Creating quality content for your content marketing efforts takes a lot of time and dedication.
The purpose of this article is to list popular content types, as well as give you ideas on how to make the most out of them by repurposing them.
Because finding ways to repurpose content is one of the biggest priorities for marketers.
Let’s do this!
Blog posts
Small businesses that blog get 126% more lead growth than those who do not.
Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13X more likely to enjoy positive ROI from their content marketing efforts.
Blogging is still going strong despite new and emerging content marketing types.
Blogging has evolved, however.
The fierce competition in blogging raised the bar higher when it comes to getting to the top of the SERP’s.
Today, comprehensive long-form articles get the most love from audiences and search engines.
Use the Skyscraper Technique when creating blog articles.
This technique entails doing competition research and creating something better and more useful than already exists on the topic or keyword you’re covering.
Repurposing tips:
You can repost entire articles or parts of the articles on social media platforms like LinkedIn (which is enjoying huge organic traffic right now).
Slightly reworking articles so that you target a similar keyword or a topic and then reposting them is a good way to get the most out of your articles.
Every article is bound to contain a bite-size nugget or two which you can then repost on short-form social media sites like Twitter or Instagram.
Videos
64% of viewers are likely to buy a product online after watching branded social videos.
87% of consumers want more video content from brands.
Video is another pillar of content marketing.
Television is losing the battle with video content published on platforms like Youtube.
Youtube is a great platform to utilize for video content marketing because Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world.
Video is a great medium for providing value through educational and informative content that solves problems for your audience.
Repurposing tips:
If you’re filming an interview, you can pull the audio and create a podcast episode.
Long-form videos can be chopped up into medium-length videos and be uploaded to platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.
You can always pull short length videos from longer videos and post them on short-form content platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.
Podcasts
80% of listeners can recall a brand advertised in a podcast.
67% of listeners can recall specific product features or promotions.
Podcasting is exploding in popularity right now.
And so it audio consumption in general.
Have you ever turned on a Youtube video and only listened to the audio while doing something else at the same time?
I do that all the time.
Besides the huge attention, podcasting can serve as a networking tool for you and your business.
You’ll get a lot more Yes’s when you invite business owners who you want to make connections with to be guests on your podcast than sending them a sales-oriented cold email.
Podcasts can get you a lot of promotion too because guests usually like to promote podcast episodes they were on.
Repurposing tips:
Filming your podcasts is an amazing way of getting a ton of content.
You can not only upload entire episodes to Youtube, but you can chop them up into smaller videos and repurpose them that way too.
And even if you’re not filming your podcasts, you can still upload them to Youtube by adding a static image to the videos.
Odds are, your audience is consuming such content on Youtube by only listening to the audio anyway.
Images
Using relevant images in your content not positively impacts the SEO of said content, but it has a positive effect on your audience too.
People remember only 10% of information three days after hearing it, on average; adding a picture can improve recall to 65%.
Blog posts with images are viewed 94% more than posts without.
By adding Alt Text to images, you add another way for your content to be discovered on the search engines too.
Images can help break the monotony of written content and keep your audience engaged with your content for longer.
Repurpose tips:
There are countless ways of repurposing images.
Once you create an image you can use it in:
- Blog articles
- Social media posts
- Video thumbnails
- eBooks
- Courses
- Slide decks
- Presentations, etc.
White papers
White papers are usually dry and information-dense pieces of content that aren’t meant for mass audience consumption.
They’re data-driven and very detailed pieces of content that are best utilized by B2B oriented businesses and marketers.
By creating white papers around products, services or business processes, you can showcase yours or your company’s expertise in the matter.
Your average audience members probably won’t be interested in reading a white paper, but decision-makers who depend on objective data-driven long-form content surely will.
Repurposing tips:
Meaty long-form content can be reused as lead magnets.
You can offer white papers as bonus content to entice email newsletter sign-ups, for example.
You can also break your white papers into segments and use them in various ways.
Publishing white papers as blog articles can also attract a lot of backlinks because people usually like to link to authoritative data-driven content.
Case Studies
Case studies are a fantastic content marketing type because they showcase your business-related efforts for everyone to see.
Content like that goes a long way to establishing trust, authority, and authenticity.
You can create case studies based on success stories, cautionary tales, product and service applications, etc.
Case studies can add to your branding efforts because through case studies you can demonstrate what your business is all about.
Like white papers, case studies can get your domain a lot of backlinks because people love examples to either learn how to do something or compare their efforts against.
