TL;DR
Whether new content creation or the repurposing of existing one is to be done is often a decision based on your goals, resources, and audience needs. This blog explores the benefits and the strategies of both approaches to ensure you opt for the best method to get the most engagement, SEO, and ROI.
The strategic use of content has always been at the heart of every digital marketing strategy, but coming up with something new continuously can indeed be very challenging. For marketers, the constant debate is to create new content or repurpose old content. Each strategy has its pros and cons, and the use of one over the other can either make or break engagement, SEO performance and return on investment. Let’s see the pros and cons of each strategy to understand what may work better for your business.
The Case for Fresh Content
Fresh content generation is realized with the creation of entirely new matter through conceptualizing and manufacturing. This has several strong elements in its favor.
- Originality and Novelty: New content allows you to generate new ideas and new perspectives, things that would still be interesting to your audience; thus, your brand is kept alive and relevant. Fresh content can take on hot, new trends, news, and emerging issues that are game-changers in your industry and can make your brand a thought leader.
- Search engines love fresh content. We would be able to put on regular blog posts, articles, video posts, repeatability, and so on to have a periodic SEO performance because of periodic spiders’ crawl and more chances to get ranked for a mix of different keywords. HubSpot mentions, “Companies that blog regularly have 55% more website visitors than those that do not.”
- Audience Engagement: Fresh information will attract your old crowds and gain you a newer one. Posting new topics of discussion and giving out new information is sure to keep the flow of your crowd, and they will be drawn to coming back to your website.
New content, though, presents several challenges.
- Resource Intensive: Developing new content is a resource-intensive process. Creating content definitely takes research, writing, designing, and then promoting the content, which can be really draining.
- Consistency: Keeping up the momentum of high-quality fresh content is tough with small teams or businesses that have minimal resources.
The Necessity for Repurposing Content
- It is the practice involved in the reuse of the existing content into a new format or scope or a different audience. The following given points also highlights the factor where there is a necessity to repurpose content:
- Efficiency: Repurposed material saves on resources compared with new or original materials. You can cut on production time when recycling content. Content Marketing Institute says 60% of marketers who have repurposed their content strategy have saved it up to five times or two.
- SEO Reinforcement: Repurposing can strengthen your SEO approach. Example, an inspired performing blog post into infographic or video attracts backlinks adding to your site’s authority: Also, to target additional keywords reach different segment.strategies of your audience.
- Extended Reach: Different audiences consume content differently, and thus, Repurposing helps you increase your audience and reach more people with the same message in a different format. For example, you might take a blog post and turn it into a podcast episode, webinar, or series of social media posts.
- Maximized Value: Quality content deserves more than a single use. By repurposing, you gain the highest returns from material you already have by creating value that banks on and builds up what has already been built over time.
Some disadvantages of repurposing include:
- Relevance: Not all content may be repurposed. Some material gets out of date very fast, therefore losing its value when used again.
- Creativity Limitations: Too heavy reliance on repurpose can restrain your creativity and innovative skills. It is necessary to strike a balance in content between repurposing and generation of unique content to continuously keep the audience engaged.
Trying to Find a Balance
- In 99% of the cases, a mix of both creation of new and repurposing content is the best content strategy. Here’s how you can achieve the right amount of balance:
- Your Goals: First, take time to decide what you can achieve from your content. If it is great authority you want to create for your business and new eyes that you want to capture, then, by all means, focus on creating new content. If, by any chance, you are all about the ROI and looking to reach different segments of your audience, then you would look at repurposing.
- Content Auditing: The first step is to audit the type of content that you have created and identify the best content that could be repurposed. Evergreen content is that which will remain relevant for years to come and has already proved to resonate with your target audience.
- Strategic Planning: Plan your content calendar in such a way that considers both new ideas and repurposing. This way, you are constantly churning out new stuff while getting all the mileage possible out of what you have already created.
- Measure and Adjust: Monitor analytics for new and reshared content. This will help one to differentiate between what seems more attractive to the target audience and what does not, and thus readjust one’s approach in real time.
Conclusion
The balance between new and repurposed content is crucial in a strong content marketing strategy. It’s, therefore, important to consider the benefits and challenges that each approach offers so that you can make decisions that’ll help to meet the goals of your business as well as the needs of your audience. Finding the right balance between the two of these strategies can certainly be helpful for a content strategy that allows for a flow of engaging content, improved SEO efforts, and a good payback from your marketing ROI.
