Many financial marketers work very hard, but they could be working much smarter. One of the best ways to achieve this is through re-purposing content. This can sound like “cheating” or a “cop-out”, but this is far from the truth. Here is a useful definition:
Repurposing content within financial services refers to the practice of taking existing content and changing the format. It can also refer to changing the tone, structure or style of that content (e.g. a blog post) so that it speaks more clearly to a different target audience.
To give a concrete example, suppose you are a financial planner and you write a 1,000-word article on QROPS (qualified recognised overseas pensions schemes) to sit on your website blog. Under the first approach of re-purposing content, you could turn some of the text into an infographic to represent the content in a visual way. The second approach might re-write the content for a corporate audience instead of a retail audience, which would likely require a more formal and academic writing style.
What are the advantages of re-purposing content in your financial marketing? There are at least three:
- It saves time, since you have already done the research for the topic at hand. You have plenty of raw material to work with.
- It’s great for SEO. If you release a YouTube video on a particular subject, for instance, and then use that content to also produce an article for your website, then you’re able to target two search engines at once (i.e. Google Search and YouTube).
- It keeps old content fresh. Suppose you wrote an article about pension transfers for your blog over two years ago. Left alone, it will likely go out of date. Yet by re-purposing it, you have the opportunity to update this article to make it more “evergreen” whilst potentially also making it more effective to target modern audiences.
Given the advantages of re-purposing content within a financial marketing context, what are some examples of this which businesses can draw inspiration from? Below, we offer five potential ways to re-purpose a piece of content. We hope you find this helpful and invite you to get in touch regarding your own content marketing if you’re ready to take your own strategy to the next level.
#1 Re-purposing a blog article for a new audience
Imagine for a moment that you wrote a 1,500-word article recently, titled: “Over-50s Guide: How to Start a Pension”. Naturally, the content here will be targeted towards the distinct needs and challenges of this age group, who have not yet taken their pension plan seriously. Yet how might you re-purpose this content for younger age groups?
Of course, you could simply start from scratch as you write individuals pension guides for those in their 40s, 30s and 20s. Yet this seems unnecessary given that much of the content in your over-50s guide will likely still be relevant, even if the emphasis and key mains may be different. For instance, each age group is likely to need to know about the state pension and workplace pension contributions. All will need to know about the annual and lifetime allowances. Yet each age group will have distinct questions about pension planning which your re-purposed guide will need to address. They will also likely have distinct priorities and financial challenges which need speaking to.
#2 Turning a blog post into an infographic
Let’s take the over-50s guide again for the purposes of this example of re-purposing content for your financial marketing. How might you turn this into an infographic, and why?
One reason to create an infographic is that they’re great for social media (since they’re highly sharable), and it’s also a great way to build backlinks with other websites – who may wish to use it as source material in their own content marketing.
Fortunately, designing an infographic does not need to be complicated. It is possible to design something reasonably for free within a service like Canva, for instance.
#3 Turning multiple blogs into an e-book
Do you have three or four separate blogs on pension planning which could, if combined somehow, could make a great enlarged guide/resource? If so, then one great idea is to take snippets from each article to create a new Word document that offers a comprehensive guide. From there, you can use a service like Canva to design a free, downloadable PDF guide to offer prospects and clients on your website.
#4 Taking soundbites for social media posts
Some of your old articles on your website may take too much effort to re-write or update. Yet there are likely still great points which you made in these articles which are still relevant to people today. Here, you could simply lift a list of quotes from your old articles and compile them into a Word document. From here, you might schedule some of these as social media posts for your online audiences to consume.
#5 Turning a blog post into a video script
Could one of your articles on your website about financial planning be used as raw material to create a strong animated video? This can be a powerful way to communicate to new audiences on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. Here, you will need to produce a script for the video, and much of it will already be available in the blog post. The tone, style and structure will likely just need to be changed so that it “reads better” for a video audience rather than a text-based format.