Especially if you can formulate findings into some kind of statistical information.
Statistics tend to attract a lot of backlinks.
Repurposing tips:
Case studies can be posted as blog articles or offered as an incentive for email newsletter subscriptions.
You can also keep indefinitely referring to your case studies in your other content marketing types of content.
Case studies can also be reused as press releases, email newsletter content pieces, or you can shoot videos or create slideshows showcasing your case studies.
eBooks
Creating an eBook requires time and effort, but it’s well worth it.
Even though eBooks might resemble long-form articles, they’re not exactly that.
Nor are they groups of articles on a single topic just slapped together.
eBooks should be a bit more elaborate than that.
When creating an eBook, simply follow the best practices of content marketing.
Meaning, create an informative value-driven long-form piece of content that has the purpose of addressing problems in-depth.
Don’t create a long-form sales pitch that’s supposed to serve as an ad for your business.
Creating eBooks carries various benefits like:
- Brand building
- Increasing brand awareness
- Expanding reach
- Establishing authority and expertise
Repurposing tips:
eBooks are one of the better content types to repurpose as lead magnets.
Offering an ebook as an incentive for an email sign-up works well and it’s a tactic utilized by so many businesses and marketers online.
You could also feature your eBook in your email signature with a direct download link for some extra clout.
Boiling down eBooks into infographics is also something marketers do often.
Infographics
Infographics are a great way to break the monotony of written content.
They also serve as a fantastic eye-catching way of creating statistics posts, step-by-step guides, tutorials, list posts, etc.
Dry and data-dense content can always be made more fun by turning it into an infographic.
One of the biggest benefits of infographics is that they might provide you with backlinking opportunities.
Boiling down your posts into infographics and then adding those infographics to the posts is a great way of enriching your content and making it much more attractive.
Repurpose tips:
You can repurpose your infographics by reposting them on your social media accounts, converting them into slide decks, adding them to your eBooks, future blog posts, etc.
You can also print them out and use them as promotional material when suitable.
Social media posts
Don’t forget that short-form social media posts are pieces of content as well.
In fact, you should always treat them as just another avenue of your content marketing efforts and try to add as much value to them as possible.
A Tweet or an Instagram post can add a ton of value to your audience as well if you craft them the right way.
If you can articulate thoughts and ideas into short-form content, you will make your social media posts stand out.
Repurposing tips:
Don’t forget that most social networks today allow you to post images, videos, and written word.
This means you can repurpose any social media post to multiple social media platforms.
Just don’t forget to add platform relevance to ensure your posts do well on different platforms.
To add relevance, you can simply start the written word section with something like “Hey Twitter…” or “Hey Instagram…”
Adding captions to videos also adds relevance when you’re posting them on social media because oftentimes people aren’t browsing social media with sounds turned on.
You could also repurpose your social media posts by adding them to the relevant blog articles to visually boost them or help drive home a point, etc.
Email newsletters
Email newsletters aren’t just a promotional tool that many businesses and marketers use them as.
If you want to successfully incorporate email newsletters into your content marketing strategy, you have to add a lot more value and substance to them.
In fact, I would argue that the majority of your email newsletters should provide value through being informative and educational.
And only every once in a while should the email newsletters be sales or lead generation-driven.
Repurposing tips:
Email newsletters can always be repurposed into social media posts or expanded into long-form content like blog articles, press releases, company news articles, etc.
Tools and calculators
Tools and calculators are one of the most powerful ways of attracting visitors to your website.
If you can boil down some kind of a problem into a tool or a calculator and help your audience get to a solution to their problem that way, they will love it.
Tools and calculators will get you a ton of backlinks as well if you manage to create something truly useful.
That will boost your domain’s backlink profile and push all the rest of the content up in the SERPs.
Repurposing tips:
Once a tool or a calculator is created, you can refer to it in every relevant piece of content and add value to those pieces of content.
You can also shoot videos and create tutorials explaining how to use a certain tool or calculator.
Reddit and Quora
Reddit, the self-proclaimed front page of the Internet, is a platform that has nearly 1.5 billion unique monthly visitors.
Quora has 300 million monthly active users.
You should tackle both of these platforms with a value-first mentality.
Shameless sales pitches don’t do well on either.
But establishing your presence on one or both of them will boost your personal or company brand, authority, and authenticity.
Many personal and company brands leverage Reddit AMAs (Ask Me Anything) to communicate with the Reddit community at large.
