If a topic is valuable to your brand community or audience, then it makes sense to explore that information in multiple ways to drive the most value from your efforts! As our team believes: for every one piece of content you create, you should have at least three uses.
To help you create a process for planning your derivative content, Erika joins Meisha Bochicchio, digital content marketing program manager at VMware, in this #ContentChat recap to explain how to repurpose content to maximize your content marketing value.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube or read through the highlights below.
Q1: What are the signs that an existing piece of content could drive value in a new form?
If your audience engages with a piece of content and it consistently drives views or clicks, it could be valuable in other forms!
“If something is really resonating with your audience so you’re getting a ton of engagement on your social amplification and people are commenting, you have high engagement via email, [and] you have lots of page traffic or lots of referral traffic—those are really great signals that a topic is relevant and your audience might be hungry for that content in different formats.” – Meisha Bochicchio
“As I look at our event content and how to prioritize how we’re repurposing our content, I’m using things like consumption signals (how many folks are going to our on-demand library and what sessions are trending). Also reviews from our sessions: how can I get those out and amplify those to our remote folks as well?” – Meisha Bochicchio
Ideally, your content team will map out all the derivative forms of content for a topic or asset during the planning stages.
“I hope that starts before you create the content, right? I like to think about it on a campaign level—mapping out your content from the very beginning.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Erika uses a content planning form to think through the many forms that a content idea can take.
“Pretty much every major engagement I’ve had for the last six years has been kicked off with creating that kind of content intake form or content planning form. Because a lot of times, maybe so many different people are involved in the process that everyone just sort of picks it up and starts fresh every time. And that’s how you forget things. If you’re starting from a blank page, I think it’s so hard to really make the most of it. It has to be a system.” – Erika Heald
Using a large research report as an example, Meisha says you could launch it in the form of a digital event, explore the topic in other places like webinars or podcasts, and also plan a certain number of blog post topics to promote the report.
“So, for example, [if] you have a large research report coming out the next quarter, think about how you can take that and break that down into an entire ecosystem of content. You might [say]: I want to launch this in the form of a digital event, we want to have a webinar or a conference around this theme to launch the report. You could [also] submit speaking opportunities to relevant conferences, webinars, [and] podcasts. You could also come up with X derivative blog topics that might make sense to level up into the report.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Social media is important to consider, too!
“Also think about your social strategy. How are we distributing and breaking down this information and starting conversations with our audience on social? You could come up with carousels, video sizzle reels that share the data, or you can break up your event into different sections and video segments for social reaction videos. You could do polls and then gut check your research against what people think.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Email marketing can be especially effective for repurposing your content.
“Have snippets that you send out in your newsletters. Maybe you send it out via a one-off list that matches the ICP for that information. [Or] add that content to relevant onboarding flows or nurtures or newsletters, wherever it makes sense given the context.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Q2: When planning a piece of content, how do you decide the best format(s) to create for your audience?
Ask what content format makes sense based on the context of the content.
“First and foremost, you have to think about what makes sense in the context of the content. Something highly visual might not make the best podcast episode, for example. Alternatively, if you have a super long, deep conversation about something, that might not make the most visually stimulating event. But then you could use short video snippets or audio grams broken up from that super long conversation that might be good for social.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Then, assess what makes the most sense given your audience and their content consumption habits.
“A B2B audience might not respond well to content that you repurpose across Facebook, for example. If you’re a B2C brand or a direct-to-consumer brand, you might struggle on LinkedIn but crush it on Instagram or TikTok. Think about what makes sense for your audience and where they like to consume their content information.” – Meisha Bochicchio
As a final consideration: What makes sense for your team or your company?
“I try to encourage folks to not cave to the pressure to be everything, everywhere, all at once, because it’s just not effective. And it’s not a good use of anyone’s time. The rule of thumb here is: it’s better to be the best in one place that’s most relevant to your audience versus being mediocre and basically ignored everywhere. Tie it back to your bigger goals. How can content be repurposed to support those efforts?” – Meisha Bochicchio
Be willing to experiment with new content formats and channels to stay ahead of shifting tides.
“It’s important to think about the fact that you’re going to have a process in place, but all of this changes with every piece of content you create. Because your audience consumption is not static. The channels we use are not static. I know so many B2B content marketers were used to Twitter being this amazing channel for content distribution, [but] it’s really changed. Having that process in place means that when a bigger shift like that happens, you’ve already been thinking through where your audience is and other ways that you can use or distribute your content.” – Erika Heald
“Have the foresight to experiment. I know there are a lot of folks who are experimenting in different spaces on different platforms. It’s good to not go all-in on just one space.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Q3: What are some smart ways to repurpose virtual or in-person event and presentation content?
Meisha’s role is very focused on the idea of repurposing event sessions for VMware. She shared the following insights for how she finds meaningful ways to repurpose event content:
Add a transcript of the recording.
“The super low-effort, low-impact way to do this is simply add a transcript to whatever page your video is on. This can be good for accessibility [because] you’re giving folks multiple ways to consume your content, but otherwise, it’s not really the best experience.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Session curation is a great option. These posts can also be used in follow-up after the event, recommending sessions based on an attendee’s job title or other sessions they watched.
