In this three-part Kickstart Your Content Strategy series, we’re exploring the top three barriers to having a successful content strategy, cited by marketers in CMI‘s survey:
- Lack of time (69%)
- Producing enough content (55%)
- Producing engaging content (47%)
Today, we’re focusing on #2:
Producing Enough Content 🧞♂️
No matter if you’re a solopreneur or a large-scale content production team, finding the inspiration and ideas to fill up your content calendar can be a headache. Especially if you’re focused on quality over quantity. Fortunately, there are a few hacks that you can use to ensure you’re never short on topics and resources to ensure your content calendar is positively bursting with ripe, engaging content that your audience will love to read and share.
Repurpose Your Content 🦎
Ever feel like you can’t produce enough content to keep up with your targets? Well, sometimes, you can repurpose what you already have in your archives.
What do we mean by repurposing? This is different from recycling, which we covered in this post. By repurposing, we mean deconstructing larger pieces of content into bitesize chunks or altering the format for different platforms.
Advantages of repurposing your existing content:
- SEO: The more content you have around a specific topic, the more opportunities you have to target a particular keyword.
- Reinforce the message: The more people see or read your message in different ways, the more likely it is to stick in their mind.
- Reach new audiences: Different people hang out in different places. A strategically-placed Pin on Pinterest may end up reaching someone who never would have seen it on Facebook or Instagram.
- More opportunities to get shared: The more places your content lives, the higher the chance of it being shared by different audiences.
And how can you repurpose your content? Let us count the ways…
1. Identify Your Evergreen Content 🌿
Take a look at your archives. You’ll likely have pieces that are still valuable, that haven’t been promoted in some time. There may be some that you’ll need to refresh and update. But chances are, that’ll take less time than writing a completely brand new piece.
Once you’ve identified your Evergreen content, you can go about updating any outdated information (e.g statistics, news, dates or examples), refreshing the imagery, adding any extra relevant information, and you’re all set to cross-promote it on your social platforms. Using a tool like SmarterQueue enables you to automate the content recycling process, so you’ll never have to worry about manually scheduling posts again.
2. Take a Look at Your Most Popular Social Posts 💅
You’ll learn a lot from what your audience responds to. Don’t ignore the feedback you receive every day from them!
With SmarterQueue, you can instantly sort through your past social posts on each platform to see which were the most engaging over time. You can use this in two ways:
- To re-add the most popular content to your Queue
- To get a deeper understanding of what content you should be creating
3. Convert a Listicle into Separate Pieces 👨👩👧👦
Have you got articles in the archives named something like, 12 Ways to Achieve X? It’s worth revisiting them to see if you can expand on each point and turn it into 12 separate, in-depth pieces.
Listicles are awesome, but long-form pieces add extra value. Consider aiming for 1000-2000 words on each individual listicle item, backed up with research and practical tips.
4: Auto-Share Posts from Blogs ✒️
Do you manually add your new blog posts into your social media management tool by copying and pasting the link each time you publish a new one?
Well – we’ve got a game-changing hack for you. SmarterQueue’s Auto-Post from RSS feature imports new blog posts from any blog to your Queue automatically.
- It works on any website with an RSS feed
- You can specify whether to add it to the top or bottom of your Queue or save it as a draft
- You can specify it to only import blogs with certain keywords
- You can pick which Category the blog post is imported to
5: Create a Slideshare Presentation 🖥️
Often, marketers overlook this opportunity, but Slideshare is a great platform for distilling your most popular content into a slide format. We recommend starting with one of your most popular blog posts, and turning it into a story with slides you design on Canva.
6: Produce Infographics 🎨
An infographic is a visually attractive summary of research or a guide, in a vertical format. They’re especially good for data visualisation, but can be used in a number of ways to tell a story visually.
We’ve curated a selection of infographics over on our ‘Infographics‘ board on Pinterest. Follow the board to be inspired daily with brand new infographics!
Ready to create your own? Piktochart is a simple tool that provides preset Infographic templates that you can edit.
7: Use Quora 🎙️
Quora is super valuable as a platform for us content marketers because people on it are actively seeking solutions to problems.
Chances are, there are people asking questions on Quora right now that your existing content can answer.
Answers get upvoted on Quora if they’re relevant, considered, helpful and well-written. Take a look at questions being asked around your keywords, and check for opportunities for you to answer with genuinely helpful advice.
8. Create Bitesize Content For All Your Social Platforms 🍪
OK, let’s say you started with a whitepaper, and you’ve created eight separate blog posts from your whitepaper to share on social media. Great! Now, you can create even more pieces of content off the back of these eight articles.
Our blog post, 8 Creative Ways to Repurpose Content for Different Social Platforms, gives you ideas on how to cross-promote each piece on Instagram, Instagram Stories, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
9. Bring it to Life in a Video, Webinar or Podcast 📹
Turn your expertise into an audio or visual experience! This is a great way to add a new dimension to your content offering and has so much room for growth with opportunities for collaborations, interviews and guests.
It also allows you to reach your audience when they’re not at their desks: perhaps they’re open to listening to a podcast on their commute or when they’re out walking. Think about how you’d need to adjust your content for audio or video purposes, by imagining where your audience will be when they’re listening and what frame of mind they’ll be in.
Will you try any of these ideas to repurpose your content? Let us know if you have any other ideas in the comments! 👇
Want to boost engagement and save 8+ hours a week on social media management? Try SmarterQueue out for free today!
