Most business decision-makers today research solutions to their business challenges online. To reach these decision-makers, vendors must produce high-quality content on a consistent basis and post it online where it can be found. Yet many marketers struggle to produce enough eBooks, blog posts, articles, social media posts and video to meet customers’ demands.

One answer is to reuse and repurpose existing content. Reuse means taking advantage of the same piece of content by promoting it in many different ways for consumption by as many audiences as possible. Repurposing means taking the content from a particular piece and rewriting it for different purposes.

The following are examples of ways to reuse and repurpose the same piece of content — in this case, an eBook or white paper.

Reuse

• Send a press release. For an eBook or white paper that talks about your original research or your company’s thought leadership, send out a press release with a link to the document over a service such as BusinessWire and post the press release on your website.
• Website. Post the paper in the resource section on your website and in sections on your site that pertain to the topic of the paper.
• Research libraries. Post your white paper or eBook on a research library such as TechTarget. Buyers go to these libraries when they’re researching a particular topic and want to find as many vendor resources as possible all in one place. Chances are, your competitor’s papers are already on these libraries so you should be too.
• email-marketing campaigns. B2B marketers often use white papers or eBooks as the offer for their lead-generation or lead-nurturing email campaigns. Beginning-of-the-funnel educational and thought-leadership white papers make great offers for lead-generation campaigns. If you’re doing a lead nurturing campaign for a product with a long buying cycle, create a multi-stage email campaign that takes the buyer through several stages of the buying process, from determining the business need through mapping out feature requirements to evaluating vendors. In this type of campaign, you can use informational or thought-leadership content as offers for emails that target the early part of the buying cycle as well as buyer’s guides for feature evaluation for emails designed for later stages.
• Social Media. Promote your content using social media. For example, start a discussion on one of your LinkedIn groups on the topic and provide a link to the paper. Alternatively, find existing discussions on the topic and describe the main point of your paper as a comment with a link to the paper. You can also tweet about your paper or describe it on Facebook and provide a link.
• Handouts. Where appropriate, use the eBook as a handout on sales calls or at trade shows.

Repurpose

• Blog posts. Take the content in your eBook or white paper and make it into a series of blog posts. For example, you could take a white paper or eBook entitled the 10 Steps to Litigation Readiness and do a different post about each step. If the topic proves popular, revisit it from time to time, refreshing it with updates you glean either from your own experience or from reader comments.
• Articles. Propose the topic of the white paper as an article to a special interest eZine or magazine.
• Newsletter articles. Use an abridged version of the paper in your company newsletter.
• Target a new market. Revise an existing white paper to address a different role or vertical market. For example, I once did a series of white papers on how to document processing automation supports the procure-to-pay accounting process. I wrote a similar paper that emphasized the appropriate messages for the IT department. In another example, I recently took content from an eBook about using workforce management for the U.S. logistics industry and targeted it to the Canadian market by revising the business challenge section of the document to reflect Canadian market conditions.
• Live webinars. Create a live webinar about using the content of your paper. Alternatively, create an eBook or white paper from a webinar.
• On-demand webinars. Record the live webinar and use it on-demand. Post it on your website and use it as an offer for your email lead-generation and/or lead-nurturing campaigns.
• SlideShare. Take the PowerPoint from the Webinar and post it on SlideShare.
• Videos. Create a short video on the topic of your white paper and post it on YouTube.
• Podcasts. Create a short podcast on the topic.
• Tweet quotations. Take a powerful quotation from your paper and tweet it.
• Social media. Create tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn updates by summarizing your information in a unique way on each platform.
• Infographics. Take an infographic that you’ve created for your paper and pin it to Pintrest. You can also post a link to this on Twitter and Facebook.

With a little planning, you get much more bang for the buck for each piece of content you create.

How have you repurposed content?