People consume more digital content than ever before across a wider number of discovery surfaces, and tools for content creation continue to make it easier to express your creativity: whether it’s a blog post, a podcast, a video or a photo, new tools make it easier to create and distribute content than ever before. However, the same bottleneck still remains: time. How much time we have to invest into content creation is, and will always be, the limiting factor for content creators.

With a limited amount of time and an expanding number of ways to reach an audience, how do content marketers make ends meet to not find ourselves burnt out, lacking inspiration and creatively blocked? When you have 10 different social networks at your disposal and each requires a different flavor of content, how do you make the most of your investment into content creation to maximize the return on your investment?

Enter content repurposing.

What is content repurposing

Content repurposing is a method of remixing or recycling existing content into a new format or package to maximize the value from the initial work. In its simplest form, content repurposing can be reposting an old piece of content to drive more engagement with it after it was created. In its more advanced form, content repurposing is creating new, derivative work based on the original content that was created.

You can think of content repurposing as content alchemy. How might you intake one piece of content and turn it into one or many different types of content in various formats? This process can be done manually by hand, or using various software products on the market today.

Why is content repurposing important

Content has been, and always will be, king. There’s no question that the human appetite for content is insatiable. Marketers are well aware of this, and have been doubling down on their investment into content creation for the last decade.

According to a 2017 HubSpot report, companies spend 46% of their marketing budget on content creation. Because companies are spending more time and money on content creation, the quality bar has also gotten higher: blog posts have gotten 50%+ longer and take 60%+ more time to write. It’s no surprise that it’s now common practice for marketers to reuse their existing content to increase its ROI.

How to repurpose your content

There’s a new wave of tools that are now available to make content repurposing a seamless and easy process. Whether it’s a tool like Headliner which turns podcasts into video clips, Designrr which turns blog posts into eBooks or Aesthetic which turns websites into images, we’re entering a golden age of new, generative tooling that can ingest content in one form and generate variations of it in another formats.

Content repurposing is a trend that we believe is only just beginning and could represent one of the most important shifts in the marketing landscape for the next decade. If investment into content creation can have increased returns, companies will have higher conviction to invest even more into content creation, thereby adding another revolution to the flywheel.