“Session curation is one way that I am thinking about this. It really works well if you have a lot of content to work with. Let’s say you have a large event with lots of sessions: look at common themes and different ways you can bucket those in meaningful ways and just have a curated list for folks. You might have ‘Top X’ sessions by popularity overall (or based on the reviews and feedback), or top sessions based on a persona or a job function. ” – Meisha Bochicchio
“That’s so great, because you basically can create a master class for people by combining sessions that they weren’t necessarily aware of, or from different events over time. You’re taking all of that evergreen content that people might not look into, because they’re not going to just page through archives looking for stuff.” – Erika Heald
Session recaps with highlights are valuable when formatted well. If relevant, you can include attendee or participant content that relates to the session.
“You do have your session recap highlights [with] top takeaways, however, you want to think about that. You can embed the full video or highlight reel to encourage folks to watch more. The key to making these work is really focus on the formatting, making it super easy to scan for folks to get the gist of the session. And it’s just way less intimidating than looking at a full wall of text.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Create video clips from the sessions.
“Using the clips from the full event session [is] a super low lift way to feed your organic social feeds. Or even repurpose those for paid social, if that makes sense (or paid ads elsewhere!).” – Meisha Bochicchio
Or create audio snippets.
“Even if your event recording isn’t the best quality or it’s just not as visually appealing, you can try audio grams. Create an audio gram of a really compelling nugget or snippet.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Visual illustrations are a way to distill event content in a fun and engaging way.
“Hire an illustrator or someone who can sit in on your session and create a sketch that pulls everything together. It makes a fun giveaway to your attendees or folks who couldn’t attend. Send it to them via email. They might feel compelled to share that on social after. And I think it also makes a nice gift to your presenter as well.” – Meisha Bochicchio
If there is enough audio content, you can consider creating a podcast episode.
“Depending on the session and the format, [you] could make a low-lift podcast episode. And just repurposing that [session] into an audio-first format.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Q4: How can you use AI to help with content repurposing?
AI can be a very helpful thought partner to conduct research and uncover considerations you may be overlooking.
“AI can be really helpful, if you use it properly, to provide that context to you so you understand the environments in which people are working, what kind of challenges they have that you may not have anticipated, etc. I think it’s a fantastic thought partner. I’m hopeful that we see more content creators look at it and see how they can harness it as maybe an intern—a tool you are teaching how to do things the way that you want them to be done, so it can help you do more of what you want to do.” – Erika Heald
If possible, advocate for your organization to form an AI council.
“VMware, as a company, is very invested in the future of AI. And we even have an internal marketing AI council dedicated to the exploration of this whole field, which is pretty cool… It’s [also] been helpful to have some internal partners that can help guide me to AI tools and give pretty strict guardrails that guide me in the creation of very technical content.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Q5: Do you have any go-to tools for repurposing content?
Looking at AI tools for content creation and repurposing specifically, Meisha recommends Jasper AI, Writer, and Gloss.
“[Jasper has] a feature called remix where you can upload a transcript of an event session, and then I can work with it to create a recap or summary [and] play around with different prompts to get what I want based on that transcript.” – Meisha Bochicchio
“I’m a big fan of Writer, and they’re interesting because they can actually ingest video content directly. So you don’t necessarily have to spin up a transcript.” – Meisha Bochicchio
“Gloss is one that we’re piloting, where it can take an hour-long event session and suggest different snippets. It’ll give you key moments that they think would be appealing on social, but then you can go in and edit those and trim them down from there. And they also have some branding tools as well, so you can add in bumpers or different branding elements or different pop-ups with your approved font and colors.” – Meisha Bochicchio
Erika and our team use Otter.ai to generate transcripts. Erika also recommends Copy.ai.
“What I love is that if I invite Otter to a meeting as an attendee, it will [transcribe the conversation] in real-time. And it will send out an email to everybody on the invitation for the meeting with the summary. So if you do a good job of assigning people to-dos, then you’ll have all of that stuff in that summary email and not have to follow-up.” – Erika Heald
“What I really like about [Copy.ai] is that it allows me—as somebody who has multiple clients who have different brand voices, different style guides—to create those kinds of resources or point to them so when I’m creating content I can make sure that I haven’t accidentally applied someone else’s voice.” – Erika Heald
Outside of AI-enabled tools, Meisha and Erika recommend Canva for graphic design, Descript for video editing, and Beautiful.ai for presentations.
Q6: What examples can you share of times you’ve repurposed content for different formats and drove considerable results?
Starting at 38:50 in the video recording, Meisha explains how her previous company, Goldcast, used content to launch a new webinar offering and educate buyers that Goldcast is great for recurring event series.
“We came up with a week-long campaign called ‘Webinar Week,’ where we hosted five webinars in five days. The goal was to share a behind-the-scenes look at how we actually planned and executed webinars. [And it] was educating our audience on having a webinar strategy. We had a report that we also launched in tandem with this campaign, where we looked at our proprietary platform data and came up with a benchmark report of how other customers were using the platform for webinars and the results that they were seeing. We ended up [creating] over 15 derivative blog articles—some of them related to the data and best practices, some of them had external thought leaders share how they were doing webinars at their companies. We had multi-channel distribution across social, which we were active on LinkedIn, because that’s where our audience lived.” – Meisha Bochicchio
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