Recently, one of our large enterprise customers asked us to join a roundtable of their vendors and marketing pros to discuss goals for the next year. In one of the discussions, an SEO consultant they hired raised an idea:

“Just take this blog post and make it a nice PDF with a header and footer; then you’ll have another asset to use.” 

He was so confident, and it seemed like this is what he suggested to his customers regularly. I had always known that marketers do that, but I will never forget this moment because the only thing that came to my mind was that I would never recommend or hire this vendor.

Creating exceptional tech content is challenging for most marketing teams. Targeting use cases, interviewing customers and subject matter experts (SMEs), and mastering the balance between try-it-yourself examples and storytelling often throws even the most experienced content marketers for a loop. Plus, the costs to create brand new and original technical content to maintain your content strategy can quickly add up.

Naturally, the difficulties that come with developing tech content make repurposing that content extremely tempting. Many marketers know that reusing content is a great way to get more mileage out of a successful piece of content, but often, they aren’t quite sure how to repurpose this content effectively.

Developers have specific standards for compelling tech marketing content, which can make repurposing technical content seem even more daunting. Thankfully, with the right strategy and fresh eyes, you can easily start expanding your content strategy with content you already have.

Repurposing vs. Repackaging Content

With 38% of organizations claiming updating and repurposing their existing content to be their most successful content strategy tactic, it’s clear why marketers are eager to try this. But many marketers misinterpret content repurposing and end up only repackaging their content instead. It’s important to understand the difference between content repackaging and repurposing to reap the benefits of this strategy.

Content repackaging is presenting your existing content in a new format. One example of effective content repackaging is providing a written transcript on the same webpage as a video interview. This can make your content accessible to multiple audiences who prefer to consume content in different ways.

Meanwhile, an example of ineffective content repackaging is turning a blog post into a branded, gated PDF to collect email addresses, like the SEO in my previous story suggested. In this case, providing the content in a repackaged format doesn’t offer the reader any additional benefit or new information.

While there are benefits to providing your content in new formats, content repackaging rarely helps your organization achieve its goals, because it doesn’t produce new, original, plagiarism-free content. Contrarily, content repurposing is a way to provide your audience more value from your existing content.

Content repurposing is making multiple distinct content pieces for different platforms by leveraging the same source material, allowing you to rapidly scale your content strategy with more affordable content. For example, teams can use information collected during a single podcast interview recording to create multiple blog posts, design infographics, develop social media threads, feature audio and video snippets, and more.

Here are the top strategies your team can use to repurpose your tech marketing content.

1. Use Original Content to Inspire Your Repurposed Content

A single interview, event, or use case can present tons of different angles that can appeal to developers and technically-minded professionals. However, when marketers try to repurpose content from an existing “finished product”—like a blog post or video—they often end up regurgitating the same content into a new format. If your new content feels too similar to the original content piece, it likely won’t help accomplish your content goals.

Instead, focus on creating source material you can leverage for multiple content pieces. Capturing resources like recorded interviews with SMEs or clients, use-case walkthroughs or product demonstrations, webinars, live events, and original research data offers thought leadership and context your marketing team can repurpose into new, original content. 

Then, rather than creating one large content piece from these experiences, transcribe the source material and explore how you can expand the ideas covered into multiple pieces of content that target different audiences on different platforms or throughout the sales funnel.

Even if you’ve already created a lengthy ebook or video interview from your source material, don’t try to create new content from this existing asset. Always start by referencing the original source material for inspiration and content. This keeps your perspective fresh and helps you find nuances to dive deeper into that you may not discover from a polished, finished product.

2. Focus on Creating Short, Niche Content

When you start with lengthy source material, there’s a good chance it covers a wide array of related topics. Pulling transcripts of videos or audio and parsing data from the original source makes it easy to note the major themes covered by your SME. From here, you can see which themes you can expand on or break down into smaller, more distinct topics to develop highly targeted content pieces.

As you start identifying distinct topics or themes in your source material, ask yourself these questions to find new angles for content:

• • • Which audience(s) is interested in this topic? 
    • How does that audience prefer to engage with your brand’s content?
    • How does the topic angle change for audiences on different platforms?
    • Is there additional context you could add to make this information more helpful for readers at different knowledge and experience levels?

With these answers in mind, consider which types of content and distribution channels will help you accomplish your content goals. 

Varying your content strategy starts by expanding into new topics, but those topics also need to be presented in ways that appeal to your audiences, where they are in the sales funnel, and how they choose to engage with your content.

Research from SEMRush found that 24% of organizations say diversification and creating new content types made a big difference for their content strategy in 2021. By diversifying your content and exploring new content types, you can explore topics in a way that supports multiple audiences with different backgrounds, skill levels, and customer goals.