You Should Be Repurposing Your Content [+ 7 Examples To Get Started]

You’ve got rockstar writers. You’ve done the keyword research. Your content strategy may look like it has it all, but does it have the right distribution? 

If you’re at a B2B SaaS company and want to maximize your content’s reach, your team’s efficiency, and your SEO success, we highly recommend repurposing your content. 

Why?

Your current content assets aren’t just a backlog. They’re the key to consistent messaging. Utilizing pre-made content stretches your team’s bandwidth, bolsters your site’s SEO, and multiplies the potential of each piece you invest in. Your time and resources will go twice as far (or more) when you squeeze your content for all its juice. 

Follow along for our guide to kickstarting your content repurposing initiatives. And while you’re here, feel free to listen to our recent discussion on content distribution strategies as well:

What is content repurposing?

When we repurpose content, we aren’t pressing Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. It’s not duplicate content — it’s content recycling. 

Repurposing content is the act of taking existing content and transforming it into something fresh to share on other marketing channels. Whitepapers become podcasts. Podcasts become Instagram Reels. And the wheel of marketing keeps turning. 

Whether you call it content repurposing or content recycling, it often looks like one of three things:

1. Creating an entirely different media type for a piece of content you already have (like turning a blog post into a LinkedIn carousel)
2. Breaking down the messaging of a long-form piece of content into smaller, more digestible standalone content in different formats
3. Stacking multiple existing pieces together to form a more comprehensive and informative guide (bonus points if that guide doubles as a lead magnet)

Why ALL companies benefit from repurposing their content

Content helps you connect with and convert your target audience. That’s why your company employs an in-house team or a suite of agencies to make content that generates demand and captures leads. 

The benefits of repurposing content go beyond keeping your site and social media platforms active. When you’re scaling your business, content recycling allows you to work smarter, not harder — and also faster, cheaper, and easier than starting from scratch over and over again.

Increases the value of your content investments

The beauty of repurposing your brand’s content is that your team can take any existing content that still holds value and relevance to your messaging and make it work for you multiple times — perhaps forever.

Let’s say you record an in-depth one-hour webinar video.

You can repurpose that one video into 5–10 highlight reels for LinkedIn posts, 5-10 even shorter clips you can embed in Tweets, 6–11 new YouTube videos, a podcast episode, and at least one long-form blog post, or several short-form posts.

That’s 18–33+ shiny, repurposed, and ready-to-distribute pieces of content all crafted from a single webinar video (and we guarantee you can come up with more).

Or maybe you’ve created a library of 3,000-word blog posts with original research and insights. 

Parse it down into 10–30 social media posts across different platforms, a 10-email educational campaign, a slide deck you can share with your revenue team, and scripts for a 10-part video series. 

Again, that’s 20–60+ pieces produced by recycling a single piece of content that your company has already created. By redistributing your blog posts, they can very quickly become a magnet for traffic and engagement.

Expands your content’s reach — allowing you to shape content for each distribution channel 

Your company likely already distributes its marketing content on multiple channels. This ensures you’re speaking to different audiences where they prefer to consume information. 

The content that performs well on TikTok looks, acts, and feels different than the content that excels in a webinar. Each channel trains its users to appreciate a slightly different presentation style to generate the best engagement. (Note: more engagement doesn’t always mean better.) 

If you tried to make all of this content appear out of thin air, you probably need to talk to your People Team about adding a few new hires. Instead, make your content last longer and reach farther by recycling it for different platforms. 

Repurposing content allows us to make sure we have the most effective media, writing format, and positioning — no matter which channel we’re using. Different positioning allows you to speak to an entirely new audience — and it might be as simple as changing who you address in the hook of your social media content.

A single long-form podcast video file can put you on Spotify, Apple, or Google podcast platforms pretty easily. Then, upload the long-form video to YouTube. Smaller sound bites are perfect for LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram social posts — but you could also embed them into blog content or include them in a monthly email newsletter. 

Spend less time creating content and more time promoting the high-quality assets you’ve already created. 

