As immigrants to this country, we learned fast how to make the most of what we had on hand. While other moms were buying colorful Tupperware sets, my mom taught me that when the TempTee cream cheese ran out, we washed the tub and re-used it to store other items. Jelly jars became holders of various little bits of hardware. Huge margarine tubs in our fridge actually stored leftovers. (God forbid we labeled anything; what fun is there in that??) 

When my kids were very little, my parents would visit, bringing various items for them, and it didn’t faze me when they handed over a giant box of Corn Flakes. Despite my husband’s puzzled look, I knew that Corn Flakes box was just a handy container to hold purchases of bibs, tee shirts and socks. What, you don’t do that?? 

My parents re-purposed before it became fashionable.

It’s no wonder I am following in their footsteps when I advise my clients to always repurpose their marketing content. If you submit an article to a magazine hoping it can be published, also use that article in an email campaign. If you’re going to create a presentation in PowerPoint for your event, take the content and turn it into a workbook.  

Think of it as a game – your content is now the Blue Bonnet tub: how many uses can there be for this body of work?  

  • A PowerPoint presentation turns into handouts which turn into a workbook which becomes a lead magnet.  
  • A lengthy article can be repurposed into a 3-part series of short blog posts, several social media posts, an email campaign, and added to 3 other lengthy articles to create an e-book which can be given away as a lead magnet. 
  • A series of educational emails can become an online course that you can sell for a modest amount of money, and live evergreen on your website.  

The possibilities are endless. The rule of the game is, “don’t ever create one thing for only one purpose and then put it away forever”.  

Every time you repurpose content, you’re giving it another chance to be seen by a new pair of eyes. You’re also going to add to it and modify it because we’re always learning and discovering and tweaking.  

I have a client who writes about a topic for one of the segments in her email list, and then we work together to tweak the language to repurpose it for a completely different segment of people. What can I say, this is my version of fun! 

A simple way to give your content a new life is to look at your blog posts from 3 years or so ago. Read them carefully – make sure it’s all still relevant, add any new developments from your industry and change the title. Yes, I’m giving you permission to publish a blog post in 2020 that you wrote in 2017.  

One set of folks who do this brilliantly is Planet Money, my favorite podcast. They will frequently re-broadcast an old show, but they always add on new information at the end. They’ll re-interview someone from the original show or give us new updates, so we always feel we’ve been entertained, educated, and brought up to speed. It’s awesome. 

You can do the same. You can announce, “here’s a topic I wrote about in 2016. I want to re-share it with you in case you didn’t see it at the time, and then I’ll let you know what has changed in the industry since then”.   

If you ever feel that you’re “stuck” for marketing content, just think of all your past work as a giant box of Corn Flakes, holding all kinds of goodies, waiting to be re-opened.