You can base your AMA around a skill or a service you know a lot about and provide a ton of value to Redditors by answering their questions.
Reddit and Quora are primarily platforms where marketers go to establish authority, build brands, increase brand awareness, gain authenticity, showcase expertise, etc.
Repurposing tips:
If you do take Quora and Reddit seriously, you will be creating a lot of written word content that you can repurpose in a lot of ways.
Not only can you get content ideas based on people’s questions, but you can repurpose your answers as email newsletters, social media posts, article seeds or even full articles.
You can also shoot quick videos where you answer the same questions.
Live streaming
80% of consumers would rather watch live video from a brand than read a blog, and 82% prefer live video from a brand to social posts.
Viewers spend 8X longer with live videos than on-demand videos.
Live streaming is a step up from basic video content when it comes to communicating and interacting with your audience.
The sense of immediacy that live stream broadcasting brings has huge benefits when it comes to making an impact on your audience and leaving an impression.
There’s a reason why fake gurus advertise their recorded video webinars as live events.
People are simply much more excited about live broadcasting and watching something as it’s happening.
Repurposing tips:
There are solutions out there that enable you to go live on multiple platforms at the same time.
With a click of a button you can start live streaming to Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Vimeo, etc.
So you don’t have to do a live stream for each of your social media channels.
Not to mention the endless possibilities of editing and cutting live stream broadcasts after the fact and creating many more video content pieces out of them.
FAQ’s
Creating FAQ sections and giving out bite-size answers to frequently asked questions can provide a tremendous amount of value to your audience.
Not only can you create central FAQ pages for your entire business, but you can add FAQ sections to your blog articles too, for example.
You can even display those FAQ answers in the search results via the Schema Markup.
Creating FAQ type content carries positive benefits when it comes to voice search.
When users browse the Internet via voice-only devices, the device doesn’t have a display on which it can show the results.
The AI assistants are forced to look for FAQ-type bite-sized answers to the search queries.
If you provide what AI assistants are looking for, your page might shoot up in the search results for voice search, which is the future of Internet search.
If you want to know more about voice search, check out my article How to Prepare Your Local Business for Voice Search.
Even if your business isn’t local, there are a lot of tips that carry over to other types of businesses and ventures.
Repurposing tips:
You can reuse answers to frequently asked questions whenever you’re covering topics relevant to the answers you already have written.
FAQ’s can be added to the descriptions of relevant Youtube videos too.
Each question and answer can also be reused as a standalone social media post.
Original research
Original research is highly valuable because you’re creating something extremely rare and unique.
Publishing information that no one else on the Internet has attracts a lot of attention in the form of backlinks.
By conducting original research, you’re also showcasing your matter expertise and establishing authority within your niche.
Needless to say, doing original research on various subjects in your niche usually requires a lot of time and effort.
But, to paraphrase JFK, people don’t do original research because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.
By actually doing the hard work, you leapfrog over your competition people are prone to looking for shortcuts and taking the path of least resistance.
Repurpose tips:
Original research can be published in a lot of formats.
In fact, after coming up with something this valuable, you want to milk it for everything it’s got.
There’s no shame in that.
You can create articles, videos, infographics, slide decks, social media posts, podcasts and much more around the findings of your original research.
Live Webinars
This survey shows that 95% of the respondents agreed on webinars as a key to their lead generation and marketing efforts.
75% of the respondents reported that they use webinars to build their brand, 76% achieved more leads by running webinars.
When done right, webinars are an amazing content marketing type.
They combine the exclusiveness of live broadcasting with highly structured educational and value-driven content.
I would suggest employing content marketing best practices when doing webinars and focusing on providing value instead of worrying about sales and lead generation.
I would especially urge you not to do what fake gurus do and that’s tricking audience by marketing recorded webinars as live webinars.
Repurposing tips:
Of course, live webinars can be recorded and reused over and over again.
Just tell your audience upfront they’re watching a recording.
Because live webinars are educational in their essence, after they’ve been recorded they can be chopped up and reused in relevant pieces of content.
The Q&A part of the webinar can be transcribed and reused as FAQ or posted question by question on your social media channels.
Conclusion
This is just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to content marketing types.
You can make anything that can be published online as a part of your content marketing strategy.
The only requirement is that the content is value-driven and consumer-centric.
Since the objective of content marketing is creating quality content, another big concern is getting the most out of said content.
This is why I’ve included repurposing tips throughout this article.
I’d love to hear your ideas on how to best repurpose content!