Chances are, your org has a ton of content.  Blog posts written by SMEs, white papers, customer story writeups, solution briefs, and one-pagers like data sheets. Podcasts and webinars. Conference presentations. Even proposals and pitch decks.  At the same time, your CEO wants you to generate more content to reach customers and drive brand awareness.  But before you hire a writer to create new pieces, hit pause. 

 

Fact: it is less expensive and less time-consuming to repurpose what you’ve got rather than create all new content.  

 

So, the question is not whether you have enough content, but rather, “Do you have the right content for the people you’re trying to reach, in the right formats, published in the right channels?” (Ok, that was 3 questions).  

 

In this post, I’ll share with you a plan for making the most of your existing content and saving money and time to boot. 

 

Find your existing content

 

First, you need to figure out what content you’ve got. Ideally, you also have data about how often it is viewed or used. 

Where is this content?

 

• Your website, though that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg
• Any sales content management system like Seismic or an internal repository like SharePoint 
• Hard drives! 

 

You can often export information from your content management, storage, or sales systems, such as the title, the date of publication or last update, and views or traffic. 

 

The hard drive content is more of a challenge. You need to ask account, sales, and support terms to provide you with the content they have so you can consider that in your assessment.  They may have pitch decks, customer stories or testimonials, and solution briefs they put together for 1 specific opportunity. 

 

Put this all into an Excel spreadsheet with the following columns:

 

• asset title
• asset type (ebook, video, solution brief, podcast, webinar)
• author or subject matter expert (SME)
• date published or created, and 
• visits/downloads/traffic if you have that data. 

 

I’ve got a simple content audit template for you here.

 

Assess your content and identify gaps

 

Here is where you get to actually read each content piece.  As you do this, go back to your Excel file and note for each piece:

 

• The target persona for each content asset. Who was this content originally written for – a CFO, an engineer, or a marketing manager? 
• The stage in the journey it was created for: awareness, consideration, or purchase. For example, if it’s a comprehensive ebook that identifies a common problem, then this is likely awareness-stage content. If it’s a case study that talks about how your brand helped solve a problem, it was probably most appropriate for the research stage.  Check out this article from HubSpot on content for each stage of the buyer journey that might help you. 
• Whether it is still relevant and current. Is it still an important topic to your audience? Is the data out of date? Note in a column whether the content is ok as is or whether it needs to be updated whether in terms of branding or content accuracy.  

 

Now you have a handle on your content and you know who it was for, how it was used, and whether it’s any good or not.

 

Also, at this stage, get your audio content into written format.  Use a cheap automated service like rev.com or scribie to get transcripts of your videos, podcasts, or webinars – this makes it way easier to leverage audio content into written content pieces. 

 

Create new content from the old

 

Now’s the fun!  Time to repurpose, refresh, leverage, and reuse. 

There are three key ways you can turn old content into new content.

 

1. Break it up. Content repurposing is often called ‘atomization’ because in this approach you chunk up content into smaller pieces.  Maybe a blog post can turn into lots of social snippets, or you could make a short video.  An ebook can often become several posts. 
2. Expand it. Turn a blog post into an ebook. Make it longer; explore the topic fully.  Research shows that posts over 2,000 words do quite well. 
3. Change the format. Here you need to remind yourself of the best content types and formats for your audience. What have been the most effective content types for your audiences? Maybe you have an old case study that would work better as a blog post.  Maybe you have a webinar – great content, no views – that needs to be an ebook.  

 

Note in your Excel file, in a column called next steps, which approach you are going to take.  Include the choice to ‘update’ which I describe below.

 

Update where you can 

 

When all you need to do is update content, this can be a handy list.  Improving the quality means doing things like:

 

• updating data or references
• adding links
• refining or narrowing topics
• tightening up your headlines (try a list or how to subject line)
• improving copy
• altering the length
• tweaking storytelling style (too formal?)
• improving search engine optimization (SEO)

 

In this recent article by Neil Patel, you can read a lot more about how updating old content can benefit you.

 

Identify the gap

 

Through all this, you’ll inevitably discover that there is some new content you could create.  For example:

 

• You might not have enough content for each stage in the journey: awareness, consideration, purchase, support  
• Do you have a variety of content types? 
• Are you covering all the hottest topics and key buyer challenges

 

This is where you might actually want to plan and create new content (after you get all the juice out of your old stuff).

 

A note on distribution 

 

What good is all that content if you don’t put it out there in the online world?  Distribution means promoting content in places where your target audience will find it. Will you host it on your home page whether gated or not? Will it live on its own landing page? Promote in organic social? Paid social? Send to your subscribers in an email? 

 

Now add the discrete projects that you’ve identified in your project management tool, prioritize and get started! 

 

Assessing and repurposing your content will save you tons of time and money in reaching your target audience. Your peers agree: In a recent article by bloggingwizard on content marketing statistics they note that 61% of people in a SEMRush survey said updating/repurposing existing content was the most efficient content marketing tactic.

 

Added bonus: All this effort will jump-start you when you need to take your content global.