Ongoing content creation is arguably one of the most important aspects of a successful online marketing strategy. It is also key to promoting corporate events. Original and informative content helps build your website’s authority in the eyes of Google, provides value to your visitors and drives leads and product purchases. But it does take time.

What happens when you’ve exhausted everything you can say about a specific topic or product? What do you do when you want to promote the same event this year that you have promoted for the last three years?

Reposting the same blog you posted last year is redundant. Your customers won’t find it as interesting as they did before and Google doesn’t like duplicate content anyway.

You are busy and time is your most precious resource. So how do you take advantage of content that performed well last year without duplication or creating website bloat?

The good news is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Identify High Performing Content

The first thing you should do is study your Google Analytics data. Look for your top performing content. What blog posts or articles performed the best over the last few years? Look at time on page and bounce rates for starters. Also, the number of page views is a key indicator.

If last year’s blog post promoting a specific event performed well, obviously, your customers found value in it. The question to ask is: What are some creative ways to capitalize on the content that you know your customers liked?

When you find a creative way to repurpose content you previously published, it will save you time and give your audience something fun and fresh to consume. This is especially helpful if you are struggling to come up with yet another new way to talk about the same event you promoted last year and the year before.

Creative Ways to Repurpose Content

If a specific blog post worked well last year, you might consider rewriting that post and inserting some new graphics – perhaps photos from last year’s event. But don’t stop there.

If you shot video of last year’s event, consider editing it to turn it into a promotional piece and posting it on YouTube. Testimonials from organizers and attendees can be extremely powerful as well. From there, you can embed the video into an updated blog post along with the photos from last year’s event. You can also simply promote the video to your target audience on Facebook or YouTube.

Other Content Recycling Options

There are many ways to repurpose and recycle content. In addition to video, a few ideas include:

• Infographics – You can use the bullet points from last year’s blog post or statistics from last year’s event to create a visually rich infographic. You can buy an affordable infographic on www.fiverr.com.
• Put together a listicle that combines text and visual elements, a video or a podcast topic.
• Consider a slideshow. LinkedIn’s SlideShare platform makes it easy. Your slideshare should include the key features and benefits of the event you want to promote as well as some statistics from last year’s event. This can also be embedded in a new blog post.
• Convert the old blog post into a frequently asked questions page or blog post.
• Use the content from a high performing blog post to produce a podcast interview. Just like a video, the podcast can be posted online and can be embedded in a new blog post.
• Convert a couple of related posts into white paper or e-book to promote your event. If you make them downloadable, you can also capture names and email addresses to add to your database.
• Consider an email marketing campaign to last year’s attendees. Start with content from last year’s high performing blog post and add testimonials, photos and a video to remind your audience of the value that they got last year and why they should attend again this year.

The ways to repurpose high value content are limited only by your creativity and imagination. The more you do this, the better you will get at it. Most important, if you start with content that you already know your target audience appreciates, your efforts will translate into maximum value with minimum effort. You will save time by reusing what you know is already working.

Make Recycling Content an Ongoing Part of Your Content Marketing Efforts

Don’t consider this a one-time tactic. Whether it is to promote an event or just part of your ongoing content marketing strategy, save time and enhance the value to your audience by repurposing content that you know will work. This strategy allows you to keep important topics in front of your audience and reduces your need to research and develop new ideas from the ground up.

November is sustainability month for us at CEN, but we'll continue to bring you news and information on sustainable event practices throughout the year. As you'll see from this post, sustainability can be applied in more ways than you might think!