5 Compelling Reasons To Curate And Repurpose Your Content
Posted by Jody Pellerin on Fri, Jul 06, 2012
You’ve been told that content marketing is the way to go and that a website sporting fresh content will be found more easily because the search engines love to see new stuff. But it seems an insurmountable task to create fresh, new content each and every day. Did you realize that you may be sitting on an entire mountain of content already? Or at least a small hill?
That’s right. Look around your company and you will find all kinds of digital and non-digital assets to leverage for content marketing purposes. Hence the terms in our title: curate and repurpose.
Content doesn’t just mean text and it isn’t limited to articles and blog posts. It includes everything in the pages on your website, any videos you have created, pictures of products or services, podcasts, data sheets, and more. Locating and organizing all this great content is part of the curation process. Taking a piece of content such as a video and creating a slideshow or white paper out of the information within is repurposing.
The pressure of coming up with an original piece is gone; now you only need to determine a different way to present already existing content.
Here are some great reasons to go this route:
Short Attention Span Marketing
Everything on the web needs to be “skim-able” because there is so much out there that people no longer read everything they see in-depth. You can take some of your longer pieces and break them up into more bite sized chunks for easy scanning. This also gives you the opportunity to present the information in different ways to appeal to different segments of your customer base.
Efficiency
One piece of content can become the hub for a whole range of other content pieces in what Lee Odden calls the hub and spoke model of content creation. Your hub may be an 8-page white paper that spawns:
You cover the entire range of social and traditional marketing from a single piece of content or a single event such as a new service offering.
Personalization
Because you are making changes to existing material you can easily create more targeted versions for specific sections of your customer base. The same material presented in a variety of ways has more chance of getting attention from a wider audience than attempting a one-size-fits-most message.
This works well for vertical marketing as well. If your product or service is used across multiple industries or businesses, repurposing helps you hone each version for a different vertical rather than come up with a whole new piece for each target.
Search Engine Optimization
Still one of the most powerful tools for marketing, building SEO becomes much easier with curated and repurposed content that already contains the SEO keywords and phrases that best fit your needs. While you may target 10 keywords, there are endless variations of phrases and search terms those keywords can appear in. This is where so-called long-tail SEO comes in, where a keyword phrase giving context to the keyword may bring in more qualified buyers than just the keyword alone. With more versions of the same content out there, you increase your chances of having the winning combination.
Crowd-Sourced Wisdom
Curating content that exists in every corner of your company plus third party resources such as reviews broadens the scope of your collective knowledge. By curating, or gathering and organizing, knowledge of your product and services from different departments and different opinions you will be able to present more relevant and effective content than if everything is produced by one or two people in a marketing capacity. Remember, it took many different people to develop your product. Each of them will have valuable input about its capabilities and methods for its use.
These are five very powerful reasons for supplementing your content marketing by curating relevant content and repurposing it to cover a broader range of marketing methods. Creating original content is hard and expensive. Get more value out of it by taking it apart and putting it back together in different ways.