Repurposing: Your secret marketing weapon

I’ve worked on 320 white papers, and I have a secret:

Less than 1% of those white papers was ever repurposed.

Only a tiny handful of my clients, large and small, ever thought about repurposing. And only when I mentioned it. 

A secret weapon for marketing

That means repurposing can be a secret weapon for any B2B marketing team.

You can use it to do more with your marketing dollars than the other guys.

Let them continue to miss the mark while you run rings around them!

The best news: You can repurpose any good white paper you ever published.

You can breathe fresh life into your evergreen content in minutes.

And when you’re planning a new white paper today, plan on repurposing from the start. While the cost is minimal, the impact can be ferocious.

Why bother repurposing?

Why do people recycle?

• It’s more sensible than making everything new
• It’s more sustainable to reuse valuable materials
• It’s wasteful to trash things you could use again

All this applies to recycling a good white paper.

As you know, I believe an effective white paper is foundational content with the best research you can find, the most compelling logic you can develop, and the most persuasive arguments you can make.

If you put that much effort into publishing a great white paper, why just park it on your website? Why not squeeze more value from it?

And why not reach new prospects in a new way that suits them better?

Here are 5 benefits you can gain from repurposing:

• Boost your SEO
• Engage more prospects
• Tear down content silos
• Tame your editorial calendar
• Stretch your budget

What marketing person doesn’t want all that?

And what white paper writer doesn’t want to help their client achieve all that? Especially when they’re happy to pay you hundreds of dollars more to achieve it?

Boost your SEO

The more good pieces of content posted on your website, the better your SEO will turn out.

So if you can generate three or four or five added pieces from the same white paper, the SEO for your site is bound to improve.

It’s that simple.

And starting from a white paper gives your an original source that checks all the boxes Google is looking for:

Engage more prospects

Repurposing means recycling existing content in different media for different audiences to access in different ways at different times.

Let’s face it, not everyone wants to read a 3,500-word white paper. Not everyone has time.

But break it up into 4 or 5 short, snack-able blog posts and time-pressed prospects will gobble them up.

Boil it down into a slide deck and visually-oriented prospects will jump at the chance to click through it.

Present that slide deck as a webinar and record it, and presentation-oriented prospects will be happy to view it at their convenience.

Offer them an audio version, and commuter prospects will be happy to listen while they’re stuck in traffic.

Tear down content silos

Too many B2B marketing teams generate different types of content from different people, with little overall coordination.

I’ve seen this first-hand in most of my clients, who tend to have teams that look like the following:

• A web team to do web content
• A social media person to oversee daily interaction
• A PR agency to write press releases
• An outside writer for case studies and white papers
• Another agency to do presentations and infographics

It’s natural: There’s a ton of work to do. The problem is that all these creative people never talk to each other.

Everyone starts every project over again from square one. When one person comes up with an apt metaphor or a powerful argument, no one else picks up on it.

So the gems in your content are flung far and wide, with no one bringing them together into an integrated campaign with a consistent message.

That means a big chunk of your marketing budget is wasted by constantly reinventing the wheel.

Happily, repurposing can reduce all that.

If you pour your best research and your most persuasive arguments into a white paper, you can instruct every other team to work from that as the foundation of a new campaign.

You can tear down the content silos, and build up an integrated content marketing campaign.

Tame your editorial calendar

Another sad truth of today: The editorial calendar rules like a beast.

• “Yikes! It’s already Wednesday, we need a new blog post for tomorrow!”
• “It’s the 14th, we need a fresh case study on the web this week!”
• “Did you get that stuff loaded onto LinkedIn yet?
  What do you mean, we have nothing?”

An editorial calendar can be a useful tool to guide your content efforts.

But in many companies, the editorial calendar is a ferocious monster that demands  a steady diet of fresh meat.

While marketers and creative teams want to create useful engaging content, the editorial calendar is always yelling, “You’re late! You’re late! For a very important date!”

Some teams even have their bonuses tied directly to the editorial calendar.

That means missing a deadline to finish some content costs everyone money.

This guarantees that they publish pieces that aren’t quite ready, just to avoid being docked.

And this means the editorial calendar boosts quantity over quality. That’s a ridiculous way to operate.

Repurposing can help tame this beast.

With a good white paper to draw from, you can repurpose another 7 to 12 pieces within a few days:

• A press release
• 3 to 9 blog posts
• A slide deck
• A webinar script
• Even an audio version

This will help restore the balance between speed and quality.

Get back in your corner and stay there, editorial calendar!

Stretch your marketing budget

For a tiny added fee—or none at all if you have a reasonable writer in-house—you can publish many more pieces of content derived from a white paper.

• For 5% of the cost of your white paper, you can get a press release
• For 10% more, you can get your writer to create 3 to 9 blog posts
• For 20% more you can get a slide deck with speaker’s notes
• And from that, you can develop a webinar
• For 30% more you can get an audio version

Add all that up, and here’s the bottom line.

By spending another 50% to 65% of what you spent on your original white paper, you can get 7 to 12 more pieces of content.

And every piece will share a consistent message based on deep research and iron-clad arguments.

Now that’s integrated marketing!

And if you have no one in-house with time or talent to do this, ask your white paper writer. You can even ask me.

As you can tell, I love repurposing!

See part 2 on how to repurpose a white paper into a press release. 

Originally published 20 April 2017. Last updated 16 May 2022

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