How to Repurpose Content Across All of Your Channels
*What’s up? I’m George. I used to work with Dave at Drift and now help to manage his content at DGMG. I’ve been known to sling copy from time to time, so Dave asked me to throw a blog in here and there.
I’m the content manager here at DGMG.
That means I help with everything content related (obviously). Email, the newsletter, social, the blog (what’s up?), on and on. You name it. I probably have a hand in it. Which means I need to come up with new content for every channel, every day. And honestly…it’s not easy.
There are plenty of times throughout an average week where I think I’ve finally hit the content wall. I’ve said everything there is to say about marketing. It’s especially frustrating when I slave over a piece of content for hours, finally get it up on social, the website, whatever, and then boom — I’m back to square one. I have to wake up the next day and start all over again, coming up with a new concept and writing a new piece of content.
Then I realized something. Yes, you should always be putting out brand new content. But there’s nothing wrong with using the content you already have to inform the content in other channels. It’s like when I ran the webinar program at Drift. I would hold a webinar on ABM, for example. The webinar went well, got some leads, and it’s over. But then I would yank clips from the webinar and make it into a class in our learning hub. Or pull a gif from the video and use it in a future promotional email. Or steal slides from the webinar deck and put them in an ABM ebook.
All of a sudden, I had 4-5 different pieces of content off of a 1-hour webinar. So I want to run you through a recent example of how Dave and I took a single marketing lesson from the 1960s and turned it into content across every one of our channels.
It started with a social post
About 2 months ago, Dave dropped this piece of knowledge on LinkedIn:
The lesson is from Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. It’s a marketing classic and an all-time favorite of Dave’s. The post itself is simple enough. Basically just listing Schwartz’s principle and adding a little color to it. But as you can see, it went over pretty big on social…
So Dave, never one to let good content fade away into the ether, decides to take that post and make it the focus of his newsletter for that week:
Now you’ll notice that he didn’t just copy and paste the LI post into the newsletter. He took the concept, explained the background behind it, and built out his own hypothetical examples of each stage of awareness to add clarity. This is a huge key to content repurposing — make sure you’re adding a little extra value or a certain tweak every time you post the content somewhere new. Always ask yourself: how is this piece of content different from the piece I’m taking it from?
Moving Beyond the Written Word
Ok great, so we’ve got this lesson down in writing in two different channels now: social and the newsletter (email). But a lot of people don’t like to read. Some people need to hear or watch something to understand it. Well Dave thought of that.
Just last week, nearly two months after that original LI post, he had Asia Orangio (CEO, DemandMaven) on the DGMG Podcast. In addition to being a lead generation guru, Asia also happens to be well-versed in, you guessed it, the five stages of customer awareness.
So as part of their conversation, Dave had Asia discuss the five stages in a real-life business context. Now we’ve gone from just stating the lesson itself (the LI post), to providing hypothetical examples of the concept (the newsletter), to a practical application of the concept from a proven business leader (the podcast). Every step of the way, we’re adding value.
But Dave also realizes that his podcast is about an hour long. Not everyone has that kind of time in their day. So he said, “why don’t we just condense the podcast down into a digestible one minute or so video,” highlighting Asia’s explanation of the 5 Stages of Awareness.
Now all of a sudden, we have a video (coming soon, tech issue) that can live forever on DGMG U and continue providing value for us over time.
Bringing it full circle
Finally, we come back to where it all began — social. Last week’s podcast reminded Dave of how strongly the Five Stages lesson resonates with marketers. So he had me request a social graphic from our designer. Now, we have the concept in pyramid form and an excuse to repost it on the DGMG social channels:
So two full months after Dave dropped that initial LI post, we’re still getting social value, brand exposure, and thought leadership content out of one marketing lesson from 55 years ago. All the while, we added value or a different angle on the topic each step of the way. Oh and now we got a blog out of it too 😉
That was a fun one. Hit me up on LI, Twitter if you ever want to talk content, repurposing, or need a freelance writer (shameless plug).
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Have a great weekend!