How to Repurpose, Refresh, and Reuse Content

By Pam Didner
Former Global Integrated Marketing Strategist
Intel Corporation



I had the opportunity to speak at the Content to Conversion Conference on May 6. It was a great event with a solid agenda touching on content strategy, sales enablement and demand generation. My topic was “Repurpose, Reuse and Refresh (RRR)” and I shared my thoughts on how to make the most of your content.  You can check out the presentation on Slideshare.  As usual, your feedback is appreciated.

Before repurposing, reusing and refreshing your content…

It’s important to answer three questions:

• Who is your audience? –> Persona
• What topics should be used to engage them?  –> Editorial Topics
• What materials should be used to engage them? –> Content

As I mentioned in the post I wrote on how to create a global persona, a good persona provides insights such as pain points, keywords, job description, desires, demographics, attributes, even content format and media consumption preferences. Using the intelligence gathered from your persona research and observation, you and your team can brainstorm on editorial topics that your personas care about that are relevant to your products and services.

Somewhere between original content and curated content…

It’s hard to create original content day in and day out. At the same time, curated content (third party content) may not perform as well as the new material. Somewhere between these two you need to find creative ways to repurpose, reuse and refresh (RRR) existing content.

There are three potential options to RRR:

1. RRR a flagship content to one audience
2. RRR a flagship content to different audiences
3. RRR different pieces of content into a new piece of content

RRR a piece of flagship content to one audience:

RRR content to different audiences:

LinkedIn’s Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide offers a perfect example by creating similar content and using it to target different marketing professionals. Thanks to Jason Miller, Global Content Marketing Manager, for sharing his awesome content RRR examples.

RRR different pieces of content into a new piece of content:

Understand your content landscape, pick and choose different pieces to create another piece of content to share with your audience.

Above are some examples that I shared to repurpose, reuse and refresh your content. The reality is that it’s expensive and time consuming to RRR content. Don’t RRR for the sake of RRR. Give it some thought by evaluating your current content list. Start with promotion and audiences’ needs in mind. Create an RRR plan by starting with 1 or 2 flagship content items or by logically pulling pieces of information from various content pieces.  Happy RRR! I would love to hear your examples of RRR.