Digital Marketing Blog

Are you a slave to posting endlessly on social media in hopes to grow your business?

Does it feel like you spend so much of your time creating content for each platform, only to feel burnt out and exhausted? 

Here’s the thing... Social media is wildly important to help you grow your business. But, it should not hold you back from doing the work that you were put on this earth to do. It should help spread your message, not consume your day-to-day routine. 

For example, if you’re a yoga teacher and instruct others with courses and coaching, your time should be spent doing yoga. Or if you’re an expert copywriter who also has coaching options, your time should be spent helping others learn how to write high-converting copy. 

You should not spend all day scrolling your feed trying to keep the algorithms happy.

But that doesn’t mean you should ignore social media either. 

So what’s the answer to being on social media but not wasting all your time and energy?  

Learning how to repurpose your content for maximum engagement and exposure. 

In this post, we’ll give you the step-by-step process to repurpose your content to grow your business faster than ever. 

Why You Should Repurpose Content

Before showing the exact strategies that top influencers and entrepreneurs use, let’s talk about why repurposing is so important in the first place.  

As you probably know by now, social media can’t be ignored. If you want to grow your business, you need to know the importance of social media since it can help:

• Share your story

• Build relationships

• Create custom audiences

• Learn about your competitors 

• Stay top of mind with your audience 

• Grow your audience (even with a small budget) 

And a lot more. Not to mention, the average person in the United States spends more than two hours a day on social media! 

But that doesn’t mean you should spend all your time on the vortex of Instagram or Facebook. That’s not why you became a content creator, entrepreneur, or influencer in the first place. 

Instead, you need to have your content work for you by creating strategic content that starts the seeding process with your audience and repurposing it across all platforms.

When you do, you’ll save tons of time and still reap all the benefits of being active on social media without having to create unique content for each platform. 

Not to mention, repurposing your content will help you: 

• Increase your ROI.

• Organically grow your social media channels. 

• Learn the buying patterns of your ideal customers. 

• Allow you to spend more time in your zone of genius.

And of course, promote your products and services. 

Goal = Becoming Omnipresent 

So what’s the end goal?

Becoming omnipresent and dominating your niche. 

Perhaps the best part about repurposing content is that you can eventually become omnipresent.

As Scott Olford said, “The job of omnipresence is to create a filter bubble to move people from the sidewalk to the slow lane to the fast lane and ultimately to buy from you.”

Becoming omnipresent will help you cast the widest net across all social media platforms with your message, which should correlate to more customers and revenue.

If this sounds good to you, let’s dive into my step-by-step strategy to repurpose content. 

How to Repurpose Content For Social Media 

Here is a quick overview of what to expect in this 5-step system:

1. Create Amazing Pillar Content 

2. Create Micro Content 

3. Distribute Micro Content 

4. Outsource and Systemize Your Strategy 

5. Learn From Your Audience

Step 1: Create Amazing Pillar Content

The first step to repurpose content is to create amazing pillar content. Without this step, nothing else works.

If you don’t know, pillar content is a big piece of content that is then cut down and repurposed for the rest of your social media. 

In this step, you could start with an immersive YouTube video, a video podcast interview, public speaking event/mastermind, or even Clubhouse audio.

Ideally, you want this to be at least 30+ minutes long to create the most amount of micro-content.  

Pillar content is generally not written content as you can’t repurpose written content (like a long-form blog post like this one) into a video. But you can make audio or video into an almost endless amount of micro-content. 

However, there are some ways to take long-form written blog articles and break them down into other smaller pieces of content like a tweet, Instagram carousel post, or guide.

You can even use these new social media posts to start the seeding process and as a first, second, or third touchpoint.

This big piece of content is where it all starts.

But your pillar content isn’t some off-the-cuff piece of content. No, this is the best of the best and where you go all out.

Since this will get distributed to multiple platforms and social media channels you want to make sure all aspects of it represent your brand well. 

To create the best piece of pillar content you want to:

• Plan ahead. Don’t wake up and hope that a great idea comes to you when it’s time to create pillar content. Instead, plan in advance what your topic is about and make sure it answers a big question that your target audience needs help with. 

