Guest Post: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – Content Marketing Edition
Today’s guest post is by Jill Kurtz, who provides online marketing strategies for small businesses through Kurtz Digital Strategy. She uses more than 30 years of marketing and communication experience to help each client reach customers and prospects using websites, social media, and other online tools.
Recycling items is part of everyday life. We look for ways to reuse items and avoid throwing things in the trash. The concept has great value to content marketing efforts as well.
It is time consuming to create good content. Blog posts, articles, infographics, memes – all types of content take time to develop. Reusing and recycling content ensures you get the most out of your content creation investments.
Publishing a piece of content should just be the start of its usefulness in your marketing. If you are not using each item to inspire more content, you are missing a great opportunity.
Think Evergreen
Content should not be one and done. Most of what you talk about today is still relevant and usable into the future.
Keep an inventory of your content. List the title, location published online, date published, and key messages covered. There may be other details that are helpful to track, too, like any images used with the content and the level of engagement it attracted.
Revisit your inventory every few months. Most often, you can refresh your ideas by changing up the words and visuals or changing the focus. You may have new ideas to bring to the topic or have gotten comments on the first use that can be used to make it better. The result is a whole new content item!
New Format, New Content
Move your content to a new format and it is new again! A blog post can become a video. A video can become a meme. Give content new life by sharing the same concepts in different formats.
You can transform content by optimizing it for a different marketing platform. A blog post can be translated into a compelling visual for Instagram. A LinkedIn article can become a series of tweets.
Edit to a New Length
Adding or reducing content can create a whole new piece of content. Find a way to make every piece of content shorter and longer and now you have three items from one idea!
If your post had three key points, consider adding a new idea or replacing one of them with something that seems more timely.
Pay attention to reader reactions. Refocus a post to cover the point that gets the most attention. Expand content to address common questions. Take your key points and present them in an image or infographic.
Share Elsewhere
Many outlets welcome your previously published content. Make sure you space publication dates two weeks or more. That will reduce the chances that your content will seem repetitive to people who see it in more than one place.
When you share previously published content, change up the title/headline and the first paragraphs whenever possible. That will be enough to make the content fresh, even for people who have seen it in the past.
Repurpose Every Idea
Developing great content is one of the hardest tasks of online marketing. There is a lot out there – you need your content to stand out from the rest.
Taking the approach of reusing your best ideas to create recycled content can help you hone your message to be most effective. It also increases the odds that it is seen and understood. It can also save you time, and that’s never a bad thing.
