The value of repurposing and getting your content found

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Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The benefit of repurposing content

Chapter 3: How to decide which content to repurpose

Chapter 4: Getting your content to your audience

Chapter 5: Summary

Chapter 6: Checklist

There is no denying that marketing is a constant challenge. Consumers' behaviour frequently changes, which means our marketing approach has to change frequently, too.

Outbound and inbound marketing are good examples of changing consumer behaviour and marketing’s response to it. Since the early 2000s marketers and content teams have switched up their marketing approach. Swapping cold calling with free, quality content to answer the questions of their target audience and help build relationships.

Digital marketing has accelerated the need to provide fresh and valuable content to audiences across multiple channels, but content creation is not a quick task. Creating a regular stream of quality content is a real challenge that marketing teams face.

There is a way to reduce content creation workloads, and the answer is content repurposing. Pair that with omnichannel marketing and you can minimise your content creation requirements and maximise your content investment.

In this eBook, we’ll outline what content repurposing is, why it should be part of your marketing strategy, how to optimise the reach of the content with omnichannel marketing and most importantly, how to do it.

Let’s dive in.

What is content repurposing?

While creating fresh and new content is important, it is time-consuming, resource-heavy and often can lead to neglect of valuable existing content. Whether your team wrote it or the content was outsourced, there was a significant time investment in that content.

Content repurposing is the gift that keeps on giving. It gives a better bang for your buck, takes the best content you already have, changes the medium, and gives it a chance to reach more people.

For example, you could repurpose a live webinar into five pieces of content across various channels.

• A YouTube video for on-demand watching.
• A podcast for on-demand listening.
• Small teaser videos for social media.
• A long-form blog as a written alternative.
• A visual infographic if you have quick stats and numbers to display.

Because not everyone consumes content in the same way, repurposing has the opportunity to get the content to your audience in their preferred format.

Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking content repurposing is the lazy way to approach creating new content. Repurposing content is still a form of content creation, and there are plenty of reasons why you should give it a go:

• It saves time. Repurposing content is more efficient. Once you’ve approved the message, all you need to do is change the format and just like that, you’ve got more fresh content.
• It reduces risk. If something is popular with your audience, it’s less risky to iterate from something you already know works well.
• It reaffirms your position. Revisiting and expanding upon a subject you’ve already covered helps to solidify your position as a thought leader in your industry.
• It creates a steady content flow. Repurposing content provides a constant flow of content to share on your website, newsletter or social media.
• It works the content works harder. Content creation isn’t quick work, and you can get more mileage from your content by tweaking and editing a well-crafted piece.
• It provides a better return on investment. As mentioned above, the time and effort you put into creating content is spread across multiple consumer touchpoints and increases visibility.
• It extends your reach. By posting similar content in multiple places, you can reach more customers.

Now we have convinced you that content repurposing is what your team needs, read on to get started. 👇

Choose content that aligns with your goals.

The obvious place to start is by considering what your goals are for the repurposed content. If extending your brand's reach organically is your goal, then repurposing a live webinar into a YouTube video makes sense. Be sure the effort and investment you are making in repurposed content are helping to reach your objectives.

Choose relevant content.

There might be a lot of content to choose from in your archives, so be sure to choose relevant topics for which you have the expertise and want to be known. You can build your profile as a thought leader with topics that support your goals by repurposing relevant evergreen content. The more quality content you have on your relevant subject, the more likely you will be viewed as an expert in the field.

Choose content that has performed well previously.

Google Analytics (GA) is a data goldmine for content repurposing. It will instantly indicate which content performs best for organic visibility, reach and performance metrics. Use the metrics in GA to guide your next repurposing content piece.

Once you’ve decided which pieces of content to repurpose, you need to think about how to maximise the reach. We’ve given you all the tools to remodel your best-performing content, don’t fall at the final hurdle; consider these principles to distribute your message.

Be found.

The distribution of your content can be the difference between success and failure. It could be the best content in the world, but if your audience doesn’t find it, then it is pretty useless.

Between accessibility, search engine optimisation, schema markup and omnichannel marketing, you can be sure your content is getting found.

Think accessibility.

What’s the point of creating great content if nobody can find or access it?

Your first step when planning a new piece of content should be to make it accessible and inclusive. Simply put, that means creating content that serves the needs of every customer.

By starting your content creation process with the needs of visually, hearing, and mobility-impaired customers in mind, you include the one billion-plus people worldwide who live with some form of disability. If you start with those users in mind, you’re always aware of how to include them in accessing the content. 

