Repurposing blog content is one of the most valuable marketing tactics at your disposal.

As well as being an effective way to generate inbound leads, it gives you the ability to personalise your content, and the freedom to write on a variety of subjects from various angles.

According to research from Hubspot, generating traffic and leads is the top marketing challenge facing organisations today, and growing their SEO/organic presence is the top priority.

While over in sales, getting a response from prospects, as well as engaging multiple decision-makers at a company in the buying process, is becoming increasingly difficult,

Repurposing blog content can help with that, and so much more. But industry research shows that only a third of marketers say they have a systematic process in place to reuse or repurpose content.

So I’m going to explain how you can customise, repurpose and reformat your content to get it working harder for you and delivering a greater overall return.

How to customise your blog content

Imagine you’ve written a blog about the challenge organisations face when they rely on outdated tech or manual processes.

It’s a wonderfully insightful piece that contains industry research to give context and highlights how your organisation has helped one of its clients to overcome those challenges, boosting performance and team morale. And it’s going to sit beautifully on your website where you’re going to direct people to go and read it.

For different sectors

But what if your business targets multiple sectors? Does it matter if you’re directing everyone to read the same generic post?

Your content is always going to be more engaging if you speak to people in their language. So think about taking your blog post and customising it for different sectors.

For example, it might be that you keep the key messages, but you tweak certain words or phrases and include a different case study example to make it more relevant to a particular sector.

These customised blog posts can then sit on different sections of your website so when someone hits your site, they really feel that you understand their sector and its challenges, and are therefore best placed to help.

For different channels

Every marketing channel is different, so why would you post the same content on all of them?

It makes no sense and is definitely not going to give you the return you deserve. But taking that original blog post and adapting it for the audience and type of conversation you’re having on each specific channel, you’re going to deliver a far more compelling proposition.

For example, your company website might be the place you want to push the company voice and demonstrate how your mission, values and culture translate into what you deliver. Let’s imagine your original blog post does this.

But you’re looking to push the Practice Director as a thought leader so he can get up on stage at the upcoming conferences. Tweaking the blog so it’s written in his tone of voice, and adding anecdotes from his experience, means you can post it on his personal LinkedIn profile to reach a different audience.

And what about pushing it through your PR machine to make a noise in the media? Taking the original post you could tailor it again, perhaps adding a controversial slant to get your name noticed.

How to repurpose blog content

For different audiences

While you may end up needing the signature of one person to close a deal, there’s likely to be several people involved in the buying process and influencing the decision.

For example, you might need sign off from the IT manager for a deal to go ahead, but before he signs on that dotted line he might need buy-in from the IT Director or CTO, and assistance from HR to roll it out.

Your blog might be enough to pique the IT manager’s interest and get them wanting to know more about your offering, but it’s not going to provide the level of detail required to get a more technical mind on board, or consider the impact on staff.

By repurposing the blog to focus on key themes that speak to different audiences, you’re going to help your internal sponsor to ‘sell’ you to the rest of their organisation.

For thought leadership

Perhaps you want to be seen as a leader in your industry, someone who people look to for advice and guidance. By repurposing your blog content you get to demonstrate your skills, knowledge and expertise in useful, interesting and relevant ways.

For example, by taking your original blog post, you can break it down into a number of themes, and then explore each of these in greater detail through dedicated posts.

Alternatively, if you have an older blog post you could look to update it and show what’s changed over the time period and the direction you feel the industry is moving in now.

How to reformat blog content

Into something bigger

Blogs are wonderful things because they give you the scope to explore different aspects of a particular topic in lots of detail. But bring these separate blog posts together, and you suddenly have a much larger, richer piece of content that’s going to command a commitment from your prospect.

For example, if you’ve written a series of blog posts about a particular cloud, data or security technology, you could wrap these up together and edit them into an ebook, white paper or guide.

This longer-form content is great for boosting your organic SEO so you’re more likely to be found when people are searching online. As more valuable content, you could gate it, asking people to submit their contact details in exchange for downloading the marketing asset.

Or you could even create an entire marketing campaign out of it.

Remember, a blog is never just a blog

Customising, repurposing and reformating content is something I’m a huge advocate of, because there’s so much value to be had in every piece of content you create – whether for external promotion or internal client projects.

So next time you hit ‘publish’ your blog, take a moment to think about what else you could do with it to make it a real asset for your business.