Mastering content repurposing for maximum impact

In a recent Adobe survey, 49% of respondents said they saw an 11-25% increase in engagement on repurposed content and a 52% increase in brand visibility. Repurposing content turns valuable resources (guides, blog posts, webinars, videos, etc.) into fresh content for your client’s audience. So, here’s how content repurposing can be woven into your existing content strategy for maximum impact.

Content repurposing is pretty straightforward: create a piece of content (a blog post, guide or podcast, for example) and then create other content from it. The new content could be a post on social media, several short videos, FAQ sections for a landing page, an email, the list is nearly endless.

By creating a single piece of content, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. Creating multiple pieces and sharing them across various platforms gives your clients more chances of reaching their audience.

 Repurposing content is a relatively quick process, particularly when deploying AI. 56% of businesses using AI to repurpose save 1-5 hours a week. This means you can increase your client’s visibility in search results without spending a lot of time and money. It’s a great way to balance speed and quality when producing content for your clients. 

The benefits of content repurposing are clear:

• It maximizes the ROI of your content
• Demonstrates expertise across different channels
• Reaches different audiences
• Improves workflow

Instead of constantly creating high-quality content from scratch, a smart content repurposing strategy involves reusing your best existing content to achieve your clients’ marketing goals. This allows you to save time and resources, and get more mileage from every piece you produce. Here’s how to do it.

Before you can build a successful repurposing strategy, you need to know what you’re working with. If you’ve just started working with a new client, auditing their existing content is an excellent chance for quick wins. Auditing every six months also helps you uncover ‘sleepers’ that can double your organic clicks. Here’s how a content repurposing audit works:

Distinguish between evergreen content (which remains relevant for a long time) and time-sensitive content (anything with the year in the title or pieces based on current events, etc.) Start with evergreen pieces; they keep paying dividends long after the publish date. However, this might be a good time to update your time-sensitive content.

Dive into the data to find your most popular existing content. This high-performing content is perfect for repurposing because you know it already resonates with your target audience, and there’s a good chance it will on other platforms too.

Organize your existing content in its original format, whether long-form blog posts, podcasts, videos, or guides. This helps you identify opportunities for creating new formats. Add ideas to your working doc about which new formats work best for the existing content.

Reusing old content in fresh ways is an excellent way of making it work harder for you. However, the power of reusing content doesn’t stop there. Take a look at your existing content strategy. For example, if you’re creating blog posts, there’s no reason these shouldn’t be repurposed into social posts, emails, videos, etc.

Ready to squeeze more mileage from every post? Try these plug-and-play repurposing moves.

The idea is to use a single, comprehensive, long-form piece of content as the source for dozens of smaller, targeted content formats.

For example, you can turn an in-depth guide into 10-15 blog post variations on specific sub-topics. From there, each blog post can be broken down into several social media posts and graphics.

Data points from the original long-form guide are also ripe for creating infographics and data visualizations. A detailed client case study, for example, can be a powerful long-form asset to repurpose into an email marketing series or multiple social media posts.

From one long-form piece of content, it’s possible to gain over a hundred assets (10 blog posts, up to 10 social posts per blog, 1-3 emails per blog, etc.). Your clients can use these assets to target their audience on multiple platforms, increase brand visibility and prove they are industry leaders.

This framework involves transforming a single asset into different formats to reach new audiences on different channels.

For example, a webinar recording can be transcribed and repurposed into a detailed blog post. To promote the webinar, you could then take the key takeaways from that blog post and turn them into a snappy podcast episode or video. These could then be turned into social posts and emails, too.

Of course, from that detailed blog post, you could create a cluster of content like in framework one and repeat the steps to produce 100s pieces of content from a single podcast idea. This is all part of a smart content repurposing strategy. The goal is to get as many new formats as possible from a single piece of long-form content, while keeping quality high.

