Repurposing content and the importance of a plan

One piece of content can take up to six hours to create. That's a long time, especially if you're only posting it once!

Repurposing content should form part of your wider marketing plan as it means you get to reap the benefits of your hard work over and over again, and it'll help to bulk out your calendar to ensure you never run out of things to post.

To help you get started, we hosted a workshop with TPD Marketing's Catherine Maskell, who specializes in helping businesses put together marketing plans and strategies that drive results.

You can watch the full replay of the session below, or keep scrolling for the summary.

It's something every marketer hears a lot, but having a plan in place (even if you don't stick to it) is the key to success. A good plan maps out content themes, formats, key dates and other crucial information that keeps your team aligned and helps you make strategy tweaks based on the ongoing data you'll collect.

How do you create a great marketing plan?

Well, Catherine would recommend starting with a good template, which you can download for free. Or investing in a [content calendar](/platform-features/products/publish/ "content calendar).

Content pillars are a key part of deciding what you'll post on your channels (and also helps with reactive content when it comes to deciding if a trend is right for you and how to approach it). You should aim to have around three to five key content pillars, which are broad themes or values that represent your brand well. This content can also be broken down into multiple, smaller pieces of content - and everything you create will fall under one of these pillars.

For example, if you're a B2B tech startup, they could be business, empowerment and mentorship, technology, and strategy. If you're struggling for ideas, think of your five biggest company challenges and use those as your pillars, so you're more inclined to act on them.

Other things you should consider when building out your marketing plan are:

• Key dates, and which ones you're going to do activity around (download our free key dates calendar for 2022 to help you)
• Newsjacking (being aligned with the news agenda feeding your content into that)
• Episodic content (such as ContentCal's monthly social media roundups)
• Content reviews and repurposing your best content

"It's not about the pilot, it's about the entire series"

With every piece of content, you create, think at the start about how you can repurpose or reformat it in the future. It will instantly give it more value and help you realize when you creating content for content's sake - rather than creating things with a real purpose.

How to split your content by channel

Knowing a rough split of the type of content you produce will help when it comes to planning and filling gaps.

Here are some things to consider:

• What content formats work best for the pillars you have chosen?
• What type of content typically works well with your audience?
• Who are your audience? Which formats are they most likely to be engaged with?

Instead of using social media platforms as your priority when it comes to splitting your content, Catherine suggests that the story you have to tell is more important, if people aren't engaging with that...it's not going to perform well anyway!

Once you've got that split, you can then decide what types of content fall under each piece of the puzzle, like below.

How to reuse your content

Any piece of content Catherine helps her client creates, gets reused a whopping 14 times. It may sounds like a lot, but there are over 25 easy ways you can reformat content to make it different, and get as much value from it as possible.

For example, who's ever thought of creating a Spotify playlist with every TikTok sound their brand account has used? Or a graphic containing stats from a research report you'd done? These simple tweaks turn your content into a whole new entity.

Small changes such as switching up colors or audio can turn your content into something brand new. If there are key dates coming up that would work alongside previous content, repurpose it again! The average tweet only lasts seven seconds, so the probability someone is going to remember seeing that content before is very small. You're likely to also have grown in follower size since you last posted it, so you'll already have new eyes on it.

A lot of people will also appreciate new formats, because of course not everyone learns in the same way. Someone who can't sit and digest a 5,000 word blog may be super interested in a minute-long video or an infographic.

Catherine's key takeaways

• Even if it feels too soon, the world and new audiences are always ready for your repurposed content
• Pick a timeframe (whether a month or 12 months) and have a basic skeleton plan of what you propose to put out - if things change that's ok!
• Aim to repurpose your best-performing content 14 times