Recycled content gives a second life to the material created for your content marketing strategy
are you convinced that your company's content is of high quality? Do you appreciate the time and effort put into shaping it? Do you think it is useful for your audience and worth their access? Then let me introduce you to recycled content.
This concept falls under the umbrella of content marketing and is used to take advantage of already created materials (articles, videos, images, etc.) in order to increase their reach. There are three general ways to reuse content (which we will go into in more detail later on):
- Disseminating old content without modifying it.
- Updating old content and disseminating it.
- Adapting content to different dissemination formats.
This practice is useful both for the company (which optimises the resources invested in creating content) and for users (who receive higher quality material in an updated and multichannel way, increasing their chances of accessing it). Therefore, it is not a misleading or unethical strategy, as is sometimes suggested, but quite the opposite.
Benefits of recycled content
Focusing on the benefits your company can achieve by recycling content, here are the most attractive advantages:
- Increases reach: Reusing content gives users more time, more channels and more formats to access the content.
- Saves time, effort and money. The philosophy of recycled content is to opt for quality over quantity. This way, those in charge of generating materials can reduce efforts in finding new ideas to talk about and invest time in improving what has already been said about the topics covered.
- It helps the SEO positioning of your website. One of the requirements of the search engine algorithm is that the content must be of quality. In addition, expanding and updating content prevents new articles from being published on the web with the same keywords. In other words, it is easier for search engines to position a complete blog entry well than several specific ones on the same topic. On the other hand, increasing the dissemination of content leads to more visits and web traffic, something that the SEO will value positively.
- It serves to plan content in the long term. Content recycling must be taken into account in the dissemination plan. Therefore, it facilitates the planning of the content marketing strategy by ensuring that the content is used to its full potential.
Ideas for recycling content
Each of the three content recycling techniques offers different ways to leverage content, so we at OCCAM share several ideas that you can put into practice:
Disseminate old content without modifying it
- Use social media as often as you see fit. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts have a very short life span (less than a day). LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest offer a little more time, but your website is the only one that can guarantee your content a long life if it is well positioned. Therefore, do not hesitate to share content on your social profiles as many times as you see fit, but try to be original so as not to duplicate content.
- Create hyperlinks in your content that refer to your own publications. In addition to being a resource to improve the SEO of your content, it serves to disseminate material that has already been created, providing value to users.
- Add related articles at the end of your posts. This option offers a quality tour of your website to users who finish reading your articles. In this way, try to attract them with content on the same or related topics. If they continue browsing the page, they can become new leads (something very useful for your inbound marketing strategy).
- Create lists on social networks with the most viewed articles on your website. One way to re-distribute content on social networks is to share a list of the most read, shared or commented articles during a week, a month or a year. In this way, users who did not know that content may be attracted if they perceive that they have aroused interest in other people.
Update old content and disseminate it
- Improve the visual impact of timeless content. Web design is updated over time, so older content can become visually outdated. If the information is still current, modify the visual section and re-share the content.
- Rewrite outdated content. Both the design and the text can become outdated, so it is advisable to update the information offered with new data or by adding the appropriate news. In this way, you can re-distribute this content by announcing its revision.
- Change the title of old articles or apply SEO recommendations. You may have articles with potential, but because of the title it has not achieved a good positioning. In this case, modify it keeping the same URL. In addition, you can take advantage and check if it complies with the SEO recommendations that you have incorporated into your editorial plan.
Adapt content to different dissemination formats
- Create a newsletter. This is one of the best methods to disseminate new content, but it is also interesting to give a second chance to old content. A newsletter is an email that users who have decided to subscribe receive, as they consider relevant the content offered by a particular website. Therefore, by targeting users interested in your material, you can take advantage of it to share old content that may be to their liking.
- Take advantage of the material to create quality and eye-catching content on social networks. The team in charge of your social profiles can use the content created to adapt it to new formats and disseminate it as exclusive content to your followers. Thus, instead of just disseminating materials, you would also be adding value to your social networks by offering quality content with which you can interact with your community(see here for an example).
- Adapt the same content to different formats, so that users perceive you as an expert in those topics and reach new audiences through different channels and formats. Some examples are: web articles, infographics, videos, courses, podcasts, ebooks, GIFs or webinars.
