How to Reuse Content, to Supercharge Marketing

Good content marketing ideas can be hard to come by. To get the most out of each idea, develop a plan to reuse your content. It can supercharge your marketing and help reach more potential customers.

The idea, research, and even some of the very words in a blog post can be reused as an infographic, chart, podcast, or YouTube video script. These new versions of the content shouldn’t be wholesale imitations, but fresh takes on a good content idea — new ways of telling a story.

Having a content reuse plan in place — even as you develop new content marketing ideas — could help obtain higher quality content and faster content production.

Remember content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing content like blog posts or videos with the specific aim of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers.

Content marketing is most effective when it helps, informs, or entertains your audience of customers and potential customers. It should produce content your audience wants and will seek out, allowing you to draw customers to your business.

Content marketing is one of the best and most popular ways to engage customers and potential customers.

Last year, eMarketer reported that about 86 percent of business-to-consumer marketers were using content marketing, up some 10 percent from the prior year. What’s more, most B2C marketers are spending at least 10 percent or more of their total marketing budget on content, according to the survey.

Content marketing’s value as a customer-winning marketing tool, the effort it takes to produce, and growing content competition make every content idea your business generates valuable. You could use that idea just once, or you could plan ahead to reuse it, multiplying its value.

Here are some ideas for starting a content marketing reuse plan.

Identify Content Mediums

Content can take many forms, but most businesses will start with a blog or journal. This owned media will be the primary means of publishing and the focus for content marketing ideas.

After establishing your primary medium or content-marketing channel, identify some secondary mediums. For example, an online retailer might choose a blog for its primary content medium. But it could also publish high-quality content on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, using an email newsletter to develop the audience further.

Each medium will have its own type or form of content, and it will have a particular target action, like subscribing to your company’s email list.

Everything produced, be it a blog post or a video, should adhere to your company’s content-marketing mission statement.

Create a Multiplication Schedule

Each time you do the work to develop a content idea for your primary medium or channel, like a blog, have a plan and schedule in place to use variations of that idea in your secondary channels.

For example, you might create a schedule like this one.

• Wednesday, 9:00 a.m., publish your new blog article.
• Wednesday, 11:00 a.m., post a picture from the article on Instagram
• Thursday 4:00 p.m., publish a picture and key point from the article on Facebook.
• Friday, 11:00 a.m., post a second image to Instagram.
• Saturday 1:00 p.m., publish a second picture and second point from the article on Facebook.
• Tuesday, 7:30 a.m., release the article in this week’s email newsletter.
• Thursday 8:00 a.m., two weeks later, post a YouTube video based on the article.
• Friday 10:00 a.m., post a third image to Instagram.
• Tuesday, 5:00 p.m., share the video on Facebook, with a paragraph explaining a key point.
• Tuesday, 7:30 a.m., three weeks later, share the video in the email newsletter.

In this example, the content idea generated an article, a video, two email newsletters, and six social media posts. And this strategy might be extended so that you revisited the content idea in three months and then again in six months.

Create with Reuse in Mind

From the moment you begin to develop your content idea, think about how you will reuse it.

Joe Pulizzi, founder and C.E.O. of Content Marketing Institute, recommends thinking about content as a story in his book, Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses.

Think of a famous story like Romeo and Juliet or Noah and the flood. While there is certainly a source for these stories, the tale can be retold. You could sit on your couch and recount Romeo and Juliet’s sad fate to friends or children.

In a similar way, the content you use to market is like a story that can also be retold. So it is possible to write a great article that tells the story of how to accomplish some task or use some product, and then retell that same story in a video or in a Facebook post.

Content Reuse Helps Your Business

Pulizzi and others have identified several benefits from content reuse.

Improved content quality. Content reuse can make you invest more time in telling and retelling the story. When you post a key fact on Facebook, you’re not simply pasting the headline, you’re being thoughtful, which can make all of your content better.

Fast content creation. While you may spend more time on each content idea, you will need fewer content ideas overall. Retelling a story can be faster than creating a story.

Address different audiences. “Some people are visual learners, while others may prefer reading a document,” Pulizzi wrote. Converting your idea into different formats for different mediums may help you reach a greater number of potential customers.

Cross promotion. Good, interconnected content helps to promote your primary medium.