• Create evergreen content. For your long form content, make sure it’s around a topic that is highly relevant to your offer(s) and you have plenty of experience in it. Evergreen content can live on for months or years helping you grow your followers and fans on autopilot. Try to create 90% of your content as evergreen so you don’t get stuck in the content hamster wheel. 

• Research competitors. One of the great things about social media is that you can easily see what your competitors are doing. While you should never copy exactly what they’re doing, you should study the content and messaging they put out. This will help you learn what works (and what doesn’t) since you have a similar audience. Also pay attention to the style of content they create, like what fonts they use and colors.

• Review your existing content. Finally, make sure you use Google Analytics, YouTube Studio analytics, and other metrics to review what has resonated most with your audience already. Then, create similar content to increase the likelihood that your audience will love it again. Plus, the more you can speak on a subject, the more likely you are to become an authority in your niche. 

Step 2: Create Micro Content

Now that you have your epic piece of content, it’s time to convert it into smaller, bite-sized pieces for each social media platform. This way you can create content that is specific to each social media channel and your followers. 

Remember, no two platforms are the same. Both the algorithms and audiences are different so you need to play “their game” in order to maximize any piece of great content you release.

Think about it, the audience that is on LinkedIn vs. Instagram or Snapchat is very different. Not to mention the content itself is different and why it’s so important to create micro content specifically for each social platform. 

Otherwise, you can post all day, but you probably won’t grow your audience thanks to low engagement. Not seeing any results from your hard work can easily lead to burnout and giving up before you get to reap the rewards. 

Here is how you want to create micro content from your pillar content. 

Written Content:

Transcriptions

The first thing you want to do with your pillar content is to get it transcribed. This way you can upload the transcribed content to your blog post, use parts of it for your emails, captions on videos, and more. 

We use Searchie.io to transcribe all of our conversations. Searchie makes it easy for you to transcribe all of your audio or video content. When you upload your content, Searchie automatically and instantly generates a transcription and captions for all of your video that is fully searchable.

It helps eliminate the stress of using multiple tools and it integrates with many of the partners like Facebook, Zoom Pro, Vimeo, and others with 92% accuracy.

Blog Post

Once you have your transcription, you’ll want to write (or hire) someone to create a long-form blog post. This should not just be the transcription of your video with an image or two either. 

While you can upload your transcription to the blog post, you want to create unique content as well. This will help you rank in Google to eventually get organic traffic to your website from your long-form post. 

You want to make sure you perform keyword research and include those short-tail and long-tail keywords in your blog article to ensure the best results.

To create the most compelling and high-value blog posts, make sure to:

• Make it fun to read.

• Use lots of white space.

• Use primary and secondary keywords.

• Link to other relevant blog posts and 1-2 external links. 

• Make it readable for humans but also use SEO tricks to rank in Google. 

• Break up the text by adding images, infographics, and embedding your pillar content. If you choose to do an audio podcast version, embed that as well. 

Read our in-depth process of how we create our blog posts from start to finish here.

Just like social media, you want people to stay on the page longer. This signals to Google that your content is high-quality and they will reward you by moving your content up in search results.

Finally, don’t forget to include an incentive to get people to join your email list at the end of your post. Whether it’s a freebie PDF, a free video series, bonus audio, etc, always have a CTA.  

This will help you convert readers into subscribers and get them on your email list. You can also choose a pop-up form to ask for their email address before leaving your page. 

Emails For Your Newsletters

As you’ll see throughout this post, creating content is important, but promoting it is even more important.

Despite email rates declining over the past few years, email marketing is still the best way to communicate with your audience. This is how you build the know, like, and trust factor and sell your products or services. 

Each time you create a new piece of content, make sure you share it with your email list shortly after publishing. You want to try to spike the algorithm by sending people to content within the first 24 hours of it going live.

The more people that watch, engage, and share your content, the more you’ll get rewarded. 

For example, if you publish weekly videos on YouTube every Wednesday morning, email your list mid-morning with the link. Get your loyal followers to consume it so that YouTube and other platforms will recommend it to more people. 

To write your emails, you can use portions of your blog content or parts of your transcription as well. Test out long versions and short emails with your list to see what yields the higher open and click-through rates. 

Email Series

🚀Related Post: How to get Email Lists For Marketing

Once you get in the habit of creating emails for your new content, don’t forget about repurposing those as well. After you have a few topics and emails about related topics, you should upload them to your email marketing provider as an autoresponder.

