Earth Day. A day to think about reducing waste, recycling and thinking of new creative ways to make your world a better place. These practices aren’t just great for our planet, but they are also helpful when it comes to thinking about your marketing content strategy.
If you’re anything like the 58% of marketers who feel that they struggle to create good content, you can understand how time-consuming it can be to keep up with a robust content calendar.
But what if there’s a way to reuse all that content that you worked hard to make, without feeling like you’re pulling a Groundhog Day (wait… wrong holiday).
Here are a few ways to ‘Reduce, Reuse & Recycle’ your marketing content:
Reduce:
Make it Green. Evergreen that is. Create blog posts, e-books, social posts etc. that are evergreen, meaning they are always relevant and not time sensitive. Have these types of content on hand for whenever you’re bogged down with other projects.
Crowdsource. Take any feedback that your followers or readers give you in your comments section and expand upon them. Or you can go a step further and ask your followers what they want to read about next. This will not only reduce the amount of time your team spends on coming up with new ideas, but will also make your audience feel heard.
Reuse:
Out with the Old, In with the New. Refresh old content that made a lot of great points, but could be a bit out-dated in terms of facts and figures. Pop in some new, relevant data and voila you have yourself a new piece of content.
Best of the Best. Although we’d like to believe that your audience is on the edge of their seats waiting for your new content to be delivered to them, chances are they’ve missed some of your content. Offer a “Best of” blog post that can highlight different blogs you have done on similar topics, most popular blog posts or a yearly or quarterly review. This is not only an easy way to reuse content, it’s the perfect way to drum up interest in older blog posts and encourage people to click around your site.
Recycle:
A Rose by Any Other Name. Let’s say you have a really successful webinar that you got great feedback on – cool, now what? You can say:
A) “Awesome, on to the next one!” OR
B) “What else can I do with this?”
All of you over-achievers out there are probably really pushing for Option A. However, I’d suggest that you don’t join the ranks of those 58% of marketers who are stressing about content and pick Option B. (And I know all of you SUPER over-achievers are looking for the “C) All the above” option.)
In this scenario, you can find other ways to use this webinar:
- Put the pertinent facts into an infographic
- Post a few highlights on your blog. *Bonus points for you over-achievers: you can then have a CTA at the end of this post to gain access to the recorded webinar. Can you say lead opportunity?
- Make it into an eBook
That’s the same content three ways. Now how’s that for getting the most out of one webinar?
Get it Twisted. One last fun way to recycle your content is by taking old posts and giving them a new twist. There are a few ways that you can do this. One would be to find an old post and provide new insights that have become available since that piece of content was published (such as a new piece of technology, tool or app that makes a process simpler). Another way would be letting a different author take a stab at the same topic and provide their own unique insight (also driving people to look back at your previous post as well, two-for-one!). Lastly, if you have a long-standing content library, a “#tbt” could be fun – and an interesting look at how your company has progressed. If you need an example of what that would look like…here’s a real throwback for you:
Your turn!
Do you have any creative ways to recycle content?