This advanced content repurposing strategy involves adapting a single piece of content for different stages of the buyer funnel and other target audience personas. It’s not just about changing the format but the message to move your client’s audience from awareness to conversion. A key component of this framework is to audit your existing content to see what’s working best. Here are some examples of how it can be used:

• Top-of-funnel (Awareness): Take an industry report and use a single data point to create a compelling graphic for social media with a question to drive engagement.
• Middle-of-funnel (Consideration): From the same report, develop a video or a series of podcast episodes that dive into the implications of the data, positioning your client as the solution.
• Bottom-of-funnel (Decision): Use a powerful client/customer testimonial from a case study as a targeted ad to drive website visits and lead generation. This is a great way to repurpose your content for specific outcomes.

If you’re wondering whether you can combine all three frameworks to create the ultimate repurposing content strategy, you read our minds. By combining these, you have the potential to produce 100s of pieces of content for every buyer stage. Now, effective team collaboration is key for this strategy, as is the technology you use.

Producing hundreds of content pieces for a client is a huge task, even for large creative teams. However, with AI, turning a webinar or guide into 100s of touchpoints is suddenly doable; even for leaner teams.

Agencies using AI to reproduce content slash production times by 60%. Your creative team still leads on the original piece, ensuring it’s valuable, accurate, and aligned with the client’s audience. From there, AI can:

• Identify core themes and turn them into standalone pieces
• Adapt content for multiple channels and formats – blogs, social posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, etc.
• Map each piece to audience needs and search intent
• Generate headlines, outlines, and keyword-rich copy while maintaining brand voice

Each piece links back to the original and related posts, building an interconnected content ecosystem that boosts reach, SEO, and engagement. Your content marketers will need to provide a human touch for all of this. This strategy doesn’t replace your team but turns them into content editors rather than writers.

This approach lets your team and AI collaborate to create powerful content clusters without rewriting everything manually. It saves time, maintains high quality, and starts generating results quickly.

There are ethical and shady ways to use AI. Be upfront with clients about how it’s used, and position it as a tool to scale their reach, not replace creativity.

A scalable content strategy needs reliable, high-performance hosting. Traffic spikes from viral posts or videos demand speed and stability. Slow sites damage brand reputation and hurt SEO.

Hosting platforms like Nimbus make it easy to manage large content volumes across multiple sites from one place. If you’re planning on creating a huge volume of content for your client, an agency hosting plan from us will keep your clients’ sites running smoothly no matter what.

Massive companies like Netflix, Nike and Buzzfeed are already repurposing content in dozens of different formats:

Netflix uses AI (“Cinebot”) to analyze hours of video, automatically generating trailers and highlight reels customized for different audience segments, increasing user engagement and discovery.

Buzzfeed uses AI to turn long-form articles into interactive quizzes, listicles, and short-form social content. Their strategy boosts versatility and engagement across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.

Nike employs AI tools to distil brand storytelling into bite-sized videos and platform-specific social posts, ensuring resonance with global audiences and maximizing messages on each channel. Nike has realised that their audience expects different things from a YouTube video and an Instagram Reel and has repurposed content to reflect this.

These are massive companies repurposing huge amounts of content, and we aren’t suggesting you go to these lengths overnight. However, repurposing content is a valuable and viable strategy for almost any agency and client.

If you’re new to AI, our webinar ”Cutting through the AI hype” is a great place to start.

To truly master content repurposing, you need to treat it like its own project. Here are some tips to get you started:

• Create a repurposing calendar: Plan your repurposing content efforts alongside your efforts to create fresh content.
• Measure and adapt: Use analytics to track the performance of multiple platforms and adjust your strategy based on what works.
• Maintain brand consistency: While the content formats will change, the brand voice and core message should always remain consistent.
• Get your team involved: Changes to strategies like this can scare people (especially when you throw AI into the mix). Be honest with your team, explain the desired outcome and their roles in this project.

Repurposing content is a strategic shift for your agency. Suddenly, each piece of content has a much bigger impact without any additional resources. It transforms your team from content creators into full-fledged content strategists. It will enable you to supercharge your content efforts and deliver more value to your clients. And if you need a hosting partner built for agencies and designed to support your client’s growth, we’re here for you. Take a platform tour today and see how our powerful hosting platform can help your clients grow.