Gives your audience the media type they prefer 

Everyone learns differently. 

Similarly, your potential audience members all have their preferred ways of engaging online. 

While one person might love reading a long-form thought leadership piece on what’s wrong with the current trajectory of their industry, another might be more inclined to listen to a podcast episode where you conversationally explain the same information.

When recycling content, you can quickly give people written, audio, and visual content based on your most effective content without heavy lifting from your team.

Ultimately, this means you reach a larger audience and can interact with potential prospects where and how they want to consume media.

Syncs messaging across your marketing channels and team members 

Content repurposing makes a few key things possible for your content strategy: 

• Extends the lifespan of your content creation efforts
• Relieves pressure from your internal resources, allocating more time to new powerhouse content
• Increases your publishing frequency and opportunities to capitalize on search engine optimization 
• Grows your online presence and gains market share by keeping a consistent brand voice and messaging

The content you’ve invested in aligns with your brand’s persona, digital marketing objectives, and revenue goals. Instead of creating entirely new pieces of content that need to be curated again, prioritize repurposing efforts. 

When you republish content across multiple channels, the messaging is consistent no matter where an audience member finds you. Plus, it means you’ll be posting more often — which expands your audience and grows your online presence. 

Not to mention that if your individual employees generate their own influence on social channels, allowing them to reuse the copy and images from existing content assets ensures they communicate in a way that aligns their personal brand with the company.

Creates greater opportunity for link distribution and organic visibility 

As an agency that specializes in generating SEO results, we have an interest in our clients doing this part right. 

Repurposing content and sharing a URL to the original asset or a relevant webpage gives that link the chance to be shared, retweeted, and included in other people’s content. Successfully distributing that link is what we call a backlink. Those backlinks work like research citations. 

The more relevant websites link to your content, the more authority Google’s algorithms assume you have on that topic. The result is better search engine rankings and increased organic traffic.

Recycling a written post into an infographic or a video gives you more opportunities to appear in different positions on the SERP. That video might be included in a round-up, and an infographic could pop up in Google image searches for related keyword phrases. 

Suddenly, you’re reaching a much wider audience.

Shows your executive team your resourcefulness 

If you’re a marketing manager who regularly reports to an executive team or directly to your CEO, you want to show your competence and resourcefulness through the ROI of SEO success. 

Increasing organic traffic by creating multiple pieces of content that target a high-volume keyword and distributing them effectively improves your company’s SERP positioning. This generates more leads — which translates into revenue. 

Repurposing content that has historically led to meaningful conversions or positive brand engagement means you’re extending your company’s investment. You and your team become a valuable asset to the business.

How to select which existing content you should repurpose 

If you’ve got content but aren’t sure what’s worth repurposing, you’re not alone. Without defining your objectives, it can all feel a bit murky. With a few tweaks, all types of content can be repurposed. The trick is knowing where to start. 

Here’s how we recommend deciding which content is worth recycling: 

1. Establish your content goals so that you know what you’re working toward. (More leads? Higher engagement? First page SERP ranking?)
2. Conduct a content audit using tools like Google Analytics to evaluate conversion rates, shares, page views, and time spent on page to identify your highest-performing content.
3. Of those, look for evergreen content that you can republish for months — even years — without revising.
4. Search for any information gaps your audience may have and select content that fills in those blanks.

Identify your evergreen content 

When it comes to choosing which pieces of content you’re going to repurpose, review your current content for evergreen topics. These pieces of content ensure that you’re not focusing on a repurposing project that risks becoming outdated too quickly.

How will you know which content is evergreen? 

• Its traffic isn’t affected by seasonal trends.
• It targets the fundamental needs of one consumer persona.
• It has a stable engagement history, showing steady interest.

Select the content that generates your most valuable engagements

As you dive into content recycling efforts, follow the metrics. Tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Moz Pro offer inside looks at how well your content is performing and can be valuable at this stage.

If you have content that tends to generate organic conversions, social comments, shares, and inquiries from your ICPs, start your repurposing efforts there.

This will give you plenty of useful distribution materials that target people who have a higher possibility of becoming customers.

