There are only so many hours in the day, and I would guess you don’t want a significant portion of them spent creating content.
Even with a large team, streamlining content creation saves so much time that it can then be spent elsewhere in the business.
Email and social channels are often the most time-consuming to run. Frequent campaigns and posting schedules are great, but who will be creating all that content?
What if I told you there’s a super secret method to amplify your return on investment when creating content and ensuring your channels have content that’s easy to create?
Well, it’s not really a secret; it’s in the title.
Repurposing blog content means taking a single blog post and adapting it into multiple formats for other marketing channels. Instead of creating new material for every platform, you reuse key ideas from your blog to create emails, social posts, videos, or visual content.
Keep reading and see how I repurpose, and learn some tips on how you can do it efficiently.
Why Repurposing Content Matters for Small Teams & Solo Marketers
Repurposing isn’t a new concept, and you’re likely doing it even now. Taking thoughts and ideas from one area of the business and applying them to others.
Content repurposing means taking what you’ve already created for your blog and adapting it for other channels such as email, social media, or visual content formats.
You would be surprised at how far one piece of content can go. A 1500-word blog post can be transformed into numerous social media posts, entire email campaigns, opt-in assets, and more. It can be easy to dismiss a blog, given that you have many other channels, but I would argue that it’s precisely because of these channels that your business needs a consistent blog.
In the grand scheme of content creation, this saves time, extends your reach through other channels, and compounds the ROI you get from your content work.
Smaller teams and solopreneurs may find this revolutionary, but larger teams can also benefit by allocating resources elsewhere once content is streamlined.
Benefits of Repurposing Blog Posts Into Email and Social Content
I’ve touched upon some benefits briefly, but when looking at your entire marketing strategy, blog repurposing can have a significant impact:
Saves Time While Staying Visible
Even one blog post can fuel a week or more of content when you repurpose blog content strategically.
This changes the flow of creation from:
Social + Email + Blogs
To
Blogs -> Email & Social
Streamlining the way you work through topic ideas and generate content. Now, you can focus on one larger piece of content and then follow up with smaller pieces on other channels that retain the same core messaging, which is another benefit.
Reinforces Key Messages Across Channels
Sharing similar ideas and covering content within the same clusters over different channels helps build familiarity and trust. It also helps drive a sense of cohesiveness with your content.
It’s far easier to establish authority when your channels convey the same message in a consistent tone and style. After all, brand consistency is a crucial factor in enhancing brand visibility and building trust. Similarly, your audience on all channels will likely have the same questions and require the same information. Thus, adopting a strategy such as converting FAQs into blog posts will compound when repurposed across channels, helping you answer these questions across the board.
Reinforces Key Messages Across Channels
Sharing similar ideas and covering content within the same clusters over different channels helps build familiarity and trust. It also helps drive a sense of cohesiveness with your content.
It’s far easier to establish authority when your channels convey the same message in a consistent tone and style. After all, brand consistency is a crucial factor in enhancing brand visibility and building trust. Similarly, your audience on all channels will likely have the same questions and require the same information. Thus, adopting a strategy such as converting FAQs into blog posts will compound when repurposed across channels, helping you answer these questions across the board.
Meets Your Audience Where They Already Are
Finally, a benefit that combines the previous two is that you can meet your audience where they are.
We’d all love our audience to engage with the content we post, but the reality is that some prefer browsing social media, while others check their email frequently. And some, neither.
Repurposing content enables you to appear where they are and engage with them on their preferred platform. The repurposing aspect of this allows all channels to receive the same message, optimised for each platform.
So, no one misses out, and everyone cheers at receiving fresh new content from your business!
A Simple Framework for Repurposing Blog Content
Start with a strong blog post that covers a topic in depth. From there, identify the sections or ideas that can stand alone as smaller pieces of content.
You can then adapt those ideas for different marketing formats, such as:
- Email newsletters or campaign sections
- Social media posts or carousels
- Short-form videos
- Visual graphics or infographics
Once you begin looking at your blog posts this way, it becomes much easier to generate consistent content across multiple channels without starting from scratch each time.
How to Repurpose Blog Content for Email Marketing
Now that we know the whats and the whys and have a simple framework, let’s look at the specifics for each channel.
Email marketing can be a challenging channel for some, as it requires crafting either tight messaging for branded campaigns or personable content for more casual emails.
