As a managed service provider (MSP), you have a lot on your plate. Creating fresh content to catch the attention of your audience isn’t always top of mind. Luckily for you, you can lift some of that weight off your shoulders by repurposing.
Reuse and recycle
Not only can we recycle paper, plastics, and other waste materials at home, but recycling is a best practice in content marketing, too. By repurposing, you’re still providing high-quality content for your audience. The only difference this time around is that it’s in a new format and promoted through a new channel. Think of it this way: you’re increasing its lifespan and reaching even more people.
Repurposing content might look different for each organization, but here are some examples:
- Update an old blog post with new and relevant information, data, and quotes.
- Extract statistics from one of your own resources such as an eBook or whitepaper and turn them into social post graphics.
- Take shortened video clips from a recorded podcast or explainer video to post to social.
- Select insightful thought leadership quotes and add them to your newsletters, social captions, infographics, ads, and more.
- Create a podcast episode surrounding a high-performing blog post, or a recent report you’ve published. You can even pull text from these resources to build a script.
- Turn a blog post series into an educational eBook for your audience.
- Turn webinar conversations and transcripts into blog posts or social posts.
Perks of repurposing content
Repurposing content has a wide range of benefits for your MSP. When you publish multiple pieces of content focused on similar topics and targeted keywords, it can give your search engine optimization (SEO) a boost. While boosting SEO is always a plus, it strengthens your presence as well. Taking thought leadership pieces and expanding them across multiple platforms reaches various audience groups.
Enhanced scalability is a perk of repurposing. Many MSPs think they need to create content from scratch every single time. They also think they need to produce a high amount of content. When repurposing, you’re scaling the amount of content produced, as well as your reach. Increased reach and amount produced is a win-win!
What it’s not
It’s important to note that repurposing content is not taking existing content and simply resharing it to other platforms. For example, taking an existing blog post and copying and pasting it to social media is not repurposing. To properly repurpose, you’ll want to tweak the material for each individual channel. If a piece of content is considered outdated, you’ll need to update the material and information throughout before sharing it with your audience.
Many organizations think repurposing content looks like finding a relevant news article from an outside source, editing it to fit their brand, and sharing it with their audience. This is not repurposing but could be considered plagiarizing if the source is not properly cited. If you go this route, make sure you have permission to share this content from the original author or site prior to posting. For blogs specifically, it is best to include the canonical URL (also known as the original URL) in the back end. These URLs are used when content is duplicated elsewhere to ensure both articles don’t conflict with each other on search engines. By leaving out the canonical URL, search engines will rank the duplicated articles lower, ultimately leading to less traffic for both sources. Even worse, the site with the duplicated content could be penalized.
MSP best practices
When choosing which content to repurpose, there are a few things to look for. Which content identifies as a top-performing piece? If the material is old, but it generated a lot of traffic previously, it’s time to update and recycle!
With blog posts specifically, don’t create a “new post” if you’re repurposing a top-performing blog. Use the existing URL that has strong SEO and keyword value already and promote the new updates you’ve added. Some platforms even allow you to edit the publish date. After updating the material in the existing post, try to edit the date so you can display it on your blog as a brand-new post.
MSPs that leverage these practices when repurposing will be set for success.
Photo: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.