The Art of Repurposing Content: Getting More Mileage Out of Your Work

By Nick Mann 🔹

Let’s say you created content like a blog post, social media update, or a video that was a slam dunk. Your audience went crazy for it, and there was a ton of engagement. 

You could just leave it at that and call it a day. OR you could repurpose the content, adapting it to different formats to further boost engagement, while driving an even larger volume of targeted leads to your business. 

For this post, we’ll take a deep dive into the art of repurposing content and show you specific ways you can get more mileage out of your work. 

Is Repurposing Content Truly Effective?

But before we get ahead of ourselves, is this a strategy that’s truly worth your time? 

According to most marketing experts, the answer is yes. 

“A survey revealed that 46% of marketers believe that repurposing content is more effective than creating new content from square one. 65% also agree that it’s more cost-effective than building new content or performing minor updates on existing posts.”

Source: ClearVoice

Just think about it. If a piece of content has had success with one format and your audience was receptive to it, there’s a good chance it can also find success with other formats. 

Say, for instance, a blog post went viral. Odds are it will at least gain some traction if it’s repurposed into a social media post, infographic, slideshow, or video. While you can’t guarantee that it will have the same impact as the original post, it’ll still likely generate plenty of additional leads with only a minimal time expenditure. 

So when it’s all said and done, repurposing content offers two key benefits, which are maximizing exposure and saving time and money. 

A Real-Life Example

Here’s an example from one of the most successful content marketing brands of all time, HubSpot. In mid-2024, it published The State of Marketing Report, which unpacks recent marketing trends. 

Source: HubSpot

It’s a resource that helped HubSpot increase its newsletter subscription count dramatically, as readers need to first provide their email address to download the report. 

Source: HubSpot

Like most in-depth resources from HubSpot, this report did extremely well and helped the brand continue to generate quality leads, while also deepening its reputation. To capitalize on the momentum, HubSpot also repurposed it into this Instagram post, which is pinned at the top of its profile.

Source: Instagram

As of the time of this writing, this post received 1,203 likes and 48 comments, which is solid. And users can conveniently browse through the different slides to get the highlights of the report to pique their interest and motivate them to download the entire thing. 

Source: Instagram

With very little effort, HubSpot was able to get way more miles out of this content than if it was simply posted to its blog and left alone. 

Content Repurposing Ideas

Now let’s jump into some specific ideas to get your creative juices flowing. Here are some potential formats to experiment with. 

A Social Media Post

As we saw with HubSpot, a social media post is one of the most straightforward ways to adapt content. Just take the highlights of something like a blog post and create an image or series of images for social sites like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X. 

To create eye-popping visuals, use a free platform like Canva, which makes it a breeze, even if you have little to no design experience. 

Source: Canva

YouTube Video

“87% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads,” and, “87% say video has directly increased sales.” Note that these numbers are up in recent years, indicating that video marketing is having a bigger and bigger impact. 

Source: Wyzowl

This makes video — YouTube video, in particular — an excellent choice because of YouTube’s massive audience base of over 2.7 billion monthly active users, as of August 2024. If a piece of content turns out great and gets big engagement, chances are good that it will also perform well on YouTube. 

A Slideshow

A slideshow through a platform like PowerPoint or Google Slides is, in my opinion, an underutilized content format. But when done correctly, it can be perfect for expanding and elaborating on a piece of content. 

Say you wrote a successful 1,500-word blog post that included a handful of images but was mainly text-based. Creating a slideshow around the topic would make it more image-centric and add a whole new dimension. 

And it’s not hard to do. As I just said, PowerPoint and Google Slides are excellent platforms that allow anyone with minimal design experience to build engaging slideshows quickly. 

An eBook

When it comes to “gated” content where a valuable resource is given to readers in exchange for joining an email list, eBooks have long been one of the most popular options. And for good reason. Offering a weighty resource like an eBook that’s jam-packed with insightful information is a strong incentive, which is why countless businesses use this strategy for building their email lists. 

If you have a fairly lengthy piece of content such as a long-form blog post, this could potentially be expounded upon and turned into an eBook that takes an even deeper dive into a topic. Note that this doesn’t have to be massive in length. In fact, many eBooks are between 20 to 50 pages, with some being as short as just 3,000 words. 

If you’re looking to create a strong incentive for visitors to join your email list so you can nurture them and generate more leads while at the same time repurposing content, an eBook can be just the ticket. As for platforms for creating an eBook, Canva will allow you to create a professional product for free with a very user-friendly interface.

Source: Canva

Infographic

Primarily geared around shorter content, an infographic allows you to turn a topic into a visual-driven resource, offering insights using eye-popping images. Here’s a good example of an infographic created by California-based design studio Hoodzpah.

Source: Piktochart

If your original piece of content was largely text-based, designing an infographic allows you to cater to an audience of visual learners to take your message further without a lot of extra effort. Again, Canva is great for creating infographics and lets you design fully customized content while incorporating charts, graphs, images, icons, and stickers.

A Final Note

Again, the point of repurposing content is to extend the reach and impact of your content and appeal to a wider audience without creating something brand new from scratch. One thing to caution against, however, is avoiding becoming redundant with your content. While there will be plenty of overlap, every piece of content should stand on its own and have a unique enough angle to justify its existence. 

Otherwise, the results may be minimalized if you’re simply “regurgitating” information. But as long as each piece of repurposed content adds a fresh spin to the topic, you should be good to go. 

If you’re looking for more advice and inspiration on how to further develop your marketing strategy and grow your business, check out Cove. Cove is a network of professionals from a wide range of industries who are passionate about collaborating, networking, marketing, and learning. 

With Cove, you gain access to valuable resources, tools, members-only events, and much more that can propel your business forward. Learn more here. 

About the Author

Nick Mann is a freelance writer/content strategist focusing on business, marketing, finance, and tech. Through his content, his goal is to help small businesses generate quality leads to grow and thrive.