One of the great things about repurposing your content when you’re a small marketing team is that it can make you seem bigger than you are.
If you have slick and effective content repurposing processes at play, people might just think that a small one or two person marketing team is a team of 10 people!
In this blog post we’re going to find out how to create that big team vibe through effective repurposing…
This topic is actually inspired by our interview with Jess Cook who is the Head of Content at LASSO – the first guest on Season 2 of our other podcast B2B content strategist.
She said that repurposing content is what makes her small team look big. People are often surprised when they find out how many people she actually has on her team, because they are seemingly, “everywhere, doing all the things.”
Hear Jess make this point here!
Repurposing is key to getting your brand, content and message in front of a much broader audience… and epic repurposing can be achieved as a one-person-band, a small team or a large team.
When you repurpose content you're publishing a lot of content - in different formats and for different platforms - and you're messaging is aligned, at least that is what you want to be aiming for. Because of this, you appear to your audience and the online world to be running a huge, efficient content engine!
Here’s an example:
1. You do a webinar once every two weeks and you repurpose it into:
- A YouTube video
- Short social media videos
- LinkedIn posts
- An email to your subscribers
- Tweets
- A blog post
- Quote graphics
2. You distribute the content across your channels over an extended period of time.
3. You follow this process every time you do a webinar.
Perhaps you have a weekly podcast…
1. Each week you take the highlights from the episode and break them up into:
- Short social media videos
- A Twitter thread
- A few LinkedIn posts that tag guests or experts you include or mention
2. People on all these channels are going to see content about your webinar or podcast in multiple formats and your message is going to really sink in.
3. You’re increasing your touchpoints with your audience and your time spent with them.
It’s not magic…
We know that repurposing doesn’t just happen. It takes you and your team time to do the work. But when repurposing is at the core of your content strategy you save all the time, stress and mental fatigue of coming up with new content ideas for your channels.
As a small or solo marketing team you may be asking, “How do I keep a content creation and repurposing engine going efficiently month after month, year after year?”
Here are our top tips.
5 tips for “small team big impact” repurposing
1. Systems and processes
It's SO important to have efficient systems and processes in place. At Content 10x we love systems and processes and are reliant on them when it comes to delivering over and above our clients’ expectations.
We have SOPS – these are standard operating procedures for everything that happens in the business and they are updated regularly when things change.
Tools such as Asana, ClickUp, Trello, Monday.com are all vitally important to keep lines of communication open and providing a central to-do list.
2. Create content in batches
For example, if you have a weekly podcast, record a month’s worth of episodes in a day.
If batches don’t work for you, then it’s a good idea to create your content in advance. So if you have a weekly podcast, always be working 4 or 5 episodes ahead at a time.
3. Repurposing starts at the planning phase
We talk about this a lot.
Know what your content will become and create it with repurposing in mind!
4. Do you even need to create new content right now?
Ask yourself whether you need to create new content right now. Perhaps you could spend the next month, or even a few months, repurposing what you already have. Look at your analytics, your best performing content and work out what to repurpose from there.
It’s important for leadership to understand that the question is often not…
‘What do we need to create?’
But rather
‘What do we have already and are we making the most of it?”
5. Schedule, schedule, schedule
When it comes to distribution you will want to schedule the content out to save yourself and your team time. Use the tools built into the platforms themselves, or there are loads of great third-party tools too, like HubSpot, Buffer or MeetEdgar for example.
In conclusion…
You can outsource your repurposing!
Many of our clients are companies with small marketing teams that are running extremely tight ships and simply don’t have the time to repurpose. But from the outside you'd think they have a massive marketing team.
We take pride in making our clients’ marketing teams looks bigger than they are. Stay lean, focussed, and outsource.
But, whether you outsource or not, if you put repurposing at the heart of what you do, you'll get off the hamster wheel of pumping out big piece after big piece of new content and stressing over what to post on social etc, and if you:
Develop and then follow your systems and processes
Create content in batches
Plan with repurposing in mind
Schedule out your content
You’ll make your content team appear big. No matter the size!