Getting more out of your content by repurposing

Here’s a common content marketing scenario: first, people think of what they want to do - like a case study video. They put together at timeline, they get everyone involved who needs to be involved, they have meetings, they tick the relevant boxes, and eventually a nice-looking video pops out the other end of the process.

Then they move on to the next project. This is a mistake.

Obviously, the mistake is not in creating another piece of content. That’s exactly what you’d expect a busy team to be doing. The mistake is in moving on to the next piece of content and forgetting about the last one.

This is a shame, because content has a ton of reuse value. You can slice content into chunks and put each chunk into a different context. This instantly gives you another piece of content that’s ready to go - but you used a fraction of the resources it took to create the original piece of content.

Easier than building a garden from scratch.

An example

Here’s an example. Let’s say you put together a video case study of a particularly successful client. It’s 3 minutes long, and follows the standard template - client introducing herself, talking about the business, talking about how your product or service helps, all overlaid with some nice music and setup shots with drones and Go-Pros.

Once you’ve finished this video, you can really get to work on slicing it and dicing it. For example:

Whip together a short written case study. This won’t take long, because you’ve already got all the underlying information from when you did your prep for your video.
Pull out some sound bites from the video. Now you can use these on social media, or as customer testimonial in other projects,
Cut a shorter (<1 minute) video from the original video, and give it captions, and share it on social media - people can watch it on the bus without plugging in their headphones. You don’t need to be a pro to do this. You can do it with iMovie or WeVideo in an afternoon.
Cut out some stills from the footage (better yet - get some stills while you’re filming) and overlay them with the soundbites you pulled out earlier. Now you’ve got some nice images of someone promoting your brand. Stick those wherever it makes sense to do so.

Now you’ve turned your video into something like 5-10 more pieces of content. Further, you didn’t really have to spend that much time doing it. Each of these things can be done in a day or less, and that’s being quite liberal with my time estimations.

When you compare this alongside the time it takes to coordinate, shoot and approve a video, it’s an absolute no-brainer.

So don’t be so hasty to move on after you create a new piece of content. Take an extra few days to slice your content up and get even more value out of what you already have.

Image by Michael Coghlan via Wikimedia