No one sees everything anymore.
In modern media, you’re working against algorithms and attention spans, and your best content might be missed. Social-media sites are “tailoring” content to viewers and pre-screening what they see, users are bombarded with mountains of content they swipe through at high speed, and your best work might be buried in places no one will look for it.
Even if technology and expertise can dramatically increase speed of creation and output, great content takes time to produces—so don’t waste it.
We’ve helped businesses repurpose great existing content with success. Take a look at these actual stats from a company offering fitness and nutrition services (traffic generated with no paid promotion):
The third-ranked page is a landing page that offers a free guide compiled from recipes the company had already produced. In that lead magnet, we featured a link to a specific old dinner recipe to help people jump from the baking PDF to the website for dinner. That’s the Zoodles page you see in eighth place. It was published in August 2018, but five months later, it’s got new life through the baking PDF.
When evaluating the output of our clients, we always want to know where a business’ best content can be found and what else we can do with it.
For example, let’s say a client has a great Instagram account that regularly delivers high-quality content to a large group of engaged followers. In that account, we find a post that outperformed everything else by a large margin.
Suppose it was a clever post that showed the business owner creating a healthy meal. The post had a huge number of likes, lots of comments, and its stats revealed that the post was saved and shared many times. It also generated many views of the business’ Instagram profile page, and many of those viewers clicked through to the business’ website.
The post clearly connected—but only that one time, and now it’s buried in Instagram’s archives, where no one will ever find it.
We want to use that great post again—and elsewhere. Here are a few ideas, some of which are very simple:
1. When was the post made? If it wasn’t made recently, it can be used again, perhaps with a small tweak to keep it fresh. Perhaps the business reposts the content at a different time with a different aspect ratio, new filter and revised caption. The #waybackwednesday, #throwbackthursday and #fallbackfriday hashtags also offer ideal avenues to repost great content that might be seen by a new audience or connect again with original viewers and motivate them to take action.
2. Could a repost/edit with researched hashtags get the content to new groups of people?
3. Have the owner of the business and the staff members shared the original post and pushed it into their personal spheres of influence? Have existing clients been encouraged to share it with friends through a call to action?
4. Is the content hosted on the business’ website, where it might show up in a Google search, and is that page set up to funnel viewers onto other pages or into mailing lists?
5. Where else was the content posted? Was it used on Twitter or Facebook? How about Pinterest and YouTube/Vimeo?
6. Was the content sent to existing clients through a mailing list?
7. Was the content boosted or promoted in any way? We don’t advise spending on advertising as a first step, but when an absolutely ideal piece of content is created, carefully spent marketing dollars can generate significant results.
Here’s something you can do today: Find your most popular piece of content on any social-media platform. Look for the post that generated the most attention—likes, comments, shares, saves. Then repost it, once on the same platform—perhaps with a slight edit—and again on another platform.
Here’s another thing you can do with that same piece of content: Find a way to feature it on your website, either as a blog post or a landing page.
Don’t let your diamonds remain undiscovered. Whatever you do, do something with your masterpiece.
Recent Comments