The 5 ways to encourage a content repurposing mindset in your team

Content repurposing has multiple benefits: more audience reach, SEO visibility, targeted content, time savior, and more, but it isn’t a one-person job. You need your team with equal motivation to reap the benefits.

How do you instill a content repurposing mindset in your team? Here are the five ways to get started:

1. Include repurposing as a part of your content strategy

When you plan a content strategy for your brand, instead of creating new content, ask your team to ensure whether content repurposing would do the job.

For example, say you plan to write a series of blog posts on “How to social media marketing” to generate leads for your business but have already created a video series on the topic.

So, instead of creating blog posts from scratch, you can repurpose the videos by adding more context, visuals, data, and research to blog posts. You’ll save time, expand your content’s reach, and persuade readers to subscribe (or whatever you intend to do).

Ask your team to answer these questions before creating content from scratch:

a) Have we already created content we can repurpose to achieve the goal?

b) How can we improve our existing content and repurpose it, if at all?

If “yes,” your team should prioritize content repurposing.

2. Have a culture where no one treats repurposing as an afterthought

If your team doesn’t know why they should prioritize content repurposing, they will only do it as a box-ticking exercise. They will copy-paste content from one platform to another without optimizing it to each platform’s content formats. The result will be zero organic views, decreased brand awareness, and time waste.

You sure don’t want that, do you?

So, explain to your team why they must prioritize content repurposing (the drawbacks of not doing it and the benefits of doing it), how to do it (with examples and case studies), and actually doing the initial content repurposing to teach them.

Once you educate them, give them the freedom to experiment. Don’t shame them for making mistakes. Instead, incentivize them to learn from the errors and not repeat them next time.

3. Teach patience

While content repurposing has an advantage over creating content from scratch, it also requires time to see the results. You won’t just see views and leads raking right from day 1. Hence, advise your team to set proper expectations.

The best way is to ask them to repurpose content, optimize it, and analyze results. They’ll know the time duration and can optimize their process to see results in less time. Win-Win.

4. Encourage discussion of content repurposing

You can have a Slack channel where you’ll discuss the content repurposing trends, tips, strategies, and case studies. Being the leader, take the initiative to share examples of excellent content repurposing from other brands. Then, ask your team to share what they think about it, how they would have approached it, and more.

Also, now with remote work, you should host a meeting every month/two months to discuss how to include content repurposing in your strategy. Or how to repurpose existing content and gain maximum ROI for your efforts.

5. Reward employees

Recognize employees who do excellent content repurposing and generate results for your brand. Give them a public shoutout in the Slack channel or a meeting. Or reward them with a pizza or an early Friday log-off.

You can also ask the repurposer to give a talk on how they did it. This way, others can learn the best practices and do better.