How to Refresh Content to Boost its Value in New Channels and Formats

As a marketer, it’s important that you have at least three different uses planned for any single piece of content you create.

This mindset is necessary to drive the most value from your work and ensure you provide your audience a variety of formats for learning more about their topics of interest. Think about it: If your ideal buyers are interested in a topic, it makes sense to repackage or reapproach your ideas in a few different ways, through various formats and channels, to best reach these buyers.

However, it is often difficult to go back and give a piece of content a full set of derivative content when you already have a lot on your plate. There is always another deadline right around the corner. And this only further complicates in heavily siloed organizations.

The best way to optimize your content creation is to think through the various forms for your content from your earliest planning phases. I’ll show you how to bake this type of thinking into your day-to-day work and showcase the range of ways that you can repurpose content for new channels and formats.

Plan Your PESO Model 2.0 Content Ecosystem

All content you create should fit within your greater content ecosystem. To say this another way: all content should tie to a priority topic for your audience, and your team should provide value through your audience’s preferred channels and formats.

To start, you must first define and document your priority content topics. Andy Crestodina, the co-founder of Orbit Media Studios and author of Content Chemistry, refers to this as your Content Hub. This enables you to build authority on a topic and break through the noise in your given space.

With your primary content topics defined, the best way to visualize your content’s full potential is to follow the PESO Model created by Gini Dietrich, founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich and author of Spin Sucks.

At its core, the PESO Model is all about the intersection of an organization’s marketing and communications functions. It shows the overlaps between earned, paid, shared, and owned media sources. Each of these media types has various activities and goals associated with them.

With the PESO Model, you can more efficiently brainstorm how your content can take new life. Some questions to ask yourself in this process include:

• What is the best format for my planned piece of content?
• How can this core piece of content be repurposed?
• Is there a cross-departmental need I can address with this content?

How to Refresh Content For A New Format or Channel

Any piece of content can drive value as another form with just a few simple changes. Again, the goal is to map out this derivative content from your initial planning discussions.

You should also listen to cues from your community about what content deserves to be expanded or refreshed. During your annual blog content audit, look for content that has a high readership or social shares. Monitor for comments and questions on your content that signal how you can rework the concept.

Here are just a few ways that you can repurpose any piece of base content:

How to repurpose a blog post

• Pull quotes or tips from the blog post and create visuals to promote the piece on social media.
• Break down a process or series of steps and create an infographic that distills the information.
• Combine multiple blog posts on a similar topic into an ebook or guide.
• Record a member of your team reading the blog post and embed the audio in the original piece. Use that audio on social media or through your team’s podcast feed.

How to repurpose contributed content

• Distill the main points into a SlideShare presentation.
• Curate its third-party link for social media promotion.
• Create a visual summary to promote the piece on social media.
• Write a new piece of content that builds on the third-party piece. Link to the original content in your new article.

How to repurpose an e-book

• Break the book down into a series of blog posts. Link each post to one another and the final ebook.
• Design visuals that illustrate the concepts discussed. Use those visuals for social media promotion.
• Build a webinar that discusses the e-book contents.
• Create a quick video highlighting key points from the ebook, leveraging any graphics used in the ebook.

How to repurpose an infographic

• Take sections of the infographic to create a SlideShare presentation.
• Pull individual statistics for social media copy.
• Write a blog post that expands on the infographic contents.
• Expand on the statistics or narrative in an e-book.

How to repurpose a customer case study

• Use your interview transcript to create a blog post, one-page overview, and slides for sales presentations.
• Create a video with your customer that further explains how your product/service has helped them overcome challenges and achieve results.
• Use customer quotes to layer into future blog posts and content that your team creates.

How to repurpose a podcast

• Turn the audio into a transcript and publish that as a blog post.
• Create a video to accompany your podcast and share that on social media.
• Pull a collection of quotes or tips/other actionable advice from multiple podcast episodes and create a roundup blog post.
• Use sound bites to promote the podcast on social media or in your email newsletter.

How to repurpose video content

• Create GIFs or short video snippets for use on social media.
• Distill the concepts discussed into a quick visual or infographic.
• Use the video transcript to create an accompanying blog post.
• Condense long videos into quick 30 second or 1 minute long clips.

Examples of Repurposed Content

To serve as inspiration for how you might repurpose your team’s existing content, check out these examples:

• Redbooth, Contributed Content to SlideShare: Redbooth’s CEO wrote a contributed post for Gigaom about five ways to accomplish inbox zero. We then distilled the key points for an easy-to-digest SlideShare presentation and created a new Redbooth blog post to share the piece. The SlideShare has 20,000+ recent views (the counter resets over time) and continues to drive traffic to Redbooth’s site.
• Salesforce, Customer Case Study presented as a Blog Post and Video: Salesforce is a standout company for many reasons, including how it approaches its customer case studies (or customer success stories, as they call them). Take this T-Mobile example. The case study is presented as both a blog post and a video, and the header image can easily be used for promotion on social media.
• Radix Communications, Email Newsletter Content to 10 Pieces of Content: B2B copywriting agency Radix turned an exclusive newsletter article into ten separate content pieces. After the newsletter earned a high number of click-throughs, the team shared it as a blog post, then a podcast episode, and then… a board game! Learn all about the content’s journey and how they repurposed it here.
• Jay Baer’s Jay Today Daily Video Show to 8 Pieces of Content: Jay Today was a near-daily video show discussing business, marketing, social media, and life. Jay repurposed each video as a Youtube video, Facebook video, iTunes episode, a blog post, and more! Jay explains how he did it.
• Highwire PR, Internal client presentation to business development SlideShare: PR is driven by the news cycle. But what do you do when your company has a gap between announcements? Highwire PR regularly shared their POV on this topic with clients. And while I was the head of the Content Studio there, we turned it into social content and a SlideShare that also showcased our content marketing capabilities.

Free Content Planning Template

In your day-to-day work, it makes sense to use a hybrid content creation document that details the various forms that your content will take. This document should explain your content’s goal, the other pieces of content this new piece will link to, and the various places to link back to this new piece.

Use this free content planning template to get started and accelerate your content planning processes.

What New Life Will Your Content Take on Next?

By ending your one-and-done content processes, your team has greater potential to delight your audiences and drive legitimate business value through your content.

As you plan any content, assess how you can revisit and expand upon that topic for a different format or channel. It is best to think through these options when you first plan your content to optimize your content creation for its future uses. You can then schedule a realistic cadence for when each piece of content will post, and how you cross-promote your content in its many forms.

Download our free content planning template today to get started.