Then, you can send new users through this sequence automatically. This will make sure they see your best quality content, learn more about you, and your offers all on autopilot.

When you start sending out regular emails about the cool things you are doing as a creator, the people on your list will either lean into you more or get annoyed and want to unsubscribe.

Trust me, that's a good thing.

You don't want people who are never going to engage or open your emails taking up space on your email list -- that costs you money. You either want people to be dying to read your emails or you want them to unsubscribe.

If they want to sign up for your list again later, then they have full powers to do that.

Social Media Captions

We’re not done with the blog post just yet though. Instead of spending tons of time writing captions for Instagram posts, Facebook, etc use parts of your blog to save time. 

Then, you can use the images that we’ll create below to pair perfectly with your caption. Just like emails, test out different lengths to see what performs the best with your followers. 

Try finding a content strategy that works for you so you can easily create your content for social media in batches to save you time.

Content Upgrade  

While tons of entrepreneurs repurpose content, one thing I see so many skipping is a content upgrade. A content upgrade is something to help you build your email list and provide value for your audience. 

Simply make an opt-in page, offer the content upgrade, and then get people to join your list. 

Remember, one of the main goals with content creation is to get people to join your list. But they won’t do it without a reason - so offer some sort of freebie (aka content upgrade) to incentivize them. 

Or, you could even create an eBook (paid or free) based on your epic blog posts too. 

Quora and Reddit 

The final way to repurpose your written content is by using Quora and Reddit. While both platforms have a unique audience, the same principle applies to both. 

Make sure you find the right threads/questions and contribute to the platform. Then, when it’s the right time, link to your pillar content or blog post to get more views and shares. 

Video:

Now that you’ve repurposed your pillar content in 5-6 written pieces, let’s move onto video. While written content is great for blogs, emails, captions, and more, video is more popular these days. 

Here are some compelling statistics from Oberlo about video marketing to give you the push you need:

• 87% of marketing professionals use video as a marketing tool.

• Videos are a consumer's favorite type of content to see on social media. 

• 54% of consumers want to see more video content from a brand or business they support. 

Plus, a lot of social media sites incentivize users to do video, as it increases engagement and keeps people on their platform longer.

Video is the future and the more you can repurpose your pillar content into bite-sized video clips, the more likely it is to perform better. 

But that doesn’t mean you need to create tons of new content just to play by Instagram or Snapchat’s algorithm. Instead, repurpose your pillar content into: 

Shorter Videos for YouTube  

Chances are, your pillar content is 30-60 minutes long. While that’s great to repurpose it into tons of micro content, not everyone will watch something that long. 

This is why you want to create shorter clips that highlight the best moments of your pillar content.

For example, if you do a video interview that is 60-minutes long, try to create 3-5 pieces of content that is 5-10 minutes long. 

But make sure to play by YouTube’s rules.

By that I mean don’t add a title and caption like you see on other social media. Instead, make sure each video is worthy enough to stand alone and try to target a keyword with it as well. 

You can also play around and create innovative and fresh content like the Hustle and Flowchart Podcast does. They create YouTube videos out of their podcast episodes by doing the video on live video and recording it. 

IGTV 

Remember, play by the rules of each platform. Don’t use the exact same clip from YouTube for IGTV. 

Instead, use the same shorter clips but make a few tweaks and upload them to IGTV. The only main difference is that you want to add a subtitle and title to your video.

According to Hootsuite, most people don’t watch videos with the sound on (roughly 85% on Facebook alone).

If you don’t have subtitles, they’ll likely keep scrolling, which will hurt your engagement. But if you do have a catchy title and subtitles, they’re much more likely to watch your video even on mute. 

Instagram Reels & TikTok 

If you don’t feel like dancing around to create Instagram Reels and TikTok videos, no worries! You can still take advantage of these viral clips though thanks to repurposing your content. 

Try to make sure each video fits the theme of your brand and the theme of each platform. The more you can make it look like you created it just for that platform, the better it should perform. 

And even if you don’t get a viral hit on your Instagram Reel, it should still boost your account reach for using its newest features.

Paired with stories, feed posts, and IGTV, you’re setting yourself up for success on one of the most popular platforms. 

