How to Repurpose & Repackage Your Content Into a Mean, Lead Generating Machine

Are you like the thousands of companies who feel like they’re not getting the most out of their content marketing efforts? No more! You’re going to repurpose and repackage the words you’ve already painstakingly created, published and shared to maximise your Return on Investment.

How? I’m going to show you how to create a repurposing plan that takes little effort to implement but helps you achieve maximum results – yes, bottom-line results that are going to impress your CEO.

Why? Because your content can generate quality leads, reach new audiences and keep your sales team happy with a few clever tweaks and strategic decisions.

What You’ll Learn: Learn how to repackage your content marketing into a lead generating machine with a step-by-step strategy guide to creating a winning whitepaper.

Bonus: No extra writing required – just polishing, editing and liaising with industry experts who will help you share and add credibility and uniqueness to your work.

1. What Does Your Business Need? Define Your Objectives

Do not repurpose a single piece of content without deciding what you want to gain. First decide upon the business objective/objectives you would like your repurposing strategy to help you achieve. For example, if lead generation is most important for your business your objective could be, ‘We want to generate 300 new quality leads in a quarter.’

2. What Does Your Audience Need? Consult Your Personas

Okay, you know the drill – personas are next. Visit your target audience personas to gain insight into the type of content that will pique your target audience’s interests and convince them to give away their precious details. Yes, that’s right – you’re considering core problems, needs and desires at this stage. This will help you pin down a few concepts you believe will help your target personas solve their problems or appear smarter – this is your chance to decide what your content should help them achieve.

3. Keep It Evergreen: Create a One-Topic Content Plan

If you’re going to create content worth repurposing make sure it’s evergreen. It’s important to craft quality pieces that are timeless and won’t date. How-to’s, for example, make fantastic whitepapers as they are educational, useful and form the perfect meat for a well structured guide people would like to save and revisit at a later stage. News pieces, on the other hand, date quickly and so can’t be repurposed. It’s also important to define one topic from the outset – this will allow you to create a few articles of a similar nature that can tie into your overall theme. Your theme should be focused, yet unique.

4. Choose Your Repurposing Methods/Channels

For the purpose of this blog post and to show you how to generate leads we’ll show you how to create a whitepaper. However, there are many other ways you can repurpose your content – these include creating a SlideShare presentation, using LinkedIn Pulse, creating a webinar or crafting an infographic, for example. Choose the one that’s most suitable for your business based on your objectives and audience’s needs.

WhitePaper Guide: How to Repurpose & Distribute Your Content:

1. Choose Your Topic:

Use audience insights and a content analysis tool like BuzzSumo to determine your blog’s most popular content types. This will you choose a relevant topic that will appeal to your target audience. Dedicate a period of time (for example, a few weeks or months) to the chosen topic on your blog – this will form the bones for your whitepaper.

2. Create Your Content Calendar

Once you have your topic chosen you can map out your content calendar of activity on a simple Excel spreadsheet. This should include your topic ideas – it’s best to include these in a logical and readable order from the outset as it will make preparing and editing your whitepaper easier when you get around to it. Also outline the dates you will publish your pieces and the channels you will share them on to create buzz around your series. If you’re considering paid promotion you can include the proposed channel and budget allocation in this spreadsheet.

3. Reach Out for Influencer Opinions

Identify influencers and ask for their expert opinions to add credibility to your whitepaper and increase it’s chance of getting shared to a wider, more influential and highly relevant audience of prospects. When promoting your whitepaper, make sure you mention the names of those who have contributed their thoughts and quotes. This can form a unique selling point for your piece and entice people to sign up to unlock these influencer industry insights.

4. Get Your Readers Excited & Engaged

Here’s an idea: why not create buzz surrounding your content series on social media? You can let your fans know that you plan on creating a useful series of how-to articles about SEO, for example, and drop them reminders throughout the series about upcoming posts along with freshly published posts. You can even get your fans involved by asking them what articles they’d like to see in the series. Listen to their preferences and take them up on their best ideas.

5. Select, Order & Edit Your Content

Once your series is complete your articles will need to be edited and placed in a logical order. The order should have been planned out at your content calendar stage but you’ll need to revisit this to ensure it still flows correctly and with ease. Now is also the time to decide if you would like to cut some of the content length of each piece or add any new insights. To make it easier to read you can make every article (or chapter as it will now be called) roughly the same length. Add an introduction that ties your whitepaper chapters together, a table of contents, page numbers and any closing thoughts or call to actions you wish to share at the end.

6. Hire a Designer

One of the most important elements for creating a whitepaper is its readability. That’s why it’s important to hire a designer who has experience creating whitepapers previously. Roughly sketch out your idea and brief your designer on any important brand elements they need to consider. Map out any charts or infographics you’d like him/her to include and make sure you leave plenty of whitespace. Make sure you have your whitepaper designed in your mind (or at least a clear vision of how it should look and feel) before you approach a designer.

7. Create a Landing Page

At this stage you’ll need to create a landing page that captures user’s details before you unlock the content and allow prospects to download the whitepaper. This should be clear, simple and visually appealing. It’s important to keep the design consistent with that of your whitepaper (maybe ask the same designer to create this page). Remember that when it comes to landing pages less is more. That means that it’s important to ask your readers for as few fields as possible to prevent drop off. You’ll also need to clearly (and in as few words as possible) communicate the unique selling point of your piece – the reasons why people should download it and how it will help them in their lives.

8. Create a Promotion/ Distribution Plan

Now that you’ve created your whitepaper you need to create a plan for distributing it effectively to ensure it gets in front of the right audience at the right time. Do you plan to place your whitepaper at the top of the funnel to help capture new leads, for example?Are you going to use it in your email marketing as a gift to warm up prospects (there’s no need to gate the whitepaper if you plan on doing this as you will already have your prospects’ details). Are you going to use paid promotion on social media or stick to organic? Are you going to ask influencers who have contributed their thoughts to share your whitepaper? We recommend trialing all of the above options.

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