Arguably the biggest challenge of any content marketing strategy is scalability. How can you create enough high-quality content to consistently engage your audience without burning out your team and resources?
And how can you do it with limited resources? It would be impossible to try and create completely fresh content for every platform, every day.
The solution is to repurpose your existing web content.
Repurposing is not cross-posting...
Cross-posting is when you share another piece of content as-is on another platform. For example:
- Publishing a TikTok on Reels and YouTube Shorts
- Sharing a press release article on your company blog
Repurposing is about taking an original piece of content and using it as a foundation to create something new, tailored for a specific platform or audience.
For example:
- Turning a blog post into a LinkedIn or Instagram carousel with key takeaways and visuals
- Taking quotes and key points from a podcast episode into a blog post or email newsletter
... It isn't reposting, either
When you repost content, you're simply sharing the same content again. And it's usually on the same platform. It works well for high-performing social media posts and evergreen content.
While reposting can be useful for showcasing your top-performing content or promoting a limited time offer, repurposing is a more strategic approach to reaching different audiences and keeping your content fresh.
When is it time to start repurposing your content?
To develop a winning content strategy, you need all of the above. But repurposing stands out as the most crucial factor when it comes to scaling your content creation and maximizing your reach.
So, when is the right time to start repurposing?
If...
- you have tons of additional content in your backlog
- you're new to content creation and want to test different channels
- you connect with a similar audience on multiple platforms
- you want to scale content creation but it's proven too resource-intensive
... it's time to start repurposing.
Prioritizing content to repurpose
If you repurpose every piece of content, you'll find yourself doing precisely what you sought to avoid in the first place: wasting time creating too much content. Your team doesn't have the mental capacity or time to handle all your old and new content at scale, which is why your repurposing strategy should primarily focus on what's aligned with your overall content goals.
That might be:
- Giving old, business-critical pieces a new life
- Reaching a new audience or promoting evergreen content through different channels
- Diversifying your content by repurposing into different formats (e.g., turning a whitepaper into a video or series of blog posts)
You'll also want to consider your broader business goals 鈥� that is, the why behind your content strategy.
For example, if you're a less mature company that's focused on brand awareness, you're bringing a new product to market or you're rebranding with a specific type of messaging, you can expand your reach and solidify that position by focusing on things that went live within the last month or two.
If you've already had a few hits, you can work those older, high-performing pieces into your repurposing plans to boost their reach. Since they've already proven themselves to work, this is a quick way to bring in new sets of eyes.
Repurposing your web content: Examples and ideas
Repurposing is not a one-size-fits-all approach. There are tons of different ways to repurpose content:
- Taking shorter-form content like social media posts and expanding on the topic with longer-form pieces like blog posts, guides or even e-books
- Using podcast and interview quotes to reinforce your messaging on social media, newsletter, blog posts and website copy
- Updating and republishing evergreen content with new data and insights
- Creating infographics and visual charts from data-heavy content like research reports or case studies
- Transforming webinars and conference presentations into video snippets for social media
- Creating articles from the key takeaways of a keynote speech, webinar, or whitepaper
- Turning blog posts into infographics for your visual learners
- Converting sections of your newsletter into TikToks or LinkedIn posts
To help you grasp the concept even better, let's take a look at how different companies repurpose their content.
HubSpot: Condense e-books and research reports into blog posts.
For B2B content marketing, one of the easiest ways to repurpose your web content is to take longform pieces like e-books and research reports and break them down into a smaller, more digestible article for your blog.
HubSpot does this with its annual State of Marketing report.
They publish , which you can download after entering your email address.
Or, you can read a synopsis on . It has all the important data, but it's easier to read, share and link to.
Cognism: Repurpose your blog content on LinkedIn.
Cognism is a sales-intelligence platform that collects and connects all the relevant data points about a person or company into one unified data source. And they can run their LinkedIn strategy almost on autopilot.
What they do is they take their longform articles, like on meetings booked vs. meetings attended鈥�
...and they use those articles' headings as the main bullets or talking points in a LinkedIn post, like this:
From each blog post, you can get at least a few different short-form posts out of it. Take each H2 heading as its own topic, and use the H3 headings as the key points, rather than trying to condense the entire post into one post.
ClickUp: Turn long-form videos into short-form clips.
This is something that works for any industry 鈥� e-commerce, B2B, personal brands, you name it. You can even use the short video to direct traffic to the full piece.
A great example of this is podcasts, which have dozens of great conversational points you can use to reinforce your brand's messaging.
Every time Zeb Evans 鈥� ClickUp's CEO 鈥� gets on a podcast, multiple clips from that podcast are immediately turned into short-form videos like this one where he talks about his vision for the company:
This is pretty simple to set up. There are even AI tools you can use to auto-clip videos and turn them into micro-content.
And it works for any type of content 鈥� podcasts, webinars, conferences, product demos, interviews... everything. You can repurpose video content on any channel that will take a video: LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok.
Content repurposing starts with the right CMS
Your content management system (CMS) is where all your web content lives. You need one that can effectively handle all your templates, publishing cadences, and channels.
And no, even some of the most popular CMS platforms fall short. Take the Hallmark Channel as an example.
Hallmark initially moved onto Brightspot to improve its publishing cadence and multi-channel operations. With so much diverse content across various platforms, they struggled to repurpose it effectively 鈥� especially at scale.
What Hallmark needed (and what you may need) is modular content. Brightspot CMS supports dynamic content modules designed for flexibility and efficiency.
We worked with Hallmark to develop a flexible, multisite CMS that significantly improved editorial workflows. By creating pre-built content types and easy-to-use templates, the Hallmark team could effortlessly manage content across their platforms. Additionally, we integrated promotional modules to enhance engagement and extend the magic of Hallmark's holiday spirit year-round.
The result: Hallmark saw a 96% year-over-year increase in pageviews and is equipped to publish over 100 new content pieces weekly that can then be re-sliced and repurposed as needed. Brightspot CMS streamlined their content management process, enabling them to scale quickly and maintain brand consistency across all channels.
With Brightspot CMS, Hallmark was able to create a cohesive, immersive viewer experience on their digital platforms, replicating the joy their audience loves from their TV programming throughout the year.
Request a demo and see how it works.