For example, I launched a new app called CH Tools and then created an Instagram Reel to highlight my new product. Here's what it looks like:

Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat Stories  

While Reels and TikTok have taken over, stories are still popular. And you can also repurpose your pillar content for stories as well. 

You can share these stories on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and more. This should save you time each day when you don’t feel like going behind the scenes to do a live story. 

GIFs

Lastly, you can also create your own GIFs as well. If you have a funny moment that you think would create a potentially viral GIF, create 1-2 for social media or to use inside your emails. 

Audio:

Finally, don’t forget about the audio side of things as well. You want to pull your audio from your pillar content so you can repurpose it in several places. 

Podcast 

The first place you want to include your audio is a podcast. If you don’t already have a podcast, I would recommend starting one sooner rather than later. 

Here’s why... 

According to Podcast Insights,

• 50% of all homes are podcast fans.

• 75% of the population is familiar with the term “podcasting.” 

• 45% of monthly podcast listeners have a household income over $75K vs 35% for the total population. 

Needless to say, podcasts are a great way to attract new followers and get your message in front of new people. And repurposing pillar content into a podcast is pretty easy compared to some other platforms.

Once you pull the audio, all you need to do is add the intro/outro and upload it to your podcast provider. You can then use the blog post or transcription for your podcast notes as well.  

Plus, you can also compile shorter clips into “best of” episodes to give your listeners even more epic content. 

Jenna Kutcher is an example of someone who does a great job at repurposing their podcast episodes into a written blog format. 

Custom Images

Finally, don't forget about creating custom images as well. 

While video should be your primary focus (since people and social media platforms prefer it), it’s nice to share images as well. They can break up your feed, go viral, and share valuable information. 

Quote Cards

The second type of image you want to create from your pillar content are quote cards.

These are great to drive a point home and get people to go watch your pillar content. Plus, you can also add them into blog posts to break up long blocks of text too. 

For example, if you hear someone like your favorite creator, influencer or coach say something you like, you can take those words and create a nice graphic, tag them, and post it on social media.

We do this all the time when we hear people say magical things on Clubhouse. Take a look.\

Memes

Who doesn’t love a good meme? Your content can also be repurposed into a meme that can help your accounts go viral and attract new people.

John lee does an amazing job at creating visual graphics and memes for his Instagram account. 

Pinterest Pins 

We haven’t talked about Pinterest yet but it’s a huge opportunity to repurpose your content. While most people think of Pinterest as a place to share recipes and images, it’s actually a search engine just like Google and YouTube. 

By creating multiple pins and scheduling to your boards, you can get extra exposure to a new audience. Don’t forget Pinterest is extremely popular among users and studies show that it’s on the rise in 2021. 

According to Sprout Social, 

• Pinterest has 450 million monthly active users.  

• 80% of millennial women (and 40% of millennial men) are active users on Pinterest.

• Users are 3X more likely to click over to a brand’s website on Pinterest than any other social media platform. 

Depending on your ideal client avatar, this could be a huge way to attract more people to your brand. 

Infographics 

🔥 Check out this infographic we created a few years ago from a blog post we published: 7 Social Media Mistakes to Avoid.

Depending on your piece of core content, you can also create infographics as well.

These could be about the information you shared or something directly related to your video. Then, you can add it into your blog posts, use it as a reason to guest post on other websites, and more. 

As you can tell, there is a ton of micro content now from your one piece of pillar content. Next up is using all of it for each platform to attract new fans, followers, and subscribers. 

Step 3: Using Each Platform 

Alright first off, congratulations on making it this far in the repurposing process.

If you made it to step three, you’re now sitting on a goldmine of content. At this point, you have tons of epic videos, audio, images, blogs, emails, and more to attract your audience.  

Now that your micro content is created, it’s time to share it on social media. 

Here’s how you can do it efficiently: 

Use a Scheduling Tool

The one pain here is that not all platforms allow you to schedule content in advance.

For example, you can schedule IGTV videos and Instagram posts but you can’t schedule Reels. 

While you can’t schedule everything, you want to schedule as much as possible so you’re not logging into different platforms all day. 

Use scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Buffer for these platforms: 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn doesn’t get the fame of Instagram or Facebook but it’s an undervalued resource in my opinion.

