The B2B Marketer’s Guide to Repurposing Content

Updated March 2022

There is no straightforward recipe for content marketing success in today’s competitive online world — even constantly publishing interesting new content can’t guarantee success.

B2B marketers must continuously look for new ways to stand out and create truly great content. But creating valuable and engaging content is only half the battle; you also have to reach the right people at the right time.

This is why data is absolutely vital to the success of a content marketing strategy. While there are many ways to leverage data to help guide content marketing efforts, let’s talk about how you can use it to find content repurposing opportunities.

For example, say you hosted a webinar for prospective clients. After the webinar is over you might:

• Use the webinar recording as a lead magnet
• Turn the webinar content into an eBook or blog post
• Upload the slides to Slideshare
• Add questions asked in the webinar to your FAQ page

Repurposing content helps leverage existing traffic and visibility around key themes that have proven successful in the past.

Refreshing vs Repurposing Content: What’s the Difference?

There is often confusion about the difference between simply refreshing content and repurposing it entirely. Before we get into the specific ways to repurpose content, I’d like to address the difference between these two. It’s worth noting that both tactics should be part of your content marketing strategy — they just serve different purposes.

Refreshing

Refreshing content maintains the intent and format of content while updating the actual content. For example, refreshing a blog post might include updating statistics to provide the most recent information to readers, ensuring all links work, adding new information, and making adjustments to improve the overall readability.

Repurposing

When repurposing content, the format is updated and/or the purpose is altered to reach a different or broader target audience. For example, repurposing a blog post would involve turning it into another asset, like an eBook, infographic whitepaper, or more extensive article. The goal could also be to update the content to reach a broader or new audience on another platform.

Content repurposing includes:

• Combining several pieces with the same theme into one more extensive asset, like an eBook or whitepaper
• Turning a presentation into a video, blog post, pillar page, etc. (example)
• Turning a list of stats into an infographic or Slideshare presentation

What Are The Benefits of Repurposed Content?

Creating new content takes time. One report found B2B content marketers spend an average of 33 hours a week creating new content. Depending on your market, you might spend hours just researching what topics your audience cares about. Then, you have to write, record, or produce the content.

By monitoring and evaluating top-performing content assets, B2B marketers can develop great ideas for repurposing content based on existing pieces that have proven successful. These assets can then be repurposed to create fresh content for other platforms – like a blog, resource section, social media sites, and even other industry sites or publications.

But is it worth the effort? Let’s look at the benefits of content repurposing — for both you and your audience.

• Improve SEO by covering a topic from multiple angles.
• Reach a wider audience by sharing the type of content they like best.
• Increase online presence by increasing the rate of content output.
• Provide more opportunities to earn backlinks.
• Share content in the format your audience prefers — even if they have different preferences.

How to Identify Content Repurposing Opportunities in B2B

To find content worth repurposing, look at the most popular pieces on your site and see what they have in common. Do they all address a specific topic? Are they in a specific format? You can then use that knowledge to create more content your audience is likely to interact with.

There are a few simple ways to find these opportunities:

Explore Top Trafficked Pieces

The best place to start is to look at what content received the most traffic, as these assets present the most immediate opportunity for repurposing. For this, I recommend using Google Analytics and pulling your top trafficked content over at least the past year.

Log into your account and head into Behavior – Site Content – All Pages – and look at Pageviews. See the screenshot above for details.

Export your top trafficked pieces and put them in a spreadsheet.

Look at Top Shared Pieces on Social

Traffic is not the only indicator of successful content. By exploring the pieces on your site that have received the most social media shares, you can work to create a similar asset that could drive comparable or more buzz on social.

BuzzSumo is a great tool for this. Simply plug in your domain, and start analyzing the content that has received the most shares over the past year or so. Take a look at what platform(s) are driving these shares, and what topics are performing best on each channel. Refer to the screenshot above.

Add these to the spreadsheet you created in the previous step.

See What Pieces Drive the Most Backlinks

In addition to traffic and social media shares, it’s also important to look at the content that’s generating backlinks to your site.

For example, are you getting the most backlinks from research, reports, eBook, or whitepapers? Or, maybe you’re getting backlinks from very timely pieces.

This will help you figure out if it’s worth dedicating time and resources to repurpose content into more extensive assets, or if you should focus on more timely matters like industry news and trends instead.

 

There are a few tools that do this, including Moz and Semrush, but let’s stick with how to do this in BuzzSumo. See the screenshot above.

Now it’s time to sort your content. If the same content drives the most social shares, traffic, and backlinks, it’s an ideal asset to recreate. However, there’s a good chance most of your content won’t check all three boxes. That’s okay; choose the pieces at the top of at least one list.

Content Repurposing: Next Steps

Once you identify which assets are worth repurposing, there are two essential elements to consider including the type of asset to create — and where to publish it. The right answer will depend on your audience, your industry, and where the first piece of content is published.

To make a decision, consider these questions:

• What audience are you trying to reach?
• What stage is this audience at in the buyer’s journey?
• Where is this audience getting their information?
• What is the easiest (or most engaging) way for this information to be digested?

Final Thoughts on Repurposing Content in B2B

Looking at top-performing content doesn’t just help inspire new content; it also helps you better understand your audience and what types of information they want and need. Now you can use that information to inform the rest of your content marketing strategy.

Once your content goes live, don’t forget to measure the content’s performance to see how your audience responds. You may find some platforms perform better than others for specific types of content.