Seven great ways to repurpose your B2B marketing content

The heart of effective B2B marketing is content, which marketers also call "Thought Leadership." Good examples of content include case studies, white papers, blogs, presentations and articles. Generating newsworthy, original and high-quality content is time-consuming and challenging in the B2B environment. As a result, content repurposing has become a hallmark of good marketers.

Repurposing content is about packaging the same message in a variety of different ways and media, adjusting it to distinct audiences and posting it through different channels with different keywords to expose it to as wide an audience as possible.

Here are seven great ways to repurpose your content:

Turn PowerPoint decks into video presentations. According to Dr. James McQuivey, one minute of video is equivalent to 1.8 million words. Video engages multiple senses from the audience, making them better absorb and remember information while stimulating conversion. Use a screen capturing software, PowerPoint 2010 or WebEx to record your presentations and share them online in a video format.

Break up a long white paper or article into a series of blogs. Depending on your arrangement with individual publications, there are many ways to take key concepts from a long article and turn them into several blog posts. It is also easy to customize this content for a different industry with new examples, but the same core message.

Use your old PR and blogs to lead nurturing campaigns. To develop relationships with prospects you need to introduce multi-touch communications. Keeping the conversation continuously valuable and interesting for prospects is an art and any quality content can be helpful.

Turn your new product web pages into press releases. New product releases are always exciting to share with your market. As soon as you develop a web page to describe your new product and its value, don’t be shy to use this content to announce the new product and get your target market excited about it.

Repurpose offline content for online use. For example, you can convert your trade show materials and presentations into press releases or blogs.

Transform your sales and customer service conversations into FAQ web pages or blogs on product maintenance tips. Don’t forget about your technical and customer support teams. They are an endless source of useful information on technology and processes, useful tips and troubleshooting that your prospects will appreciate.

Revise old blog posts. After a few years of your blogging and PR program, there is a substantial amount of content that continues to offer value, but is forgotten in the mountain of marketing communication. The social web has a short attention span and refreshing one- or two-year old blogs is an easy way to keep communications going.

There is plenty of room for leveraging the value of your marketing content. My only caveat: repurposing content only works if the new materials offer value and are sufficiently updated so as not to be considered duplications.

Do you have other ways of repurposing content? I’d love to hear your experience and suggestions.

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