You may be shocked to hear this from a blog writing service: business blogging results in a variety of benefits. Well-written and researched blogs increase your brand exposure through SEO, while improving your industry expertise in the eyes of your audience.
But you may not know that in addition to these well-known benefits, a blog post can do more for your marketing efforts. In fact, repurposing content can help you reach your audience throughout the various stages of the buying cycle, using multiple channels to maximize its impact. Used strategically, that blog post becomes more than just a page on your website; instead, it turns into an integral piece to bridge to each of your digital marketing efforts.
A Note of Caution on Duplication
Before we begin examining the multiple ways you can repurpose your content, it’s important to understand the difference between repurposing and duplication. Search engines like Google do not look kindly on duplicated content; in fact, a website with identical content on multiple pages can significantly hurt your SEO efforts.
Smart repurposing, however, does not impact these duplication parameters. It focuses on recycling the underlying ideas, rather than the exact copy used in your original blog post.
To succeed, be sure that each of the five repurposing possibilities below do not violate best practices for handling duplicate content online.
1. Enhancing Social Media Efforts
To successfully market your business on social media, you need regular content. Studies suggest that depending on the social network, you need to post updates anywhere between two and five times every day. Of course, to appeal to the increasing networks that are moving to non-chronological timelines, not to mention to appeal to your audience, your content needs to be as relevant to your audience as possible.
Where are you supposed to get all of that high-quality content for your social strategy? One way is to integrate your blog posts into your social media efforts. The most obvious solution is to link to new blog posts as they’re published, especially if these blog posts are not just brand-focused and appeal directly to your target audience.
As an example of how social media promotion can elevate your blog post, check out this example of how social promotions contributed to the success of our best-ever performing blog post. Of course, you can also go beyond that basic integration, pulling excerpts from the post—an interesting stat or quotation, perhaps—to post as standalone social media updates.
2. Integrating Your Email Marketing
Is email marketing back, or did it never go away? At this point, that question is mere semantics. The point is that a vast majority of your audience likely uses email, as evidenced by the fact that 91% of U.S. adults actually like getting promotional messages at least monthly. But much like social media, email marketing can only be successful if the content is up to your audience’s standard. That’s where repurposed blog content comes into play.
Again, you can use an outstanding post in a multitude of ways. Link to it in nurturing emails, or pull out its highlights to include directly in your email body copy. You can even collect multiple blog posts per month and turn them into a curated email newsletter, which—with a subscription, of course—can both inform your audience and generate leads.
3. Translating Your Blog for Varying Media
Who said that your blog has to stay limited to written words? Especially if you repurpose high-performing posts, you already know that your audience loves its topics and insights. Now, it’s time to get that content in front of them in multiple shapes.
As successful as business blogging can be, it comes with a major disadvantage: its inherent text-based nature. Take away that disadvantage by creating a visual representation of the post, outlining its main points and statistics in a variety of media. In a way, you are curating your content for a different medium.
Create an infographic, an explainer video, or a SlideShare presentation, highlighting the takeaways for your audience in new and engaging ways. All of them can also enhance your social media efforts; infographics, for example, receive three times as many shares as any other type of content.
4. Expanding into Long-Form Posts
Blog posts, at their best, hit a perfect balance. They are insightful enough to draw in readers, but concise enough to keep their readers’ attention even on mobile devices. At their best, they offer valuable nuggets of information, enticing your audience to want to learn more. For more in-depth content, of course, you likely use a format like white papers or e-books.
But who says that one cannot be the other? If you find that one of your blog posts has drawn significant attention from your audience, consider taking its thesis, structure, and main points, and expand it into a longer format. Doing so will enable you to go into more depth about the topic, helping you further establishing you as an expert in the field.
In addition, this long-form content takes on an important role in your marketing efforts, particularly if you engage in long-form marketing. Gate it behind a sign up form, and you can use it to generate leads for your nurturing efforts. Because you already know that the content in its shorter form attracted audience attention, it will likely make for an effective lead-generation tool as well.
5. Repurposing Your Research
Finally, a well-written and relevant blog post likely comes with plenty of effort that went into ensuring accurate and high-quality information. From research studies to quotations by industry experts, the content writer puts significant work into the post to make it stand out.
To use that research only on one piece of content is a waste. So in addition to the direct content repurposing efforts above, keep the research done for the post in a file or bookmark folder to use for future pieces. Statistics relevant your audience can be used for a wide range of blog posts, and keeping them handy and organized will significantly cut down on your research the next time you publish a piece of content.
Consider, for example, creating a series of blogs focused around a single, overarching topic. Not only will that series provide you with multiple opportunities to optimize your content for the same long-tail SEO keyword, but you can also repurpose research throughout its individual blogs. (Need an example? See our original blog post, turned infographic, now purposed into a series on how to start a blog.)
In short, you can use a well-written post as a thread to weave together all of your digital marketing efforts. Treat it as dynamic knowledge rather than a static piece of written content, and your blog post turns into social media outreach, email campaigns, presentations, videos, and even calls-to-action. By repurposing your content, you can maximize its impact on your audience.
