7 Simple Steps to Maximize Your Content’s Lifespan And Generate More Leads

Constantly trying to create relevant, compelling content can pose a significant challenge; generating new content ideas on a regular basis is in itself a daunting prospect, and that doesn’t even include the time and effort required to create and distribute it.

So what if you could maximize the lifespan of your content? Breathe new life into the blogs, videos or infographics you’ve spent time and effort carefully crafting? Repurposing and repackaging content you’ve already published is an efficient and effective method to increase your Return on Investment and achieve your overall goals.

How to create a simple repurposing plan

This is easy to develop, easy to implement, and definitely easier than trying to come up with countless original ideas for articles! Just because a piece of content has been repurposed doesn’t mean it can’t continue to provide genuine value to your readers; repurposing also enables you to minimize your efforts and maximize your results!

With this comprehensive step-by-step guide, I’ll show you how you can generate high quality leads, extend your content’s reach and drive sales with a few simple adjustments and tactical decisions. No extra effort required!

Step One: define your objectives

This is the single most important piece of advice that you can apply to any digital marketing activity; outline what you want to achieve from the very outset. Setting clear, explicit objectives will provide structure to any strategy and help you to make efficient use of your time and resources. You can also align those objectives to metrics that will enable you to measure the effectiveness of your repurposing plan!

Step Two: develop audience personas

A necessary step that’s often overlooked, developing well-defined target audience personas will equip you with an insight into the content topics and types that your audience most engage with, which in turn can influence not only how you create new content, but how you can revive and repackage it too. Any effective content marketing strategy is underpinned by a commitment to creating content that identifies and addresses the needs and interests of a target audience.

Step Three: choose your topic

The best way to guarantee that your content will really resonate with your target audience is to listen to what they want. Using a tool like BuzzSumo will allow you to analyze the top performing pieces of content for your own website, and your competitors’, as well as identify trending content across a variety of categories. Topsy is great for aggregating top Tweets, links, photos and videos based on certain search terms so you can determine the topics that instigate the most conversation and appeal to your target audience.

Always create content with the intention of repurposing it at a later date; you should focus on topics that are continually relevant and will age well. How-to guides, videos, or webinars that focus on strategy and technique serve as perfect timeless pieces, whereas news articles, or anything centred upon a product or tool that could become quickly outdated wouldn’t be suitable for repurposing. Creating content around one particular theme is also a good tactic to consider because it allows you to develop a series of articles that can be repurposed either separately, or together, perhaps as an ebook or Slideshare presentation.

Step Four: choose your content formats

This is where you can get creative with your repackaging! A piece of content that began its life as a 1000 word blog post can be adapted and transformed beyond recognition; all you need to do is consider the different formats available to you. If you’ve written a beginner’s guide to content marketing, you could very easily adapt that article into a SlideShare presentation, or a short instructional video. Similarly, if you created a video, you could transcribe it and turn it into a written blog post. Incorporating different formats into your repurposing plan is a great way to extend your reach, by intercepting audiences that might be more compelled to click on a video than a blog, or vice versa. As with topics, when thinking about which content formats you should implement, always make your decision based on your objectives and audience’s needs and interests.

Step Five: create a content calendar

You can either integrate repurposed content into your existing content calendar, or create a new tab or spreadsheet as part of your repurposing plan. This doesn’t have to be very intricate; a simple Excel spreadsheet is sufficient. Include your topics, content formats and when you plan to publish them. You can also make a note of the channels through which you plan to promote your content, though it isn’t essential to your calendar. Tracking the publication and promotion of both new and repurposed content means you can ensure there isn’t any overlap in terms of topics covered and allows you to plot how long after initial publication you should start to consider repurposing and repackaging.

Step Six: influence and engage

One very effective technique that you can implement to refresh your content is conducting influencer outreach. Identify industry experts, or influencers, and contact them (by email if you have it, or a private message via social media) asking for a quote or key insight you can attribute to them within your content. Make it even easier for them by providing a potential list of questions that they can provide answers to! If successful, your influencer outreach efforts will introduce your content to previously untapped audiences and cross-promotion as any influencers you credit will likely share the content with their own social media followers.

When you’re promoting your content across your social media channels, don’t forget to tag or mention any contributing influencers to entice users to click through and acquire their authoritative insights. If you decide to create a series of content, you can capitalize upon that to pique your readers’ curiosity and encourage them to engage with upcoming instalments. Incidentally, crowdsourcing content topics and ideas is the perfect way of stimulating engagement and making sure you create the kind content your target audience prefers.

Step Seven: promote

Once you’ve refined and repackaged your content, all that’s left to do is publish and promote it! The key things to consider would be whether you plan to use paid promotion, organic, or a combination; I’ve also already discussed cross-promotion with industry influencers, which can often provide a significant boost to the visibility of your content. Finally, you need to decide at which stage of the funnel your repurposed content will sit. Will you place at it the top of the funnel to capture new leads? Will you use it to warm up prospects as part of a trigger email campaign? Once you’ve made this decision your simple 7 step repurposing plan is complete and you can reap the ROI!

Develop a detailed understanding of key social media specialisms including content marketing, and platforms on which you can promote your content.