Reduce, Reuse and Recycle… Your Content?

It’s essential to keep a steady stream of brilliant content flowing through your marketing calendar, and while well-crafted content is a huge asset…

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel each and every time.

Let’s dive into a few smart ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle your brand’s content – to save you time and make the most of your marketing resources.

REDUCE

“Less is more” definitely applies in the world of content marketing. In my experience, I’ve found that simple content and streamlined strategies always have the highest success rates. Here are a few ways to cut back on your content without sacrificing impact or revenue: 

Choose Your Platforms Wisely

A successful marketing strategy involves creating a network of content across multiple platforms. In some cases, not all platforms convert well for certain brands and strategies, depending on their target audiences.

If you’re spending time and effort contributing content to a platform that gives you little to no return on investment, consider scaling back your efforts in this area and giving more energy where you’re experiencing better results. 

Archive Old Content

Ideally, your website is constantly growing and expanding with SEO-friendly content. While you don’t want to make it a regular habit to delete content, it’s best practice to take some time to do a little “Spring cleaning” and archive content that is no longer serving your brand (or remove it from easily accessible places on your site, like the main navigation, so top-performing content can shine). 

This can be content with outdated information, content that features products and services you no longer offer, and content that gets minimal traffic and conversion.

REUSE

Generally speaking, you want to have diverse, unique content on your website and marketing platforms and avoid duplicate wording. That said, there are ways to reuse valuable content in a way that makes your efforts more efficient:

Embrace Seasonal Content

If you’re creating content for a seasonal campaign, like a Christmas sale for example, make sure you record your efforts and save all the assets in case you want to bring it back to life next season. Imagine you’re boxing it up and storing it in the attic like you would your holiday decorations.

When the season comes around next time, you can use last year’s content as a foundation and spruce it up for reuse. 

Stream Similar Content

If you’re sharing content across multiple platforms, it’s okay to start with the same content, then create variation to follow each platform’s best practices. For example, you can share the same video on your website, Facebook page, Instagram Page, and YouTube Channel – just make each title and description uniquely attractive for each platform.

Refresh Previous Campaigns

Have you ever run a promotion or campaign that performed exceptionally well? Or is there a social post in mind that attracted a lot of engagement? Take a look at your top performers again and do two things:

1. Learn from its wins. Explore what made it so successful and consider how you can replicate the best practices again.
2. Create a 2.0 version of this campaign, revamp its content, and run it again! You can even say you’re offering one of your most-loved promotions again.

RECYCLE

If you have excellent content, find ways to repurpose it to continue growing your digital marketing strategies. Here are two tried-and-true ways to recycle your content:

Incorporate User-Generated Content

This is high-impact content that you don’t even have to write yourself. Share reviews, video testimonials, or any other content your brand’s fans & followers may have created. Just make sure you have the user’s consent to share their content and/or share publicly available user-generated content. 

Consider Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing involves leveraging mutually-beneficial, mutually-profitable relationships to promote your brand. Ask your affiliate partners to help share your promotion, feature you as a guest expert in content that relates to your industry, or use your informative content as a credited resource for their content.

I hope these tips will help you breathe new life into your old content!

Let me know in the comments: what’s one piece of content you’d like to reuse?