post with the key ideas from the content, and a massive bank of text that you can draw on for social media captions or short, informational posts.
Don’t miss out on our world-leading events
We bring travel and tourism professionals together, from around the world at our events. Discover the closest one to you and join the WTM community.
Images
Images might be photographs or graphics and are usually published either on your travel brand’s website or social media accounts. If you’ve got unique imagery for your brand, make the most out of this and consider reusing photographs in emails, as the background for text on social media posts, to catch attention when publishing a text post, or just to illustrate a blog.
With graphics, again consider whether you can reshare these on another channel, such as a different social media platform or in an email. You can repurpose graphical images further by taking elements of the design and reusing them for other images, helping to avoid having to start a design from scratch.
Video
As we’ve already mentioned, video is a very popular format for content at the moment. In the same way that you can repurpose written content into a video script, it’s just as easy to take the transcript from an informational or descriptive video and edit this to become a piece of text that you can publish in a blog or include in an email.
Video is also a really versatile format because you can screen grab still images from it and use this to illustrate posts.
If you’ve got a long piece of video content, there’s potential to repurpose this into lots of smaller clips. These can either be used as teasers to get people to watch the longer video or as individual videos for social media or even to embed on your website or into emails.
Audio
If your travel brand hosts a podcast, you’ve got an absolute goldmine of content just waiting to be repurposed.
Let’s start with audio transcripts. With just a little bit of editing, you can turn episodes into written content, either as a summary of an episode or a longer piece of content focusing on part of the conversation or taking advice from the episode and spinning it into an informational post.
Just like with video, you can take a longer piece of audio content and split this up into short clips to be used as promotional material. We also recommend that you film your podcast recording as well as capture the sound, as short clips from this do particularly well as teasers or bite-size pieces of inspirational/informational content.
At the end of a podcast season, or even just after several episodes, you can also create content summarising the key takeaways from this collection, either in text format or as a highlight reel of videos and/or sound clips.
Even if your brand doesn’t host its own show, you can still do most of the above with the content recorded if someone from your travel company is a guest on another podcast.
Social Media Posts
We’ve already mentioned how other forms of content can be repurposed for social media posts. The shorter nature of this kind of content means that there aren’t as many opportunities to flip the switch and change the format, but there’s a lot of potential in repurposing content for social media on different platforms.
Is a well-known piece of social media marketing advice that you shouldn’t share exactly the same content on every one of your accounts across different platforms. Repurposing comes in handy here, as you should approach every new piece of social media content with the mindset of adapting it for each of the platforms that you use.
Think about the types of customers that engage with each social platform and use this to influence how a post is repurposed. For example, you know that younger customers are more likely to engage with Instagram posts whilst older customers spend more time on Facebook. Can you tailor the intent, language and imagery used to adapt the same post to appeal to these two different demographics?
What are the Benefits of Repurposing Content?
Perhaps the biggest benefit of repurposing marketing content is that it can save you a lot of time and resources. Instead of having to create something new each time you want to share content with your customer base, you’re approaching content creation with multiple outcomes in mind, leading to much more shareable content without that much extra work.
This is also beneficial because more content means a more diverse marketing strategy. You’re able to offer your audience more content more frequently and present similar ideas in different formats, which hopefully means they reach a much wider proportion of your customer base.
Leading on from this, repurposing content helps you to grow your customer base by providing an approach that lets you adapt the audience and intent for each piece so that the reach is wider. You can use this to break into new demographics, which will not only bring in more customers but also increase brand awareness.
Experimenting with different approaches to content through repurposing gives you more data to analyse when it comes to content performance. You can use this data to identify which kinds of content are most successful and which repurposing techniques have the biggest impact, which helps you refine your strategy and increase success.
Finally, content repurposing can be a really useful option if you’re stuck in a period of creative block. Having the option to repurpose an existing piece instead of creating something original means that you can always produce something new, even if your brain isn’t offering up any unique ideas. It’s useful to have this to fall back on, and sometimes working on a repurposing approach can be the creative exercise you need to spark something new.
Summary
The beauty of a content repurposing strategy is that it’s incredibly easy to adapt and put your own spin on. It’s also very scalable, and once you’re familiar with the approach you’ll find it easier and easier to not only come up with new content ideas, but instantly think of the ways that you’ll be able to repurpose this as well. Whether you’re a one-person team or just want to maximise the impact of everything you produce, content repurposing is an incredibly valuable marketing technique.