Why Your B2B Business Should Focus on Content Repurposing and How to Do It
For B2B startups and small B2B businesses, blogging is an essential part of the inbound marketing strategy. Having a blog, and updating it consistently, helps to bring more website traffic, attracts more qualified leads, establishes you as an authority in your industry, and allows you to foster real relationships with leads and existing customers.
While your blog is a vital part of your B2B marketing strategy, coming up with new ideas can be difficult. Along with that, old, outdated content can actually harm your search engine rankings, which could push you out of view of the businesses you’re looking to attract. This is where content repurposing comes into play.
What is Content Repurposing?
At first glance, content repurposing sounds like a cop-out. Based on the phrase, it sounds like you’re just taking a piece of old content and altering it a little bit to show updated facts or statistics, add new graphics, and possibly alter the structure a bit. This is more revamping or refreshing your current content.
Content repurposing is a bit different. Instead of simply changing out a few outdated facts or figures in old blogs, you give your content a new purpose. For instance, you may be trying to reach a broader audience. You may repurpose a blog post by expanding on details in a whitepaper or eBook, or make data more visually digestible (and shareable!) in an infographic. Or, perhaps you could take an old piece of content and make a video or create soundbites for your social media pages.
How to Identify Opportunities for Repurposing
If you’re not sure how to identify content repurposing opportunities, here are few to consider:
Look at content that has received a significant amount of traffic
Find content that’s getting backlinks
See what content is getting the most shares on social media
Once you’ve found ideal content, you need to figure out what form the repurposed content should take and what platform it’s best suited for. Looking at your top-performing pieces can help you to better understand the types of businesses you’re trying to attract and what kind of information they’re looking for.
Benefits of Content Repurposing for B2B Businesses
It Helps in the Buyer’s Journey
Content repurposing allows you to more effectively reach and engage with your target market at each stage of the buyer’s journey. It typically takes eight touches before a prospective customer will engage with you. You need different types of content for each stage:
Awareness: blogging, infographics, and short videos can provide potential customers with information that provides answers to their problems and introduces them to your business
Consideration: repurposing more informational blog posts into guides, demonstration videos, and webinars can help to position your B2B business as an expert in your industry, show potential customers the benefits of your products or services, and encourage them into the final stage
Decision: content repurposed with strong calls to action or free trials of your products or services offer incentives that can drive the potential customer to make a purchase
It Boosts Your SEO
Topic clustering is becoming a more popular option for B2B businesses to boost SEO. This solution involves creating unique pieces of content that center around a specific topic. You can use your existing content to create SEO topic clusters, repurposing the content into more effective formats.
Repurposing your content can help to boost your SEO in a variety of ways, including:
Gaining more backlinks
Increasing the amount of content that you have online
Generating additional target keyword opportunities
It Can Encourage More Website Visits
You likely have social media pages. While you want to encourage people to visit your website on these pages, you also want to avoid being overly promotional. Content repurposing can help to encourage more visits by offering a view of what potential visitors will find without sounding too pushy.
It Gives Great Content More Use
Even if you’re a B2B startup, you likely have some content already posted that you’re proud of. Instead of letting the content sit and get fewer and fewer views, repurposing can give it new life and allow it to continue providing value.
It Saves Time
Creating brand-new content regularly is time-consuming, to say the least. You might run out of ideas or just don’t have the time to devote to creating a whole new blog post. Repurposing allows you to continue generating new content without having to think up and pump out all-new ideas, which can save a significant amount of time.
10 Ways to Repurpose Your Existing Content
Perhaps you have a couple of articles on your site or maybe a sales sheet or two. This is a great start! Here are 10 ways to make them go farther and fill your digital channels with engaging content:
1. Convert a blog post or eBook into an infographic
2. Take a whitepaper and create a series of smaller blog posts
3. Turn a blog post into a podcast
4. Create a how-to guide or video from a webinar
5. Turn statistical figures from a blog post or eBook into a Twitter or other social media post
6. Make a case study from internal data
7. Combine interviews with industry experts into an eBook
8. Expand on an answer to a Quora question and create a blog post
9. Make a video out of a PowerPoint presentation
10. Use information on new product or service pages to create a press release
Content is a crucial part of any B2B business’s marketing strategy. Repurposing the content that you already have gives it a new purpose. It helps to boost your SEO and search engine rankings and reach a broader audience in your target market. It also ensures that you and your products or services are always a good fit for the businesses you aim to serve.