If you’re too early in your content marketing efforts and you don’t have substantial initial data, start with the content you’ve created as a result of direct customer interactions. These pieces, likely created for sales or retention efforts, guarantee you’re repurposing information for a relevant, high-value target audience.

Additionally, recycle your most popular posts that have stimulated brand engagement and community building. This will help keep followers engaged as you push out more posts about the same topic.

Find related content topics that match the criteria above and stack them

We often think of content repurposing as the process of breaking down long-form content. But the opposite is also true. 

Review your shorter articles, case studies, first-party data, and videos about an overarching topic and stack them together, repurposing them into one cohesive guide.

Repurpose all newer content 

As you move forward, you should repurpose all long-form content. 

Yes, all of it. 

You’ll reap the rewards of upping your content distribution through higher engagement, higher search rankings, and higher domain authority. Plus, you’ll streamline your content workflow, making it faster and easier to branch into different content formats (without overloading your team.) 

Your new workflow could resemble a hub-and-spoke strategy — except here, one piece acts at the hub, and the reformatted iterations are the spokes. Start with a primary piece of content, like the webinar or the long-form blog post we talked about, and then create offshoots.

7 examples of content repurposing to help you distribute forever 

What is content repurposing going to look like for your team? Here are a few of the common ways companies tend to repurpose their content:

Here are a few of the common ways companies tend to repurpose their content:

1. Repurposing content for your social media channels 

One of the most approachable ways to repurpose content is to break down your long-form content into social media posts.

The sheer creative diversity of acceptable formats and lengths of content adds to the ease with which recycled parts of long-form pieces can become successful social posts.

This might include breaking down a post into shorter sections of value, sharing infographics, or posting shortened snippets of your last webinar video.

Common content repurposing tactics for social media

• Breaking blogs down into shorter pieces of content
• Turning blog posts into an overview slide deck (LinkedIn)
• Providing the standout highlights of an entire long-form piece as a Twitter thread
• Breaking down podcast/webinar videos in bite-sized social clips
• Sharing images such as infographics from existing content

Recommended Reading: How To Create a Never-Ending Supply of LinkedIn Posts By Repurposing Your Blogs [+ Examples]

2. Creating written content (like blogs) from video assets

Your video assets are engaging. The topic you’re discussing in that video will also be just as (and perhaps more) impactful as written, well-structured content.

This blog post that you’re reading right now is an example of a repurposed podcast discussion that we identified as:

1. Aligned with our ICP’s “Jobs To Be Done” goals
2. Having valuable keywords associated with it

The result is that we now have a blog post that we can conveniently break down into written social posts — giving us more ways to share the value of topic repurposing with our target audience than with only video.

SEO pro-tip - While an exact transcript serves as a quick way to generate a new URL/piece of content, it’s unlikely that that page will perform from an organic search perspective. 

If you’d like meaningful traffic to be generated - take the time to craft the transcript into an organized post (with headers and images) that targets a relevant keyword. 

The readers will enjoy the added bonus of having a video to watch and your video will receive the additional views from the organic traffic that the copy generated.

3. Creating video content from written assets 

Creating videos by repurposing written assets, like old blog posts, email newsletters, knowledge base materials, ebooks, and white papers, is a commonly underutilized tactic in the content community.

Record yourself explaining the main points, your favorite takeaways, or simply introducing the topic’s importance to your audience. Then, invite them to visit your written content resources as well.

If you’ve created something thorough how-to blogs or knowledge base articles for your customers, record yourself following the same steps while you screen share or use screenshots. Then, publish it!

4. Creating short-form videos from long-form videos 

Short-form videos and content are the new norm in the content industry. The good news is that this trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon, and we can capitalize on it. 

We all see short videos that draw us in, particularly on social media platforms. They often come equipped with closed captions so we can watch even if we’re in a space where having the volume on would be inappropriate.

If you’re already recording hour-long podcast videos, webinars, events, or live streams, then with a little low-lift editing, you’ll have plenty of short-form social media clips to redistribute. 

