If you’re anything like the business and mindset coaches I work with, you’ve created a lot of audio/video content over the years – from YouTube or podcasts to Facebook and Instagram Lives. That’s amazing! But here’s the problem. After you create it and put it out there to the world, it just sits there collecting dust. Knowing you have a lot of value not being utilized, you’ve decided it’s time to go back through your archives and breathe new life into your content by repurposing it to another platform.

But as you stare at everything in front of you, the task feels a little daunting. Where do you even start? First, take a deep breath. I have some good news for you. In this post, I’m sharing 6 strategic questions you can ask yourself as you comb through your content. I’m about to make it easy for you to quickly pick the pieces that will shine like diamonds all over again.

Strategic Content Repurposing – 6 Questions to Help You Rediscover the Value In Your Archives

Like anything we do in our businesses, we want to have a purpose behind it. We want to think strategically and for our actions to support our goal – either the long-term goal and mission of the business or a short-term goal like selling a particular offer or getting more people on your email list.

We need to approach content creation and repurposing with that same mindset. Creating or repurposing without a clear goal is a waste of your time. Yes, I said it.

With that in mind, let’s get to the questions. 

Question 1: Does this content still support my overall business goals?

Let’s say you’re a mindset coach who used to offer group programs. You’ve since made a shift in your business and you’re now serving clients in a higher ticket, one-on-one capacity.  

Any content in your archives that speaks to the advantages of group programs or how you can help in a group setting would NOT support the current goals and mission of your business.  

Eliminate that content from your list of “potentials” right away.

Question 2: Does this content still support my current target audience?

Like with question #1, this question can potentially knock a lot of content out of the running for possible repurposing.

If the content no longer speaks to the person you’re trying to speak to, it does not make sense, strategically, to repurpose it. Period.

Here’s an example. Molly is a business coach. She started her business working with women in the startup phase of their online business. Over time, she’s pivoted. Molly now works with women who have established businesses and want help streamlining so they can continue to grow. Any content that speaks to the “just getting started phase” no longer serves Molly’s current audience. It doesn’t make strategic sense to repurpose it.

Question 3: Is the purpose of this content still relevant and needed in my overall content strategy?

Once you’ve narrowed the pool to content that supports your current goals and audience, it’s time to look at relevance.

You want to start evaluating the buyer journey or alignment with your current offers. If a piece of content is speaking to the awareness phase of the buyer journey, for example, but you need to beef up your content speaking to the solution aware phase, that might not be the best piece of content to repurpose at the moment. Or if a piece of content supports offer A, but you’re focusing on selling offer B right now, you might want to put that piece on ice.

That’s not to say you can’t come back to that content later; it’s just not where you want to focus right now.  

Question 4: Does this content structurally lend itself to an easy transformation?

The purpose of repurposing our content is to make our lives easier by getting the most out of the work we’ve already done, right? So let’s look for content that will be easy to transform! Here are some red flags to look for that will signal it may not be the best content to repurpose:

• Unstructured, stream-of-consciousness content
• Very short content that doesn’t provide much value or cannot be easily expanded on
• Content that is in a storytelling format, but doesn’t relate to anything that supports the business

While I wouldn’t call this a red flag, I want to mention that podcasts or IG Lives with more than one person are more difficult to repurpose into a written form because of the back-and-forth nature of the dialogue. Again, not a red flag because it can be done; it’s just not going to be as easy.

Question 5: Where is this new piece of content going to live?

Now that you’ve figured out which content to repurpose, it’s time to start planning. Your next step is to identify how you will deliver your new piece of content. Is it going to be a blog post? An email newsletter? Social media posts? All, or a few, of the above?

Before you start writing, have a plan, because having a plan will lead you right to the next question …

Question 6: In what order should I repurpose to make the process more efficient?

If you’re starting with audio or video content, I recommend creating a blog post first. Once you have it as a long-form written piece, it’s easier to transform it into other pieces of written content. Also, you can never go wrong by adding content to a platform you own, and that’s your website. You don’t own YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook. You own your website, and having long-form content on a platform you control is invaluable. It will help boost your SEO, too.

Once you’ve written your blog post, use that content to create an email to send to your list and as captions for your social media platforms.

My Favorite Audio/Video Content Repurposing Workflow

Let’s paint this picture a little clearer by walking through my favorite repurposing workflow with a real topic. Imagine you are a marketing coach. You have a podcast episode that dives into 3 marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. Already it’s pretty easy to see how this will come together for a blog post – you’ll have an intro, each of the 3 mistakes will be a subheading, and you’ll wrap it all up with a conclusion.

For your email, you could take this in a few different directions based on your goals. If you’re looking to solely nurture your list, you could give all the goods in the body of the email. Storytelling would be a great way to do this. Tell your reader how you learned these lessons the hard way by making these mistakes in your own business. If your goal is to drive people to your website, your email could tease the blog post with a link to read more. If you want to fill spots in a marketing course you offer, you could frame the email to let your reader know this is just a taste of what will be covered in the course and invite them to sign up.

For your social media posts, you can easily get 4 different posts:

1. A carousel of the three mistakes
2. A deeper dive into mistake #1
3. A standalone post about mistake #2
4. An in-depth look into mistake #3

Now that you’re armed with these questions, go tackle that archive!

If you’d rather hand it off to me instead, let’s schedule a call so we can talk about what content repurposing can look like for your business.