It’s common for companies—especially those just starting their content marketing efforts—to define success by the quantity of content created. As a result, many teams end up stretching themselves thin, publishing as many blog posts, ebooks, and case studies as they can. The good news is that you don’t need to do this. We believe that true success is defined by the level of impact generated by content, not necessarily its quantity. One of the best methods to get the most out of your content is to lean into the power of repurposing or as it is also known, content atomization. Knowing why this tactic is so impactful can ensure all of your content is driving impact. The following examples will guide you to applying this strategy to your own content marketing efforts.

The Benefits of Content Atomization

Repurposing content is the process of taking an existing asset and reusing various elements or themes to create new content mediums. It’s a common content marketing practice that helps maximize the efficiency of your content efforts. Approached strategically, repurposing content can help your team: 

Scale Faster. 

One of the benefits of content atomization is that it makes it easier to scale your content efforts. You don’t need to think of fresh ideas from scratch. You can accelerate the process of generating fresh content by reusing larger themes or elements and creating smaller, more snackable content. This can be done alongside the writing of each article without draining your team’s resources or energy. 

Improve Audience Visibility.

According to BrightEdge Research, 53% of all website traffic is from organic search. However, organic positioning can take time. By repurposing your existing content, you can quickly produce multiple pieces of content that are optimized for each one of your distribution channels. This, in turn, can improve your visibility to targeted audiences while your organic rankings grow.

Create More Impact.

While blog content is impactful (we create a lot of it), you can’t be a one-trick pony. In order to create the most impact and engagement with your audience, you need to get creative with how you engage with them. The more you know about your prospects and customers the better. By atomizing your content, you increase your ability to drive more impact as you can better connect with your audience through the content channels that they prefer most. Even better, with the right technology, you can track this performance and better understand your audience sentiment and engagement with your content.

4 Ways to Repurpose Existing Content

There’s an endless number of ways to repurpose existing content. If you need some inspiration, here are a few methods that we use to make sure our content resonates with our audience: 

1. Turn Visual & Audio Content Into Written Content

One of the most effective ways to atomize content is to change the format. So whether you have an archive of webinar recordings or podcast episodes, this is a great opportunity to create more written content. Since you’ll already have the topic, talking points, and structure from the visual content, the writing process should be a relatively easy lift. You may even be able to create more personalized content that aligns with your campaign efforts as well.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind: 

• Listen or watch the content first to ensure the messaging is still aligned with your brand’s goals. 
• Make sure the visual content is either evergreen or covers a topic relevant to your audience. 
• Link to the original video in your blog post, and vice versa. You can even embed the medium within the post, depending on where you originally hosted the first piece of content. This allows your customers to choose whichever medium they prefer. 

2. Update Existing Posts

Another common practice when it comes to repurposing is to optimize existing posts. For instance, maybe you have a highly downloaded whitepaper that you published a few years ago. You can update the report with the latest statistics and republish it. Similarly, you may have a popular holiday post or one for a competitive keyword that you can update with refreshed information every year. Use these guidelines when updating existing posts: 

• Focus on content that’s high-performing, evergreen, or seasonal.
• Make sure to modify the original article, and don’t change the URL to maintain link value.  
• Check for accuracy and relevancy (e.g., take out references to events that happened last year).

3. Conduct a Yearly Content Audit 

By conducting a well-executed content audit, you can identify areas in your content ecosystem that are ripe for repurposing. An audit will help you make sure you can continue to support your content strategy as well as find areas of improvement. Content audits can help you better segment your content by performance and relevance. Finally, a content audit ensures you and your teams have visibility and transparency into the repurposing process to make sure there is alignment. These three tips will help guide your yearly journey:

• Content by Performance: While you may only focus on top-performing content, you may find that your low performing content is good content that just needs to be repurposed based on your audience and their intent.
• Content By Type: By having a better understanding of what content you have. You can quickly map out a plan to repurpose content to various formats to better engage your audience.
• Content By Relevance: Your content ecosystem is similar to nature’s ecosystem -- both of them are fragile and need to be handled with care. Make sure the content you’re creating is both relevant to your audience and is meeting their needs on a regular basis.

4. Contribute Guest Posts 

If you have a piece of content that’s performing well, offer to write a guest post for another company blog on the same topic. While you can’t contribute the exact same post, you can use your existing one to inform your structure and key talking points. Guest posts are fantastic ways to create high-quality backlinks to your website as well as targeted referral traffic. To contribute a guest post:  

• Try to reach out to companies that have a similar or stronger blog presence than yours. 
• Make sure your content and the guest post are different enough so that your readers gain value from reading both. 
• Offer to swap guest posts—this allows you to reap the benefits of contributing to another blog while also building out your own!

Using repurposing tactics, like the ones we outlined in this post, can help you create tons of impactful content without stretching your team too thin. If you want to get the most out of the content you publish, it's essential to adopt a 360-degree view of your content performance. To learn more, check out this recent post on a related topic: Are You Taking A 360-Degree View Of Your Content?