In the last few weeks, we’ve looked at the power of content in the world of eCommerce marketing. We’ve covered playing on the emotions of your customers, and how content can help you pull those heart strings (towards your brand!), a return to the content-first marketing approach, and how content fits into the headless model of eCommerce.

So, what have we learned?

Customers love content. Lots of it!

As you’ll know, though, while the consumer demand for high-quality content increases, it doesn’t always translate into more resources, staff time or budget at your end. So, how are you supposed to keep up? This is where a simple trick that’s been effective elsewhere in digital marketing for some time really can make a difference.

The theory behind the trick

Repurposing content is essentially finding new ways to reuse or adapt old content. However, by freshening it up, it looks, feels, reads and is even recognised by Google and, crucially, new potential customers as something completely original. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways you can go about refreshing content. Each one will take a little time – but, when you’ve already put in so much time and effort on the original content, wouldn’t it just be great to get that bit more out of it?

The benefits of repurposing

• The content creation process can be quicker, as you’re not starting from a blank page
• It’s a great way to improve SEO, as you’ll be spreading your content further and increasing the chances of creating new links as people find your content
• Old content gets a second chance to succeed. Have you ever created content and then later thought of a way to enhance it or add value? Here’s your chance!
• Static content, like an image or text, can be brought to life and made more three-dimensional
• Single items can be repackaged together in the form of guides, long-form content and more authoritative articles or downloadable documents

Time-saving creative methods to consider

Let’s start with the cornerstone of any solid content marketing campaigns – your blog posts. Like any text-loving writer, you’ll no doubt have seen the odd piece over time that simply didn’t get the recognition you thought it deserved. By repurposing your blog posts, you could package them up in themes and present them as guides or tips in the form of newsletters and PDFs.

Sure, PDFs aren’t great for SEO, but they do display authority and don’t take considerable time to create. If your blog posts have been image-heavy, consider repurposing them in a Pinterest content board. If they’re stat-heavy, break these figures up into infographics and social media post images. Meanwhile, if you have written a step-by-step guide post, think how it would work on SlideShare.

That’s plenty of ideas, without even mentioning repurposing the piece as a podcast or video. Written content can also be revisited in the form of follow-up posts that question predictions, review statistics and encourage readers to visit more than one post in the same visit.  Ultimately, once you’ve got an original piece of content, you’ll always have options to play with going forward.

Not all content is evergreen, but that doesn’t mean it can’t all have an afterlife that can be regenerated again and again. Consider adding content repurposing to your regular content marketing plan, and see how much time you save week-by-week or month-by-month. You could engage with plenty more people, in far less time, and even get involved in using media you’ve not considered before.

At the end of the day, repurposing content isn’t really cheating at all unless you pinch it from somewhere else. It’s a potentially time-saving masterstroke that is used throughout the digital marketing world, so there’s no reason why an eCommerce agency can’t get a business to see what it could do for them.

To learn more about implementing an effective content marketing strategy for your business, simply get in touch or visit my site. Specialising in multiple facets of marketing and eCommerce, I’ll be immediately ‘repurposed’ to helping you achieve your goals! Call MBM on 01325 939 838 today to learn more.