Business-to-business marketers are often tasked with finding creative ways to educate customers on products and services with complex features and specifications. Although this is not a new challenge, in today’s digital age new technologies sometimes propose just as many new challenges as they do solutions. Whether it’s social media, content marketing, public relations, or email marketing, the medium may change but the marketing premise doesn’t. That’s why repurposing content is such a useful tool for a marketer to craft a story across platforms. In its simplest of forms, repurposing content for marketing is building out concurrent messaging from a similar idea to use in the same or different media. Here are just a few of the many benefits of repurposing content:
Drive Home a Consistent Message
10 years ago a market research firm estimated that consumers saw over 5,000 ads a day. Imagine what that number is today when AdWeek suggests we may be seeing as many as 1,000 clickable links daily just on social media alone. The point is that there is a lot of noise out there for your message to cut through. One solution? Keep hitting your audience with the same message over and over and over again. Repurposing content allows businesses to reach consumers with a coherent message whenever, wherever and however that content is delivered to a prospective customer.
Save Time and Money
Businesses already spend resources, time and money on tasks essential for business operations. These can easily be formatted and reused to send out impactful content. Let’s think of a new product for example. You spend time putting together the copy to describe the product along with photos to show it on your website. These same assets can then be sent out as a press release and posted on your website in a news section. Then you can share the link to the release on social media and via email in your newsletter. Right there we’ve turned a new product into at least four touch points with minimal additional time or cost.
Hit your Goals
Whether your goals are to get more social media followers, increase website traffic or just see the sales needle move, repurposing content can help you reach these and more. The beauty of repurposing content is it’s flexibility to adapt to fit any goals. Let’s take a look at our previous example with a shift in focus towards a different goal – increasing newsletter signups. Our new product release can adapt to fit this new goal by including a call to action with every message sent out. By adding an option to opt into the newsletter on the same webpage as the new product release, promoting the new product release via social now serves both purposes of increasing awareness of the new product and increasing newsletter signups. This concept of minor tweaks can be applied to address many business goals.