Getting started

The W3C outlines best practices for creating accessible content for the web. These include:

• Provide informative and unique page titles.
• Use headings to convey meaning and structure.
• Make link text meaningful and avoid substandard link text such as “click here” or “read more”.
• Write meaningful and informative text alternatives (alt-text) for images.
• Create transcripts and captions for multimedia.
• Provide clear instructions.
• Keep content clear and concise.

If you have a lot of content, manually checking everything might not be something you have the time or resources for. But there are tools available to help test for accessibility, performance and content quality.

If your content is accessible, you are 90% of the way there to ensure it is SEO-optimized. Accessible, SEO-optimised content means you nearly have all the pieces to the puzzle regarding getting found online. More on that in the next section.

Think Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

But how does accessibility solve SEO content issues? We’re glad you asked.

Accessibility is important for a customer's user experience (UX) and how they navigate and find content. Accessibility also impacts the way content is served for search engine crawlers.

When you think of search engine crawlers, think of assistive technologies, and vice versa. They work in a very similar way.

For example, assistive technologies use H1 heading tags to navigate a page and understand its content, and search engine crawlers do the same. The difference is that assistive technologies like screen readers make the content available to end users in their format of choice, such as reading it aloud. In contrast, search engine crawlers store the content in an index for reference.

This example extends to sitemaps, anchor text, alt text, breadcrumb links, navigation, and readability. Accessibility and SEO work hand in hand. Creating accessible content is a double whammy for your consumers.

In addition to the accessibility benefits, high-quality SEO-optimised content helps your company get found. If search engines cannot find your content, your target audience won’t be able to find your content either. With so much content available online, give search engines a helping hand and implement these SEO best practices.

There are several factors Google takes into account for content to be surfaced in search engines:

• The usefulness of the information you provide. Google’s algorithm defines how useful a page is, from how recent and fresh the content is, how good the user experience is on the page, to how many times the search term appears.
• Knowing what your audience wants. Anticipate what your audience will be searching for and ensure that the keyword phrases are present when writing your content.
• The correct use of keywords within your content, page titles, image alt text and meta descriptions. Underuse of your keywords makes it more difficult for Google to match your page with the relevant query. On the other hand, overuse of your keywords – known as keyword stuffing – makes content unpleasant to read and can negatively impact your ranking due to poor readability.
• The length of your content, titles and meta descriptions. Google recommends 155-160 characters for a meta description, a brief and descriptive title under 60 characters to display properly in SERPs and more than 300 words for regular posts or pages and over 1,000 words for blog posts, a rule of thumb.
• Page speed – a slow-loading web page is a negative ranking factor in search engines. The ideal website load time is under 2 seconds. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time. Reducing and compressing the amount of large media on a page is one way to improve page speed.
• The number of links back to your pages. Linking to pages within your website ​​will help Google crawl your content easier and help it to understand it better. Having links from external websites with relevant content and high domain authority will help drive traffic to your website. Ensure any content you have on external websites links back to your own.
• Image alt text, also known as an alt tag or alt description, is the text that appears when an image fails to load properly. Screen-reading tools use alt text to describe images to visually impaired users, and search engines use it to better crawl and rank your website. Informative alt text is crucial if you want to get your images in front of your audience as over 30% of search engine results are images.

Help your audience organically find your content, with the answers they are looking for, at the right time, with the combination of the factors above.

Getting started

SEO is more cost-effective than search engine marketing (SEM) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC), as it helps potential customers to find your content organically and for free.

SEO also works harder than SEM and PPC because it isn’t constrained by budget, but requires constant work. There are plenty of great resources, tools, and checklists to help you get started. Start with the basics with Google’s Search Central, the Ultimate SEO checklist from Semrush, or our handy blog on SEO for a headless CMS.

Think Schema Markup.

Once you have SEO basics in place, you can turbocharge your content’s discoverability with Schema markup. In its simplest form, schema markup is a standardised set of tags to help search engines understand web content. Also known as structured data, it’s a way of communicating the context and meaning of your web content to search engines and other technologies.

Schema essentially helps make content more findable, returning rich results when the correct schema is in place. Structured data makes it easier to find the most contextually relevant results for their query, such as recipes, events or locations.

For example, if you have a recipe for a cake online, you can use structured data to display it in Google as a rich result. Adding granular information such as the name, recipe, flavour, description, image, calories and cooking time makes finding the information easier.

