How to Repurpose Old Blogs into Fresh Posts, The Easy Way

Have you ever noticed how some products only ever change their packaging, but the product stays the same? Products like Coke or Oreo don’t really change, but their packaging does. These brands do this to pique audience interest and stay relevant. The packaging that worked for one generation doesn’t necessarily work on the next one, and brands know this.

This adaptive strategy can be applied to content as well. The content of a brand’s blog a decade ago can still hold some good hooks on an audience today, but the packaging has to match the audience, so to speak. 

Society today has become very visual. We’re choosing to watch short videos or scroll through reels and photo carousels instead. If something’s textually cluttered, we tend to skip it. Knowing this behaviour, the best way to reach an audience is to meet them where they are most likely to be. 

Get Repurposing, Stat!

How does one even get started with repurposing content, especially when you have hundreds of content dating several years back?

Your best approach is to streamline your process and create a system.

Start by Finding Content You Want to Use

Go through all of your blogs and ascertain whether or not that content would have an impact today. Will your 5-year-old piece on Content Planning Best Practices still ring true? 

There are two important considerations to answer this:

• Check the blog data and statistics. Review each blog post: which created interactions and what didn’t? Eliminate the content that created no or negative connotations. Leave content that people cared about, and promoted a positive image. That’s what you’ll want to use.
• Check relevance. From the content that people cared about, which ones are or can still be relevant today? Perhaps there is old content that coincides with a new campaign, or there are key points, quotations, or data that can be used that are still relevant to your audience today. 

Then, Reformat the Content

Time to make it content appealing to modern tastes. 

For blogs, modernize wording, tone, and content to make it more relatable and relevant to today’s audiences. Make sure your website and blog sections are optimized to be searchable. Also, consider that it will be more effective to use fewer written words and more visuals. 

In this day and age, your brand can’t afford to NOT repurpose content across platforms. Your updated blog’s data and statistics can be interpreted into graphs or charts that summarize the details. The quotes can be interpreted into static graphics for social media, or elaborated on further by brand KOLs in reels. Pro tip: use relevant visuals and trending sound/music to compliment your content. 

Blog posts can also be scaled down in a few words (as a teaser) for X and other similar character-limited platforms. You can produce one long-form based on the blog, which can then be cut into snippets, teasers, reels, or a carousel for more angles on a single bit of information. They can even be made into podcast topics! There are several other formats that a brand can make use of, which many digital marketing agencies are especially skilled with. 

Remember to Tailor the Content to Each Platform

Connected to above, every digital platform that a brand uses to publish different content types reaches audiences differently, too. To delve deeper into the demographics of each platform will require an article all on its own to explain the market profiles and where and how a brand should position itself to achieve an intended result. You can begin here, though: Defining Your Target Audience: Why It’s Important for PR and Marketing Success

Be platform-specfic when posting

• Use short-form videos and reels for explainers and primarily entertaining media on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok;
• Long-form and primarily informative content work well on YouTube, which you can further repurpose into YouTube Shorts (perfect for teasers that encourage people to watch your long-form content); 
• Brief, engaging, thought-provoking (sometimes, even just provoking) paragraphs for X and Threads;
• LinkedIn for thought-leadership content related to your blog – complete with professional, thought-proviking, and networking-centric language;
• Other social media such as Facebook is more forgiving with its content context and format. Texts, videos, and photos all work. It’s more about content than format, really.

Whichever platform a brand decides to go with, it is important to first study the platform then modify the content to fit perfectly into said platform.

Engage and Promote Your Content

Brands have different reasons for recreating and repurposing blog content into other various content types. Whatever the long term strategy and KPI may be, your foot in the door is engaging content and engaging WITH content. 

That is, when your audience asks questions, respond. When they leave comments, converse. When they subscribe to you, reach out and welcome them. We mentioned this briefly earlier, but you can promote the original blog, your website, and other actions throughout your reformated content (like YouTube Shorts and X/Threads posts.) 

Follow the Data, Then Adapt

When the content has been posted, then it is time to watch. Pay attention to the traffic, the statistics that the post creates. Analyze the numbers, note the posts that did well and that did not, and adjust accordingly. 

In summary:

• Modify the content of the blog. Trim the fat and make it so that only the main points remain. 
• Package it in a way that will best appeal to a target market
• Make sure that the content will reach the target market at the place they are most likely to be. 
• Learn from the interactions with said target market.
• Formulize future strategies based on what worked and avoid what didn’t. 

Your Partner for Repurposing

Old and proven strategies CAN be used in the modern digital world. Content creation is not an exact science, but the people who have been practicing it over the years have developed strategies that get results. They have spent the time and energy and have gained the expertise to use online platforms to grow a business. 

So there’s no need for your brand to start all of this repurposing (and creation) from scratch. Partnering with a digital marketing agency like NGP IMC allows brands to tap into that expertise, experience, and knowledge without all the wasted time and effort of trial and error.