Spring Cleaning: How to Repurpose Your Content for a ‘Fresh’ Feeling
Marketers and social media specialists may be putting too much pressure on themselves to constantly generate new content. Teams juggling tight timelines, multiple priorities, and limited resources know that this ask is just too big.
If this resonates with you, it may be time to take a look at your company’s content plan and incorporate more repurposed content into your social calendar. This can be done strategically and give recycled posts a fresh, new feeling while staying true to your key messages and goals! In this blog, we will cover:
Identifying which content is worth repurposing
Formatting solutions
How to approach older vs. newer content
Tailoring to fit the audience
Common pitfalls
Is it Worth Reusing?
How to Identify Notable Content
To determine whether a piece of content is worth recycling, first identify the message that needs reinforcement. Stephanie Pryor, founder and CEO of LANC Marketing, LLC, provided a “Back to School” seasonal campaign as an example. She suggests going through previous education-related posts and bringing those back into the feed.
After collecting relevant content, the next step is to review past performance. Audit content from the last 6–12 months. Then, identify top-performing pieces based on key metrics like engagement, traffic, or clicks. You’ll want to prioritize any high-value, evergreen assets that can be repurposed into other formats.
Formatting Old Into New
Leveraging Different Formats for a Fresh Feeling
The expertise, data, and people in your organization—and the media opportunities, speaking engagements, case studies, and research that result from them— have the potential to produce plenty of long and short-form content. Blogs summaries, executive insights, and short clips can be extracted from podcast episodes, webinars, and panel quotes.
For example, you can take a long-form piece like an expert-led blog post and quickly turn it into bite-sized content, including:
Newsletters
Carousels
Short-form videos (5-15 seconds)
Long-form content can also be used as the centerpiece of an educational social media or email series as well.
Finally, proprietary data or research can be used to make:
Infographics
Reports
LinkedIn thought leadership posts
Media pitches
Tip: An agency partner like LANC can help build out an event strategy and elevate your thought leadership. Doing this can fill out a content plan for an entire year.
Approaching Old vs. New Content
Strategize Based on Content Lifecycle
For older content, Semrush defines content pruning as “the process of removing underperforming or outdated content from your website” so you can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) results and get your best content in front of your target audience.
That doesn’t mean older content should be deleted. Instead, this allows content specialists to update, refine, and expand with new insights or recent data, or increase the relevance of the new insights and data by tying in timely topics and trends.
Newer content, on the other hand, is more likely to require light editing for format and tone adjustments. Any insights or trends discussed are likely still relevant and would not need further research. New content would need to be repurposed quickly as a result—and don’t be afraid to share the same piece of content more than once. It’s a common mistake among marketers to put so much work and effort into a project only to move on when it’s completed and launched, rather than getting the most possible mileage out of the project content.
Tailoring to Fit the Audience Segment
Reuse, Repurpose, Reimagine
Marketers no longer need to confine their content to specific formats or fixed to different stages of the buyer journey. Today’s content is more fluid, and strategic repurposing allows each piece to serve multiple roles depending on your audience’s intent and stage in the funnel.
For example, a case study originally used to nurture warm leads can be repurposed for awareness-stage engagement by extracting compelling quotes or stats for a thought leadership blog. Likewise, a webinar designed to address mid-funnel concerns can yield a wide variety of derivative assets, each tailored for different touchpoints.
Take a hypothetical “Back to School” campaign: A webinar discussing how budget constraints affect teachers could be reimagined in several ways. The insights shared could inspire a fundraising initiative for under-resourced classrooms. Alternatively, the practical tips from educators might be compiled into a downloadable guide with cost-effective classroom supply suggestions. Or, the broader systemic challenges highlighted could form the basis of an opinion piece exploring the implications of school choice on public education funding.
Note that the CTA and tone should match with your intended audience’s needs and where they are in their journey.
The Most Common Content Repurposing Mistake
What Not to Do When Repurposing Content
The most common mistake in repurposing content is not doing it at all! Marketing teams often overlook existing content and move on to new projects and campaigns without fully extracting the value of their existing assets.
Marketers should look at content as reusable IP (intellectual property) and implement a system that makes it easy to recycle, refresh, and reframe content so that additional opportunities to get in front of decision makers are not missed.
Supporting Your Content Strategy
Most marketers wear multiple hats, and limited time and resources restrict teams on what they can accomplish each week. Repurposing content is a great way to keep your content fresh and engage your audience without reinventing the wheel each time.