What is cross channel marketing?
Cross channel marketing is all about having content across a range of channels and platforms so you can connect better with your target audiences. By making sure your content can be viewed in more places, you’re boosting your chances of getting noticed, and as your brand awareness goes up, so can your conversions. Essentially, more channels equals more potential customer touch points, giving users more opportunities to engage with your brand and be drawn down the funnel.
In an ideal world, we’d create shiny new pieces of content across every channel we can think of. Unfortunately, we have to come back down to reality and recognise that producing multichannel content from scratch takes time and money. That’s where content repurposing comes in.
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing is the process of remodelling and recycling your content to make the most of what you already have. You can repurpose all kinds of content in all kinds of ways. These could include:
- refreshing the information
- trying out a new format
- promoting older pieces with a new angle (as long as the content is still relevant)
A big advantage of leaning on your existing content to branch out into other channels is that it’s a cost and time effective way to push on with content marketing when resources are tight. Reworking content that you’ve already created is often much cheaper than producing blogs, videos or social posts from scratch, helping you get in front of new audiences without too much extra spend.
However, to make the most of this tactic, you’ll need to create a solid plan to keep you on track and make sure everything you’re doing is actually worth it. Just like how an overarching content strategy will help you coordinate your marketing actions, a multi-channel content repurposing strategy is the key to saving time, effort and money.
Finding content worth repurposing
So, how do you create a multichannel content repurposing strategy?
The first step is working out which content is actually going to be worth repurposing. You can typically split out this content into two groups:
- Content that’s performing well
Repurposing something that’s performing well is a great way to maximise on the gains from your original content. If a piece is already getting traffic and engagement, transforming that content into another format, such as a video or infographic (while keeping the original) means you can effectively re-live its success. Repackaging your best performing pieces can therefore be an effective way to create multichannel content on a budget.
Looking at content that’s doing well on your site can also reveal your top-performing topics, helping you create content more efficiently in the future.
- Content that’s outdated or time-sensitive
Aside from sending a signal to users that you don’t update your website regularly, keeping out-of-date or obsolete content on your site – like discontinued product pages or information about old services you no longer offer – can negatively impact things like brand awareness and customer retention. This point is particularly important for YMYL content.
Equally, seasonal or time-sensitive content might be bringing traffic to your site throughout the year, but updating this kind of content to be more evergreen will keep users on the page since the content is more likely to be relevant to their search intent.
Once you’ve identified what content you want to repurpose, creating a multichannel content calendar can help you see when – and where – to update, refresh or modify these pieces. Creating a calendar will also help you stay organised and plan ahead, keeping this a relatively low effort project.
If you need a bit more inspiration, our flexible content strategy template has plenty of tools and tricks to keep you on track.
5 ways to repurpose content
1. Produce an infographic
If you have a data-heavy piece of content, creating an infographic is a fantastic way to summarise the information into one handy visual. Not only does this make any statistics or figures a bit easier to digest, but it’s also extremely shareable on your socials. Infographics can also be a good way to embellish your existing content if you’re looking to give pieces that are already performing well another push.
No data? No problem! This technique also works well with listicle and ‘top tip’ blogs. Simply condense your advice into a few core points and create a downloadable checklist style ‘instructographic’ like in our conversion copy piece.
2. Leverage social media
Speaking of socials, creating social media posts inspired by your existing content is another simple way to extend the shelf life of your top-performing pieces.
Whether it’s refreshing a whitepaper into a LinkedIn blog post or producing an image carousel with key quotes, figures or takeaways from a long form guide, there are endless ways to leverage your social media channels when repurposing content. And you don’t just have to repurpose written content – trying clipping videos into Instagram reels or TikToks to reach a whole new audience.
3. Create an email series
For brands with plenty of blog content, turning longer form content into an email series is a low effort way to hit another major channel and get in front of the right audiences. You could transform existing advice and ‘how-to’ content into a series where each tip gets its own email or use your comms to expand or update on a topic you’ve previously covered.
If resources are tight, you can even use your emails to share links to your content, like Vox have done with their Culture newsletter. Every Friday, readers get a round-up of the news from the week, with links to articles and a short summary of the top stories. This allows Vox to communicate with their audience on a weekly basis without having to create something completely from scratch.
4. Start a podcast
In 2023, there are currently over 460 million podcast listeners worldwide and this number is only expected to grow. The opportunity in this area is obvious, but creating a new podcast from scratch requires time, money and equipment – or does it?
Repurposing video content into a podcast is an effective way to tap into this huge audience. Not only will you save money on equipment and save time on ideating and recording content, but you’ll also give your audience more ways to consume your content, improving your brand reach and awareness.
Non-profit TED has mastered this trick by turning their famous TED Talk YouTube videos into podcast episodes, allowing them to broaden their audience even further.
5. Host a webinar
While this technique might require a bit more resource than others, hosting a webinar can be great for brand exposure, especially in the B2B space. For your session, you can simply update and rework an older piece of content, but if you have a bit more flexibility, you can create something from scratch that taps into those high-performing content topics and ideas that you identified as part of your strategy. Yes, this takes a bit of effort in the short term but it’ll save you time and money in the long run as you already know the topic will do well.
And a webinar isn’t just a good way to repurpose content you already have, it’s also the perfect springboard for more content repurposing! By recording your webinar, you’ve got so much content to play with. Use the transcript to create a blog post, post the recording on your YouTube channel or upload clips to your socials, turn the audio into a podcast episode – the options are endless.
Conclusion
People’s online habits aren’t what they used to be.
Producing multichannel content is key for keeping up with the growing range of touch points your audience is using throughout their online journeys.
While creating content completely from scratch is time-consuming and expensive, with the right foundations behind it, content repurposing can save you time, effort and money.
Need help maximising your existing content? Our content team can help you create and execute an effective cross-channel marketing strategy that makes your current content work harder. Get in touch today to see how we can help.
