12 Ways to Stretch your Content Marketing Budget by Repurposing Content

If you subscribe to my blog, I may have already convinced you that content marketing is the future of marketing.  For that matter, 91% of B2B marketers already use content marketing in their organization. If you aren’t one of them, it’s time to start. But I won’t lie. Consistently producing engaging content isn’t easy, and here’s a chart to prove it.

If a lack of budget is a challenge for 35% of businesses, that percentage is bound to be even higher if you’re a small to medium-sized business: How are you expected to compete with larger companies with seemingly endless content marketing budgets?

The answer isn’t necessarily to spend more money or to work harder. The trick is to work smart, by adopting content marketing best practices for small businesses.

You can stretch your content marketing budget by repurposing your quality content. In fact, content repurposing will help you deal with at least three of the challenges faced by B2B marketers:

• You can make your content more engaging by offering people content in the format they prefer  – i.e. provide blog posts to those who prefer to read, and videos, presentation and infographics to those who prefer visual marketing.
• You can produce content more consistently by breathing new life into older content that performed well.
• You can stretch your budget by expanding your reach into new channels like Slideshare and Youtube.

With so many reasons to repurpose content, you’d think it happens all the time. And yet according to Curata, only 21% of marketers systematically repurpose and reuse content.

That means that this is your chance to pull away from the pack: if you can figure out how to optimally repurpose your content, you can gain a competitive advantage. When I work with clients who have a tighter budget, I look for ways to repurpose the content we produce. I’ve picked up a few tricks along the way and today, I’m going to share them with you.

1. Apply The Content Marketing Pyramid

A useful framework to help you adopt a repurposing mindset is Curata’s Content Marketing pyramid. I’ll let you read all about it here, but in a nutshell, the pyramid organizes content ideas into multiple levels, including:

• Core content, which tends to be substantive and original
• Derivate assets based on that core content
• “Microcontent”, which is smaller and more ‘snackable’

You can use the content marketing pyramid in a number of ways, including:

• A top-down approach. For example, develop a single cornerstone of evergreen content, then repurpose it into multiple smaller posts.
• A bottom-up approach. For example, stitch together content from a number of related posts into an ebook that you can use as a lead magnet.

3. Repurpose Your Whiteboard Video into a Presentation

Many of my clients love communicating their stories with whiteboard animation. It can take time to produce all the original illustration needed for the whiteboard video, so one way I’ve found to get my clients more bang for my their buck is to repurpose the video into a hand-drawn presentation. The results have been very satisfying: presentations that stand out from your typical boring PowerPoint.

4. Repurpose videos as blog posts

Every year, video marketing grows in importance. And while there are many things you can do with video to boost your search rankings, nothing beats out text for SEO value. So if one of your videos has gained attention, why not use its transcript as a starting point for your next killer blog post?

5. Convert a how-to post into an explainer video

A how-to post is the perfect starting point for an explainer video. With a few tweaks, you can turn your post into a script, which is a key step in the creation of an explainer video. Here’s a great example of that.

6. Convert a long-form blog post into a lead magnet

Sometimes a simple tweak to the format of a piece can give it wings. Longer blog posts tend to perform better, it’s true. But their downside is that you risk losing readers who are short on time. Mitigate that risk by creating a PDF version for those who prefer to download it and read it later. The added bonus? You can then promote it throughout your site as a lead magnet, to help you quickly build up your email list.

7. Repurpose your presentation as an infographic or vice versa

Presentations and infographics are both effective means for sharing facts and figures with a large group of people. Build a presentation and you can present it live or share it on SlideShare. Build a quality infographic, and you have a valuable asset for fueling your social media presence and building links to your site. So why choose between these benefits, when you can have both? Just design one and then repurpose it as the other.

8. Repurpose a how-to post into an email course

If a how-to post you’ve written has become very popular, your visitors may have an appetite for a more in-depth look at the subject. Expand the post in an email series that teaches them about the subject, and you will have a powerful lead magnet to help you grow your email list.

9. Repurpose your blog post into an infographic

Another way to repurpose a popular blog post is by turning it into an infographic, that you can then milk for social attention by sharing it on your social media.

Great candidates for this tactic are blog posts that:

• share helpful tips
• present eye-opening statistics
• describe a process

10. Repurpose your whiteboard video into an infographic

Combine the uniqueness of a whiteboard video with the easy reference of an infographic. Produce a whiteboard animated infographic, and you have a printable infographic that viewers can also see being drawn on screen before their very eyes.

11. Chop up an infographic into multiple social posts

Another way to get plenty of value from your infographic is to cut it up into multiple bite-sized social posts. This piktochart tutorial will show you the way.

12. Repurpose your presentation into multiple social media posts

Have you prepared a glamorous Steve Jobs worthy presentation? With a little planning, your slides each have the potential to become a compelling social media post.

Over to You

What experience have you had repurposing your content? Have you tried a few of these tips and tricks? How did they work out for you? And if you’re just too tight on time to manage on your own, don’t worry. Exaltus can help. Contact us today.