Don’t forget, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for billions of dollars and it’s great if you have an older demographic than say Snapchat. If a company as big as Microsoft is betting billions of dollars on it, you should take it seriously as well.

With LinkedIn, you have a few different ways to share content:

Feed Posts 

The first way is to share your images and video with their feed posts just like Instagram or Facebook. Simply add a caption and upload your image or video and schedule accordingly. 

LinkedIn Articles 

The other way to share content on LinkedIn is by creating native articles on the platform. From what I’ve seen, you don’t want to copy and paste another piece of content directly into LinkedIn though.

In fact, that’s a good rule in general.

Always upload directly to the platform instead of say sharing a YouTube video on your Facebook page. Social media platforms want native content in order to keep users on their platforms.

For LinkedIn articles, use some of your blog posts that you created for the full pillar content and condense it for the platform. 

Facebook & Instagram 

Using the same scheduling tool, schedule your Facebook and Instagram posts for your main feed.

You want to schedule out: 

• Instagram feed posts

• Facebook page posts 

• Facebook group posts (if you have any) 

• Instagram feed posts, carousels, and videos

Twitter

Finally, make sure you schedule your tweets as well. You can upload quotes from your pillar content, quote cards, or custom images.

Creator Studio

The problem is that you can’t schedule out certain content through third-party apps. But a good workaround is using the Creator Studio inside Facebook.

When you sync up your Instagram account, you can schedule out:

• IGTV

• Carousel images

This will save you time each day and ensure you’re wasting time uploading content every time you need to post. 

Podcast & YouTube 

The great thing about podcasts and YouTube is that it’s easy to upload and schedule out your audio & video content. 

With your podcast host, upload your audio and notes then schedule out for all major platforms (Apple Podcast, Soundcloud, Spotify, etc.). 

The same goes for YouTube. Use their native scheduler to upload your notes, video file, and schedule out accordingly.  

Step 4: Scheduling Your Content

If you’re like a lot of entrepreneurs reading this, you’re probably thinking, “This sounds awesome Gary, but how am I going to do all of this? I barely have enough time to do everything in my business, how can I create and distribute 30+ pieces of content?”

It’s a good question and something I want to cover in this section. Because here’s the thing, so many people see the value in this redistribution model but most are intimidated by the process.

It’s easy to see someone like Gary Vee and think, “Wow, he makes it look so easy.”

When in reality, he’s only doing the big pieces of content aka step one of this system. His team is doing the rest and getting it out in the world so he can focus on VaynerMedia (and buying the New York Jets). 

This is something I can’t stress enough - you too should hire help to take care of smaller tasks that keep you away from your zone of genius.

Otherwise, you’ll jump around from task to task and waste your precious time. 

Here are some of my best strategies to help you outsource, batch, and schedule your content to save tons of time. 

Hire 1-2 Virtual Assistants  

If you’re a solopreneur, there’s almost no way you can do all this on your own.

Don't burn yourself out doing stuff that doesn’t help move the needle in your business. Instead, hire 1-2 virtual assistants to help you with the bulk of the work.

For example, you can hire a VA in the Philippines for $4 to $6 per hour.

They can then edit your pillar piece of content based on each platform’s criteria. Then, you or another VA can upload, schedule, and make sure everything gets out at the right time, on the right platform. 

Create Systems and Workflows 

But the only way to make it work with your virtual assistants is to have a clear system in place. That way you can send them pillar content and they can follow the workflow to create the micro content.

Then, you or someone else can schedule all the content. 

I’ve found it’s best to use a project management tool like Trello or Monday.com to organize all your processes. You can easily share this with other team members and update as needed. 

Step 5: Learn From Audience

Alright, the hard (or time-consuming) part is over. Now, it’s time to release all your epic content into the world and see what resonates with your audience.

The final step is to learn from your audience and content so that you can rinse and repeat. 

The great thing about putting out this much content is that you can tell what’s working and what’s not pretty quickly. This will help you create even more content in the future that is catered exactly to what your audience wants. 

Once you figure out the biggest pain points you can create paid products (coaching, membership, online courses, etc.) to help solve their problems. 

This will then teach you even more about your ideal client avatar which will help produce more amazing pillar content in the future. 

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