Why content repurposing is key to positive ROI

Evaluating the return on investment (ROI) value of a single content piece is time consuming. Measuring your entire content marketing strategy is a much broader challenge — in fact, a recent survey found that 65% of marketers can’t quantifiably demonstrate the impact of their content.

In this blog, we’ll explore how to get the most out of your efforts and improve your overall content marketing strategy ROI through content repurposing.

Why content repurposing is essential

For brands looking to level up their content marketing strategy, they might focus on optimizing the content creation process. However, to make really significant efficiency gains, they’ll need to go beyond process optimization for new content, and start recycling their existing content into new formats.

Fortunately, the benefits of repurposing content include not only more content in less time, but the consistency resulting from recycling your content will reinforce not just your brand and messaging but your keyword strategy, for a measurable boost to your SEO.

What are some examples of content repurposing?

Content repurposing is the process of recycling — or extending the life of — a piece of great content already published or archived in one of your backend systems. It works especially well with quality evergreen content, which will remain relevant longer. Repurposing this old content for your target audience is a good place to start, and it can take many forms:

• Reformatting a piece of content intended for one channel into the format required by another, such as adapting blog posts into video content or podcast episodes
• Inserting one content type into another (e.g. an image used in an infographic can be reused in a LinkedIn post or webinar)
• Combine smaller pieces of original content to create a larger, in-depth piece
• Break up your long-form content into smaller digestible pieces, such as taking section headers from a blog post and turning them into social media carousels

These are only a few examples of recycling and extending your content.

When you consider the cost of a single piece of content and the added potential ROI if it is repurposed at least once elsewhere in your brand digital experience, you’ll want to reconsider your current content strategy of create, publish, and forget. This is especially true of different content formats like video, graphics, and images that are often more expensive to generate than written content.

The keys to an effective content repurposing strategy

Once your marketing team is on board with the idea of extending both the life and the breadth of your content usage, it’s important to ensure you don’t have any technical barriers to content recycling. These barriers often take the form of poor content management infrastructure or a lack of cross-functional digital asset management capabilities. You want to empower your content creation teams and stakeholders by providing them with the ability to quickly find, edit, and publish content.

If you’re facing technical challenges, the following key considerations can help you to sidestep them as quickly as possible, so you can deliver compelling content at scale.

First things first — consider your audience and how to reach them

Assuming you have a customer journey map and you’ve aligned the high-quality content you produce to it (social media for brand awareness, a whitepaper for the bottom of the funnel, blog content for post-sale engagement, case studies for your landing pages, etc.), think about your target audience(s) — how will you reach and engage them?

For each type of content, you’ll likely want to consider not only devices used (mobile, desktop, voice), but different platforms they’re likely to use, e.g. TikTok vs. reels vs. tutorials. Which of these different formats prolongs engagement and create conversions? Which improve metrics, and which save time? Which social media platforms drive the best results for different audiences, and which social media content do users respond best to?

Start with your top-performing content

This will ensure your repurposed content is of high quality. High-performing content has a much higher ROI potential than content that didn’t perform well the first time around. And it likely includes nuggets of useful information, which you can expand on across various channels. As mentioned previously, those evergreen pieces are a good place to start for the best chance of continued relevance as they take on new life.

With content from scratch, there's more risk of an unpredictable outcome or competition with existing campaigns.

Map out your content repurposing strategy

Once you know your source content, it’s time to map out the process of repurposing:

Alternatively, you might begin with testimonials that answer some of the common questions your sales team gets and then turn them into email newsletter content, a podcast subject, or a series of social media posts.

It’s OK to map out your content use after the fact, but ideally, you’d have a plan for repurposing your content before you start the process to remain on goal and so it’s built into your workflow from the start. You should also consider the specific channels where you’d like to publish, so that you can break your long-form content down into smaller modules or pieces of microcontent that are much easier to reuse.

Modularize your content

Modularized content is created with the intention of reuse in mind. Breaking down the content you create into microcontent that forms the building blocks of larger content pieces is ideal for maximizing reusability. This is especially true with some of the latest touchpoints growing in popularity — like voice-enabled devices and chatbots — which work best with bite-sized pieces of content used in a conversational form.

Another benefit of modularized content is the consistency it brings. By reusing smaller snippets that have been reviewed and approved, shown strong performance, and been frequently refined, you’ll ensure the repurposed content you publish will continue to be on brand, contain quality information, and even support your SEO program.

Select the right technologies

Determining the content you want to repurpose and having a digital marketing strategy to do so still requires the right technologies in place to effectively get your repurposed content from start to finish.

For one, content repurposing is made easier when you have all of your organization’s content stored in a central repository, properly tagged, and managed via a headless delivery model. If you can’t find the content, you’re not going to be able to repurpose it. And your marketers should be able to tag and add metadata to content (and microcontent), enabling them to pull from multiple areas inside and outside your technology stack.

Beyond making content easier to find, maximize the life of each asset with a CMS that enables you to create it once and deliver it anywhere. You’ll want to consider a content management system that has templates and is API-driven.

This means your teams will be able to push to more channels without having to re-create content for each one. For instance, if you want to use existing content for an Alexa Skill, you can leverage APIs to feed the Skill with written scripts produced from blog posts and whitepapers.

Content repurposing at scale: How Sitecore ticks all the boxes

At Sitecore, we understand both the cost of content creation and the value of repurposing content to reach new audiences, speed delivery, and increase scale. Which is why our product suite helps marketers easily manage content from strategy to delivery, with Sitecore XM Cloud, and Sitecore Content Hub with digital asset management.