How to get the most value out of your best content

Sitting down to create a solid, in-depth piece of content is an overwhelming prospect. Especially if you’re new to the process of creating marketing or sales content, it can feel like a drain. All that time and money, all those resources you have to gather, just to get one measly blog post (or if you're lucky, an ebook)?

And then to add to the stress, you have to keep repeating that process ad infinitum? For anyone that doesn't love to write, this sounds exhausting.

But if your content is high-quality, evergreen, and informative, there’s no reason for all that work to produce only one item. In fact, repurposing your best content has many benefits:

Get more out of your investment

If you’re spending a ton of time up front planning and researching to create your initial piece of content, it’s nice to see that the effort you put in was worth your while. Knowing you’ll get 4 or 5 strong pieces of marketing collateral out of the same research and writing makes the original work a little easier to accept.

Reach new audiences

People like to consume information in all kinds of different ways. Some people love nothing more than diving into reading an in-depth article, while others are constantly on-the-go and would prefer a podcast option they can listen to while driving. Some people love a clean infographic to lay out lots of information in one visual piece of content, where others would rather scroll through a slideshow and take in individual points one at a time. Presenting the same information in a variety of different ways allows you to get your message to a variety of people with different preferences.

Repetition keeps you top of mind

Sometimes the first time a prospect reads a piece of your content, they don’t happen to need what you’re offering. They may make a mental note to remember your company, but with so much noise in everyone’s daily lives, even the most useful information can get pushed out and be forgotten. Repackaging the same useful content in multiple different ways and sharing it on various channels can serve as a good reminder of what you’re offering. Ideally, when the time comes for a prospect to want what you’re selling, your name will be the first one to come to mind.

With all those great advantages to reusing your best work, here are some examples of ways you can creatively repackage content (including links to some great resources to help you get started).

• Other blog posts: were there any points that could be expanded on?
• Turn your post into a downloadable white paper
• Combine multiple short blog posts into an ebook
• Create an infographic (here are 15 free infographic templates from HubSpot)
• Share your infographic on Pinterest (here are some Pinterest best practices)
• Slideshare presentation
• Turn a quote from blog post or other written piece ofcontent into a graphic (try Snappa, Canva or Pablo)
• Share your quote graphics on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook
• Reframe topic into a how-to or a starter’s guide
• Use informational content as an answer to a Quora question (check out Buffer’s in-depth guide to Quora for beginners)
• Create a checklist or template
• LinkedIn publishing
• Break a long form piece into multiple smaller blog posts
• Break big ebook down into multiple sales content emails
• Use individual blog posts as sales content emails
• Host a webinar. Record it so it can live in an on-demand format on your site.
• Read and record the content to create a podcast, or break a big piece of content down into a series of short podcasts (here’s a great guide for beginners)
• Syndicate blog posts on Medium
• Break your content into sequential pieces to create an email course
• Udemy course or Skillshare class

This is by no means a comprehensive list, either! You may be able to come up with even more creative ways to make your best written content to keep working for you in various formats long after you’ve created it. Try repackaging one of your blog posts into a new medium this month and see if it helps you get better results out of your hard work.

For more ideas to help improve your marketing and sales practices this year, check out our free ebook, The Buyer-centric Organization.