Rich results, previously known as rich snippets, provide a summary of information for users relevant to their search query at a glance. Using the cake as the example again, “quick chocolate cake” would return rich results with the baking time and the ingredients for the cake. Displaying rich results with additional page information encourages users to click through and gets your content in front of them. Rich results are taken to a different level when it comes to voice search.

You might have come across popular voice assistants such as Siri, Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa and asked them a question before. But you might not be familiar with how they decide which result to read out. Voice search relies upon rich results at position zero to answer questions. Structured data is only going to become more important over time, this is especially true with 71% of consumers preferring to conduct queries by voice instead of typing in 2018. Speakable structured data is the latest innovation coming soon to search engines. Which opens up more opportunities for your content to be found.

Getting started

But how do you get started with schema? You don’t have to be an expert because Google has two fantastic resources in their Structured Data Markup Helper and Structured Data Testing Tool. Once you have it in place, you can see your schema in action using Google’s Search Console.

Think omnichannel marketing; channels and platforms.

The final piece of the puzzle is omnichannel marketing; being present on the devices, platforms, and mediums used by your target audience.

Consider your audiences and how they may research your product or service. Are they using a mobile device, a desktop computer, or speaking to people face-to-face? Are they using all popular social media sites, or does it make sense to concentrate your efforts on Twitter or Pinterest? Are you even getting the medium right? Is your target audience more likely to prefer reading physical magazines and newspapers? If that’s the case, they’re unlikely to be discovering your content on YouTube or TikTok.

The obvious benefit of multi-channel marketing is brand visibility. It’s easy to assume that because you’ve put your content out in one place, like your website, your customers will find it. If you publish it, they will come – right? In reality, a multi-channel approach spreads your visibility and increases the chance of your content being found. Whilst also creating consistency across channels, it creates quicker content - by sharing a single piece across multiple channels, you have something to say everywhere!

Omnichannel marketing takes the multi-channel approach one step further. By creating your content once in a single content repository, you can publish wherever and whenever you like. Safe in the knowledge that the content will always be on brand because it has come from a single source of truth. For example, you can create content once and store it in your CMS and then push the content out to an out-of-home (OOH) advertising board, to the Facebook Store or Google Ads. Creating once and publishing everywhere.

Getting started

• Work out “where” your customers go to research your product or service
• Only choose relevant platforms and services for your audience. Don’t waste your time being present somewhere that your customers aren’t.
• Work out if your CMS supports omnichannel marketing efforts.

So to recap, you don’t need to constantly create new content to achieve your marketing goals. Repurposing is an efficient way to reinforce your key messages, extend your reach and get more from your content investment.

Whilst reusing and repurposing content will increase your visibility, there are other things to consider to maximise your reach.

Making small changes to your content such as implementing the correct heading structure and adding informative alternative text makes your content accessible and SEO-friendly. Plus the introduction of structured data will also give your content an edge.

The right tools will make or break your omnichannel marketing approach. Consider whether your CMS is up to the job of creating content once and distributing it everywhere or if that needs to be levelled up, so your marketing can too. Why work harder when you could work smarter?

Finally, use our checklist to audit your existing content marketing efforts and see if there is any room for improvement. 👇

Use our checklist to…

• Audit your website’s accessibility

• Provide informative and unique page titles.
• Use headings to convey meaning and structure.
• Make link text meaningful and avoid substandard link text such as “click here” or “read more”.
• Write meaningful and informative text alternatives (alt-text) for images.
• Create transcripts and captions for multimedia.
• Provide clear instructions.
• Keep content clear and concise.

• Audit your SEO efforts

• Use these free SEO tools to get started.
• Google search central - SEO starter guide
• Semrush - Ultimate SEO checklist
• Contensis - SEO for a headless CMS

• Audit the schema markup

• Use Google’s great free tools to get started.
• Google's structured data markup helper
• Google search central - test your structured data

• Audit your channels and platforms

• Work out “where” your customers go to research your product or service.
• Only choose relevant platforms and services for your audience. Don’t waste your time being present somewhere that your customers aren’t.
• Work out if your CMS supports omnichannel marketing efforts.

• Audit your CMS and the ability to support omnichannel marketing

• Does your CMS let you publish once and distribute to multiple locations?
• Does your CMS check for accessibility mistakes?
• Does your CMS encourage content modelling and content reuse?

Carry on reading

Download other eBooks in the series or check out our latest content from our blog.

eBooks

• Avoiding the cliff edge: Why digital transformation should be agile
• The ultimate guide to content strategy and content governance