Best practices: rethink, reuse, and refresh your content
So many brands are sitting on tons of content assets. These have value and sometimes they aren’t leveraged to the extent they could… how is your brand managing this?
In many situations, content can be seen as a strategic asset for a brand.
Content has strategic value and should be treated that way.
How is your brand managing, leveraging and creating value out of what it already has?
When an organization owns a building, it invests in its management and maintenance. Content could be seen the exact same way. As a financial institution, for example, you don’t need a 13th article in the management of RRSPs in an economic downturn. What you often might need is an upgrade, and update to the best article you have on the subject and then share that article again.
Are you shy to reuse content that was already published? Let’s see how Justin Welsh sees it.
So how can you leverage the value you’ve already created, that you already have, leaving your content team with more time and more funds to actually push this to the desired audiences?
The R-R-R Framework: Rethink, reuse, refresh
The approach is simple: how do you take an existing piece of content and use it in multiple ways, increasing its value? The R-R-R content approach allows brands and content creators to do just that. What does the acronym R-R-R stand for? Rethink, Reuse, Refresh.
This posture will allow you to maximize the value of what you already have, in a way optimizing your content marketing budgets.
Let’s dive into each of these three R’s.
Rethink content
When it comes to rethinking (or repurposing) existing content, it involves changing its format or type.
Formats are general interpretations of content (written, video, audio, etc.) and types are specific media within a format (interview, F.A.Q., etc.).
Rethinking content is about transforming an existing format or type into another in order to convey the same message (or part of that message) to the desired audience. Some common examples include:
- Articles turned into video tutorials or webinars.
- Video case studies based on articles or press releases.
- Infographics to synthesize long-form content.
- Adaptation of audio podcasts to a video format.
- Social media posts highlighting key information from various pieces of content.
- And much more.
One thing to remember: your audiences are always looking for the best content experience possible.
By rethinking content, you are allowing your strategic juices to put the audience first and think about what other format they might be interested in. This can serve two purposes: it can improve the experience of the existing content, but it can also allow you to engage with new audiences as someone who might not have read your long article (for example) to watch a great video about it (if you create a video version of that high performance blog post).
Reuse content
This might sound like a simple solution, but it is often one of the most underexploited. If your content marketing strategy is well built and you are building a strong content library, there should multiple pieces and assets that can be considered as evergreen content.
Some of the clients we work with contract us specifically to help them break the habit of: produce once, publish once.
This might look like a sound approach, but rarely does a single publication or social post reach the full potential of the audience you want to impact. This is where publishing a content asset multiple times takes makes sense.
In the case of content reuse, we are not changing the content itself but the way we communicate that content. There are several ways to do this:
- Change the intent of the message being communicated (e.g. share the same article on social media throughout the year, but focus on different sections of the original asset as the primary message, in order to fully exploit its full potential).
- Target a different audience or audience segment with a high-performing piece of content to extend its reach.
- Identify relevant times throughout the year to simply repost the content. (See Justin Welsch above if you need convincing about this one.)
Reusing content can have a significant impact on content marketing initiatives. Reusing content is an efficient way to maximize the value of existing assets while saving money and resources that would otherwise be used to produce new content.
Reusing content also helps to drive more organic traffic and engagement, as well as build brand awareness and trust.
By reusing proven pieces of content, brands can quickly get their message out and reach their desired audiences without having to start from scratch every time.
Refresh content
Sometimes you just need to add a fresh coat of paint to your content. If a piece of content is working well, you may just need to tweak it to keep it relevant and useful. Here are some quick and easy ways to update your content:
- Update target keywords to keep it relevant, if new vocabulary is used by your audience, for example.
- Test new title tags that might drive better results;
- Replace outdated references and external links in your blog posts and video descriptions (YouTube, etc.) with new, relevant ones.
- With shorter content that is already performing well with your audience, go deeper and do a deep dive into the subject, allowing someone who wants to learn more to have all the information at hand, while also providing a satisfying experience for audiences that might just want to skim the surface.
- Add a list of resources or other similar pieces of original content that you have (internal linking).
It is important for a content team to dedicate time to content refreshes in a content marketing program because it allows them to stay up to date and relevant.
Content that is kept up to date with current trends, topics, and keywords will help increase engagement, build brand awareness and trust, and help the target audience find the content more easily.
Additionally, as with rethinking content (above), refreshing content can help drive more traffic and improve search engine rankings. As we all know, Google likes fresh content!
What happens after content optimization? Measurement and analysis
Once content has been repurposed, reused, and refreshed it is important to analyze and measure the results. This data-driven approach will help to identify which pieces of content are performing best with your target audience. The subsequent insights can then be used to inform future content creation efforts.
The goal with content optimization is, of course, not to stop content production, but rather inform it with gaps, blind spots and opportunities that pave the way to even better performance, which should show up in your dashboards and content KPIs.
Conclusion
In summary, the R-R-R content framework allows brands and organizations to easily repurpose, reuse, and refresh existing content in order to extend its life, reach more audiences, increase engagement levels, and maximize ROI.
And this should always be part of your brand’s documented content strategy.
The advantages are quick significant:
- Free time from your content team as they will be producing less net new content.
- Allow more time to be spent working on actually promoting, distributing and broadcasting content to the right audiences.
- Save money on external partners that need to keep churning content productions for your brand.
- Raise the actual strategic value of your existing content library.
If these arguments don’t seal the case for on content optimization over net new content production, book a meeting with one of our experts to discuss further on the matter.
And if you are convinced that this is the way to go, why not also give us a quick call and we can support your team in making this happen.