Time is money. And creating new content requires both. Whether you create the content yourself or like many businesses, have an outside content marketing agency create it for you, it still takes your time and money to ensure it’s created and gets created right.

Content is what fuels your marketing initiatives. Without content, you won’t reach any of your marketing goals.

You know you need content, and an agency knows you need to consistently be producing and sharing content. But what you both also need to remember is that not every piece of content produced and shared has to be new content.

Enter, repurposing.

Reasons Why You Should Repurpose Your Content

Repurposing your already existing content saves you time and money. It saves time spent researching and actually creating the content; time that can now be spent focusing on your overall marketing strategy and implementing other digital campaigns. And like I said above, time is money so saving on time repurposing also helps save your marketing budget.

This method also allows you to reach a wider audience. Let’s say you created a blog post a year ago. It was a good topic that got some good views, which is great, but it doesn’t mean you just leave it at that to sit buried on your blog. Repurpose and add new life to it by writing about the same topic from a different viewpoint, or take that post and turn it into a video or podcast or infographic. Consumers learn in different ways, so you’re going to reach and teach more of them if you repurpose your content into various forms.

Repurposing also allows you to add more links and calls to actions to your website. More of these opportunities will result in more leads over time.

Steps For An Easier Repurposing Process

A general marketing rule is that for every piece of content you create, you need roughly 10 ideas to repurpose that piece in the future. Seems like more than you or an agency can handle, am I right? Well actually, it’s not.

To more easily come up with ideas, follow these two simple steps:

1. Review your analytics and social shares to find content that truly resonates with your target audience.
2. Go over your buyer personas to determine specific content types for each persona.

Once that’s done, together with an agency you can plan out the different and best types of content to create and the best repurposing locations for each content type.

How A Content Marketing Agency Plays In

Now that you really understand the importance of repurposing your already existing content, you have to find an agency that grasps the same, if not greater, understanding.

Some content marketing agencies want to jump right in and start producing content for you day one. That’s not a good characteristic of a knowledgeable agency.

A good agency first takes the time to take a full inventory of your owned content—every blog post, infographic, video, etc., you’ve created—and after reviewing the content and its analytics and social shares, they can determine which pieces should be used or repurposed.

This inventory process does take time to complete, but the time put in in the beginning will save you tremendously in the long run. It’s going to save you hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars that you can invest in other marketing initiatives.

So an agency may tell you that they understand the purpose and benefits of repurposing content, but if they don’t give you any specifics, especially about you and your content, get some specifics out of them. Ask them the following questions to see if they really understand and are interested in repurposing your existing content:

• What’s your process for collecting all our owned content to discover what’s usable and what’s not?
• How would you try and reuse some of the content we’ve already created?
• How do you plan to save us money with our content creation?

Your sales team doesn’t send out one email to a customer and then never follow-up with them, and your content marketing agency shouldn’t do the same with your content.

Repurposing and resharing content gets you better organic reach as well as increases your website traffic and consistent leads. One of the biggest mistakes you can make (or allow an agency to make) is not repurposing and resharing your content—so don’t make that mistake.

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