How to Recycle and Repurpose Your Marketing

Recycling is hugely important to reduce waste and help save the environment, but are you doing the same with your marketing? I often see practitioners spending far too much time and energy trying to come up with new and fresh ideas day in, and day out which is a waste.

If you’ve been creating any form of marketing content for your business, you’ll know just how much time and effort goes into it. If everything you do is only used once, you’re not making the most of all of your hard work.

You can take the ideas of recycling, upcycling, and repurposing and transfer them to your marketing to give it a new lease of life. It's a great way to save your own precious resources.

Why Repurpose Marketing?

Providing the same information in different formats is a great way to reach other groups of potential clients. Everyone has their preference on how they consume content, some like to read, others like watching videos or listening to podcasts. The more different ways you present your information, the more people you will reach with your message.

Repurposing existing marketing takes less time than starting from scratch with a new piece of content. It’s a great way of working smarter and not harder.

Repurposing Content in Action

When I worked as a practitioner, I wrote a monthly newsletter for my clients. I then re-used the article from it and put it onto the clinic blog. I would then take quotes and tips from the article and create my social media posts from it. And, if the topic is relevant to my website, I’ll adapt it to be used there too.

I have also repurposed content to create workshops and the materials that accompany them. They’ve formed the basis of email opt-in guides and eBooks. My biggest repurposing project to date is collating articles to use as a draft copy for my book. This alone provided me with over half the book saving a huge amount of time.

One of my clients struggled to post consistently on social media because coming up with new ideas all the time was hard work. When she started using individual tips from a library of articles she'd written over the years, posting on social media became easy as she was repurposing what she already had created.

Getting Started with Repurposing Content

If you have any existing content, review what you already have and make a list of your marketing assets. You will be surprised how many presentations, videos, articles, images, etc. you have created over the years.

From your list, identify which ones worked the best for you in terms of attracting clients or getting engagement. Use the analytics from your website or social media platforms to help you identify your most popular posts. Pick your most popular two or three items to repurpose them into something else, or recycle them by giving them a freshen-up and republishing them.

Inspiration for Recycling and Repurposing

If you imagine you have one article you've written - these are some of the different ways you can repurpose that one piece of content:

• Split it down into different points and them as social media posts - you could record reels on each point too!
• Create an email for your list based on the article
• Record a podcast using the article for discussion points
• Create leaflets to give out at events or talks
• Create a presentation and put it on SlideShare
• Use the slides to create a video for YouTube and social media
• Record the article as a video
• Design an infographic to summarise the key points
• Freshen up and republish the article on your website a year or two later
• Create another version and use it for PR opportunities

Create One Extra Item at a Time

Whilst you may want to do everything, you’ll be setting yourself up to fail if you try and do it all at once.  Decide what one additional element can create from your original content to give you another piece of marketing material.  Once you get into the habit of creating the second piece of content, you can always add to it with something else.

Doing one thing at a time, you’re much more likely to keep it up. Trying to do too much in one go, you’re likely to stop before you’ve even got going.

BOOK RECOMMENDATION - If you like the idea of repurposing your content, check out 'Content 10x' by Amy Woods - it's packed full of practical ways to repurpose your content.

If you're struggling with your marketing - it's time to get support - book a discovery call and find out how I can help you.