Either/or can put a strain on resources and ideally requires a copy/content writer who’s familiar with your other channels to curate the content most effectively.
Here’s how to repurpose blog content for email while retaining the same tone and message.
Use Blog Intros as Newsletter Intros
You can craft a new campaign on the same topic as a recent blog post. It’s quite common for blog post introductions to be written in a way that you can use directly on other platforms.
Leverage your already-written blog intros to create strong openers for email campaigns and newsletters.
Turn Key Headers Into Campaigns and Sequences
A benefits section within a blog post may be a few hundred words. For blogging and SEO, this usually isn’t enough for a full post on its own. However, for email, it certainly is, and maybe a bit more.
Strip the core internal sections of your blog post and use them as their own campaigns. The “benefits of repurposing…” section above could easily be its own campaign or section of a sequence if called for.
Sequences and automations also benefit from repurposing, as they typically focus on a single core area of your business or offer.
Have a blog post on that already?
Take the best parts and core concepts and repurpose them. Then, you can link the same blog at the end of the email to give users a way to learn more.
Use the Post Itself as Filler Content
When working on emails for clients with structured formats, I cover the important elements first, and sometimes end up with one section left to fill.
New blog posts or older relevant posts make great content fillers. This means simply grabbing a blog snippet and pairing it with its headline to create an organic, already-written CTA for your blog or site.
While the link may push users to that blog specifically, strategic internal linking throughout your posts can guide them to important service pages and products.
So, while the entry is a blog you wrote a month ago, the outcome and customer journey could lead to a conversion.
How to Repurpose Blog Content for Social Media
You’ll be glad to know that repurposing blog content for social media is considerably easier, thanks to the shorter-form nature of social media.
Here are some easy, quick-fire ways you can repurpose:
Pull Short Quotes or Stats for LinkedIn or Instagram
We all love a good quote post.
If you’ve used statistics, graphs, or other quantitative data in your post, consider pulling that and forming short, quote-driven posts for your social media. LinkedIn text or image posts work well for this, and you can overlay the quote on a branded Instagram image.
Create a Carousel or Infographic Based on Blog Sections
Key headers within your blogs are also perfect for multi-image carousels or larger infographics. “Top X ways to…” or “The Benefits of…” style blogs are great to repurpose for this, as each numbered entry or benefit can act as its own image.
For infographics, consider creating portrait versions to ensure you have ample space to work with while maintaining optimal usability for phone users. Infographics are certainly more involved than simple text-based posts, but they also have the added benefit of improved SEO.
How, you ask?
Once you have created the infographic, add it back into your main blog post with a relevant, keyword-rich alt text, and you increase the chances of appearing in Google Image searches as well.
You also shouldn’t overlook the trust-building potential of this content type. Infographics deliver information more digestibly and can sustain engagement for longer. For social and email, these let you make better use of available space and save on written descriptions. For blogs, they improve the already trust-building nature of blog posts by supplementing the written content with more engaging visuals that increase shareability.
Summarise Key Points in a Short-Form Video
Another perfect one for brands and businesses that can get in front of a camera. Visuals will always enhance relatability and trust, and there’s no better way to achieve that than by shooting short videos.
And look here, the script is already written!
Chop up your blog post and use each section as a script. You can even do a once-over to remove the “blog” language and make it easier to read for a video.
Ask a Question From the Blog as a Discussion Starter
Asking questions on your social channels is a great way to gather direct feedback from your audience and learn more about them.
If you run an Instagram or Facebook profile, you’ve likely experienced the stress of needing to post a story but not knowing what to write.
Once again, your blog comes to the rescue.
You can pull general ideas from your blog or look at the reason for the blog’s creation in the first place. What problem were you trying to solve, and what solutions did you provide in your answer?
These can create discussion starters for interactive Reels stickers, allowing users to respond directly to the content.
The sneakier use of this is that you can then follow up with a conversation or by sending the blog link to those who answer. Where relevant, of course, let’s not spam!
Want to Do More With the Blogs You’re Already Writing?
Repurposing your blogs is a strategy not many incorporate, but one that can save you countless hours of content creation in the future. You can use it to give yourself time to focus on other areas of your business, create even more content, or just kick back, knowing your content is sorted at a fraction of the time.
Looking for help repurposing your blog content?
Get in touch, and we can review your existing posts, identify key sections to reuse, and build a content repurposing strategy that helps you get more value from every article you publish.
