Make Your Marketing Matter
Earlier this year, we decided it was time to update Savoir Faire’s Points of Interest (POI), a twice-monthly marketing tips email made up of six short blog posts that mostly pointed to third-party content. We used them to share information we thought our clients would be interested in. We evolved those emails into Make Your Marketing Matter, emails containing a single quick video on specific marketing topics delivered to inboxes.
(Evolving your content is not the same as repurposing content, but evolving is important, too. After seven years of POIs, it was time to shake things up.)
In the Make Your Marketing Matter videos, we’ve featured topics including:
- The resurgence of QR codes in marketing
- Important WordPress site updates
- How to rank for coveted “near me” searches
- Ways to find money for a marketing budget
Those video topics came from existing blog posts. We reworked posts into scripts, trimmed the content to keep the videos under three minutes and shot the videos in our office. Boom, fresh content. Repurposing content isn’t cheating the system.
You’ve probably got strong content languishing on your site or in your database that isn’t pulling its weight in its current form. The content might be old, outdated, not optimized for search engines, etc.
Analyze and utilize your blog
You should measure the performance of your blog regularly to inform and update your content strategy, but you may overlook your older, lower ranked posts. Go back in time and see what’s there. There might be some posts with good information but some of it is no longer relevant.
Remove the outdated material from those old posts, update them with current information and republish them as fresh content.
A new coat of paint for blog posts
The updated version of your post, which answers searchers’ questions with new data, also informs Google and other search engines that you don’t let content stagnate. Plus the repurposed (and potentially re-indexed by Google) content could reach a new audience.
Even for posts with evergreen content that don’t need updating, update calls to action on the page to point to newer or more-relevant content and update offers to keep returning visitors engaged with your site.
Transform blog posts into e-books
You can also take old blog posts within a similar topic area, remove any incorrect or outdated information, and combine them into an e-book. Don’t get scared by the word “book.” You’ve already done the heavy lifting. Just do some editing to weave the posts into chapters. Write an introduction, include a table of contents and add an epilogue, tying all the material together.
Longform content like an e-book has value beyond a blog. You can use e-books as lead generation tools to collect information from prospects. For one client, we reworked several of their blog posts and turned it into a printed glossy magazine to raise awareness about some of their new services.
Blog posts to landing pages
Perhaps you’ve got some keywords you really want to rank highly for, but your blog posts don’t hang onto rankings over time. You’re confident the information is good. But Google may be ignoring it. Perhaps the posts are too short.
Consider joining several posts on the same subject and create a comprehensive, “ultimate guide” to the subject. Make the page an “everything you wanted to know about <blank>.” We’ve seen impressive results with that tactic, and we used it for ourselves for pages on email marketing and website planning.
When you have a long piece of content with similar targeted keywords, Google pays attention and may reward you as a subject matter expert, meaning that page rises in rankings. This content is valuable to readers because it combines a lot of answers to questions in one space.
Video is easier than ever
Let’s revisit our MYMM videos. Our email subscribers get first access to them on our YouTube page, but after a period of time we make the videos searchable for everyone. We can take small snippets of the videos and share them on social channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. In fact, you can use different snippets to share on each social channel, attracting different audiences based on a variety of relevant hashtags.
Video was a minor investment, including a tripod with a teleprompter, some lighting and some décor. But you can use your existing content for videos with just a cell phone and someone at their desk or station. People are much more open to low-fi videos these days. And the technology in our pockets improves everyone’s chances of making a nice video.
Infographics still catch the eye
Some people think time-consuming and expensive when they see the word infographic, but there are several free infographic creator sites and others with 30-day free trials. Canva, for example, has many free customizable templates for infographics.
Take some of the meatiest portions of blog posts and turn them into an infographic you then share on social media. Link to the full post to fresh eyes on that content.
One other tip, not related to repurposing content, but for sunsetting content. Not all of your old content is worth repurposing. We recently analyzed all of our blog posts, determined which were worth keeping, which were worth rewriting and republishing and which were going bye-bye from the site.
And, yes, we will also repurpose this blog post for a MYMM video, infographic and posts on different social channels. If you’d like to see the end result, sign up for our emails here!
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