Sustainability is something every business and, indeed, individual, should be considering – asking the question ‘can I reuse this item’? And that could be anything from office furniture being donated to a local charity to a wedding dress being repurposed into an evening gown (Stacey Solomon wore a transformed version of her wedding dress to the BAFTA TV Awards!).
When it comes to content – whether that’s blogs, video or photography - it makes sense for a business to use all of those more than once. After all, good photography and video, for example, can be expensive to create. And, once you’ve got a piece of content, then it’s worth considering how it can be used effectively in different ways. For instance, if you’ve had a short video created for a new launch, then there could be ways of breaking it up into shorter clips for social media.
The same could be achieved with a piece of written content. If somebody on the team is asked to prepare a white paper on a particular subject, then this will start off as a long form piece of writing, which won’t sit well as a blog or social media post. It could, however, be divided into a series of blogs. If the white paper covers something new or ground-breaking, there could even be potential to repurpose the content into a press release.
A longer article could also potentially be broken up into a top tips type of article. This content is ideal for social media, as each tip could sent out as a series of posts. If these include links back to your website, then this will also help with your SEO.
You might already have good content on your website that you’ve spent money to produce, so it’s worth looking at how that can be utilised to improve the efficiency of your organisation. Here at Lake Solutions, we recently supported a client to do just that. They needed to create marketing collateral to hand out at a series of events. For the marketing team, this seemed like a big piece of work. However, the content already existed on the organisation’s website, so we engineered a way to generate PDFs from there.
This avoided the time-consuming creation of PDFs from scratch and then having to manually update them when new products and services were added. The marketing team is already really efficient at keeping the website up-to-date, so any PDFs created in real time have all the correct information. It totally makes sense to use content already ‘in play’.
Different team members also have the ability to download PDFs of the pages that relate to their part of the business and show to visitors to a stand at an exhibition, for example. To assist our client, we also added a ‘download’ button the website, so potential customers could download PDFs themselves to read and write notes on, if needed.
If the PDFs are created for a specific event, then it’s simple to add a QR code to the page, which visitors can scan to find out more. In this case, it makes sense to create an event-specific landing page, so visitors are taken to a page that thanks them for visiting (which feels personalised) and has relevant information reflecting their interests. As a business, you’ll have a reasonable idea what they might need next and, from a marketing perspective, a business can then also evaluate if that event was worth the time and expense of attending.
It's also possible to personalise these PDFs fairly easily and produce versions for different audiences. For example, your business might quote different prices for trade buyers and for the general public and your marketing collateral can reflect that; or you might want to personalise the content for an overseas market.
Of course, content on your website can be repurposed for social media posts and we are seeing more businesses utilise AI to take content and – with the right prompts – instantly produce posts. It can also be fed into platforms, such as Canva, to introduce a design element as well.
Nowadays, your website is likely to contain a variety of different types of content and there’s a standardised vocabulary out that – founded jointly by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex in 2011 – that helps search engines understand the content on web pages.
Schema.org is a shared language for websites and search engines that provides structured data mark-up that can be added to your HTML, so search engines know what your content represents. And, if you make the job of a search engine easier, that can only mean good news for your website’s SEO!
For example, if Schema mark-up is added to a page, it tells search engines things like, this page is about a product with a price and availability; this text is a FAQ with specific questions and answers; or this is an event happening on this date at this location.
Schema is valuable for websites because it adds structured data—a standardised way to describe content, so search engines can understand it more precisely. Benefits of utilising it include richer search results, better SEO, improved content understanding and voice search optimisation.
As we’ve said, many times over the years ‘content is king’ and if it’s treated properly it can be repurposed and used in myriad different ways to ensure your business is making the best use of it in the most efficient way.
If you’d like to know more about repurposing content, then do get in touch with our team at Lake Solutions on tel: 020 3397 3222.