In the debate between short-form vs. long-form content, the answer is simple: both.

5. Rolling up parts of your content into a weekly or monthly email newsletter series 

Some of the best email series and newsletters are round-ups and short, value-packed breakdowns of already great content that a company has created.

If you’ve recorded a long-form podcast about a topic your newsletter audience might also appreciate learning about, distill the episode’s contents down to its most unique insights and use it as a newsletter topic. 

You might also have a long-form article that features eight actionable tactics for helping your audience achieve a specific goal. Repurposing that post as an eight-part newsletter series is a great way to continue offering the same messaging, but packaged as a new content series for your nurture email lists.

6. Building downloadable assets such as images, checklists, or templates 

Let’s say you have listicle blog posts that function as checklists or templates for readers to follow. Creating unique versions of these assets in an easily downloadable and shareable format gives people yet another way to engage with that same material. 

Recycling materials into these types of assets will offer more value while simultaneously providing your company with a potential nurturing opportunity via an email exchange.

7. Stacking multiple pieces of content into one “Ultimate Guide” resource 

If you have multiple pieces of content covering specific parts of a larger topic within your industry, you can easily stack those parts to build a major resource.‍

Creating an ebook filled with valuable learnings establishes confidence in your brand and doubles as an effective lead magnet. Gather relevant blog posts, a video or two, and a case study to craft a complete guide, an overview of the state of a specific industry, or an online course.

Real examples of content repurposing

This is all well and good in theory, but what does content repurposing look like in practice? Let’s look at a few ways we redistribute content here at Ten Speed, and how B2B SaaS companies recycle content. 

Ten Speed examples 

Ten Speed practices what we preach. 

Our podcast episodes become LinkedIn posts and blog articles so that we can reach people who prefer long-form and short-form content. You can also find our podcast episodes cross-posted to YouTube to maximize our visibility. 

Great B2B Saas examples

B2B SaaS companies can see an incredible return on recycled content. 

• At Salesforce, an extensive whitepaper can break down into several thought-provoking and educational blog articles that add value for their customers. 
• Slack’s podcast, “Slack Variety Pack,” and webinars are instant fodder for round-up blog posts. 
• Moz turns their popular video series, “Whiteboard Fridays,” into blog articles, like this one on analytics assumptions, to double down on their content’s effectiveness. 

No matter where you look, the SaaS giants are finding inventive ways to bring new life to old content by republishing assets.

Final tips for the most successful repurposing results

Before we go, here are a few last reminders to make your content recycling mission successful. 

Repurposing requires more effort than copying and pasting 

Don’t expect duplicate content to perform with the same success as repurposed content. (Or any success, for that matter.) 

The same critical thinking that goes into your most successful marketing efforts should also apply to your strategy for reusing and remixing your high-quality content.

The best content repurposing efforts are planned from the start 

For best results, build content repurposing into your overall content marketing strategy from the very beginning.

This ensures that you create new content so that it can be more conveniently split apart or stacked. 

Prime all of your blog content’s headers to be successful social media hooks, or revamp your podcast outline with predetermined prompts so that your editor can very quickly identify the best places to create social clips.

Starting at the strategy stage also gives your team the opportunity to put repurposing and distribution efforts on the calendar. This will act as a clear roadmap for the future and later as a data benchmark for the frequency with which you repurposed your assets.

Repurposing isn’t always about distributing an older piece of content 

There is a tendency among content marketers who are pressured to garner leads to push traffic from one channel back into your website.

Become comfortable with not including a link back to the original source every single time you post something on social media. 

These assets have standalone value. Remember, you’re building a community in a space where people already exist and might wish to remain. Sharing useful advice that builds a loyal audience in that space will allow you the trust to occasionally invite them into your older, larger pieces of content.

It’s a balancing act.

Your turn to give it a shot

With the above ideas, you have plenty of examples to solidify your repurposing strategy and fill your content calendar.

If you found this or any of our other pieces of content marketing, SEO, or SaaS marketing content we’ve done valuable, consider joining our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest conversations, tips, tactics, and strategies.