You’re choosing to repurpose content because you need a method that brings both efficiency and effectiveness, right? Then a data-driven approach to content repurposing is what you need to become an expert in leveraging the maximum potential of your existing B2B marketing content. 

If you’re a data-driven marketing team, you’re more likely to have an advantage over the competition and increase profitability, shows a white-paper released by Forbes. In fact, data-driven companies are growing at an average of more than 30% annually, according to a report by Forrester.

To repurpose content successfully, you need a personalized content repurposing workflow. At first, you might perceive this approach as a delay to the decision making/ content creation process. Well, sometimes it’s ok to just go with your gut. But if you want to replicate success, your repurposing efforts should be based on a perfect mix of creativity and data. 

Learn how to design your content repurposing workflow and see why having a data-driven approach helps you stay:

The Golden Circle of Content Repurposing

The Golden Circle, Simon Sinek's popular framework, comes in handy when you are trying to define your content repurposing strategy.

Think about it. This framework is helping people and organizations be more inventive, pioneering and successful than others. But it can also be derived to improve multiple processes in your company, including content repurposing, allowing you to use this method regularly and successfully.

Define your purpose. Follow the process. Generate results. Simple as that! 

Then why do B2B marketers, despite knowing what they should do, still rely exclusively on intuition when it comes to content repurposing? 

Maybe it's because intuition (mixed with some level of experience in writing for a specific audience) might work once or twice. They live under the illusion that their approach works... until it doesn't. 

Some will even stop repurposing their content saying it doesn’t generate the expected results and that they need more than efficiency in creating new materials.

Others will conclude that intuition helps, but it needs to be backed up by some KPIs. And they are right.

Two of the key findings from the 2020 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks Report (Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs) show that:

So, if you want to make sure that your team's repurposing efforts are worthwhile, you need to shift towards a data-driven approach to B2B Content Repurposing.

Designing your own Content Repurposing Workflow 

While The Golden Circle helps you put things into perspective, a personalized content repurposing workflow breaks it down into actionable steps:

You can look at these steps as the foundation on which you build your workflow. So, feel free to add any data and variables that you find essential in making an informed decision.

Let’s take each step of the workflow individually.

Setting your Goal

If you have successfully cultivated a data-driven culture within your marketing team, you will rapidly set your content repurposing goal.

Look at the status of your content marketing goals. What does your dashboard reveal?

Now that you have a clear overview of your status, it’s easier to determine your priorities.

You might want to deal with truly urgent issues first, like attracting 20 more participants for your next in-person event that is happening one week from now. 

Then, you can work towards important, longer-term goals, like reducing email unsubscribe rates by half in the next year.

Manage and invest your efforts wisely so you can efficiently advance towards goal completion through content repurposing.

Defining your Target Audience

According to the most recent edition of Marketo’s The State of Engagement Report, 3 out of 4 B2B consumers think brands must have a deep understanding of their needs to engage successfully.

To create these engaging experiences that B2B consumers expect, you need to define your audience by answering the following questions:

Top-performing B2B marketers confirm that a deep understanding of the audience is the key to achieving marketing goals successfully:

Conducting a Content Audit 

Your B2B marketing content qualifies as repurposable if it checks the following three criteria:

Identifying your evergreen and versatile content is a black and white issue, in comparison to content quality, which is frequently open to interpretation. Being data-driven helps you avoid the subjectivity trap. Therefore look at your most important content KPIs to identify your high-quality content.

Each time you’re searching for new repurposing opportunities, make sure you customize your content audit by adding just the KPIs that are directly related to your goal and relevant for your specific situation.

You might find this content KPIs segmentation from Portent very helpful when you need to visualize what KPIs are linked to your goal:

(Source: Portent)

Keep in mind that less is more. Marketers that choose too many KPIs often deal with analysis paralysis, overwhelmed by the amount of data they have to process.

The conclusions of your content audit should point out the B2B marketing materials that generated the best results in terms of conversions/ engagement/ reputation, and what topics and formats your audience prefers.

Take into account your audience’s expressed needs as they appear in FAQs, DMs, comments, survey answers, keyword search volumes, etc.

You can add a competitive content marketing analysis to complement your efforts. Use any available data to your advantage and stay one step ahead of your competition.

Prioritizing your Repurposing Opportunities

The conclusions of your audit should provide you with enough data about how to prioritize your repurposing opportunities. But it never hurts to look at some relevant B2B content marketing benchmarks as well.

If you’re wondering what content type to choose for your goal, B2B marketers say that the highest performing types are:

(Content Marketing Institute)

Demand Gen Report's 2019 Content Preferences Survey offers valuable information about what content materials B2B buyers consume for business purchases. One insight that I find very helpful for your repurposing decisions refers to the content types preferred by B2B buyers in each stage:

I highly recommend you to read the entire report. You’ll discover what content types B2B buyers share with their colleagues or for what content they’re willing to share information.

It might take some time to get used to a data-driven approach, but once you do, prioritizing repurposing opportunities will get a lot easier and your team becomes more effective.

Creating a New Material that your B2B Audience Wants

Now’s the time to mix everything you’ve learned and transform it into new powerful materials. Talking about time, do you know how many minutes B2B buyers are willing to spend consuming content?

As you might guess, 93% prefer shorter formats (they’re busy people, just like you). 73% of B2B buyers said they have less time to devote to reading and research and typically consume between three and seven pieces of content before speaking with a salesperson (Demand Gen). 

There's a strong link between the content format and the time B2B users are willing to spend consuming it:

(Demand Gen)

Make the most out of their time and create the highest content quality possible by adding the details that your audience perceives as valuable in a B2B marketing material:

(Demand Gen)

Having all this data at your disposal is like sitting on a gold mine. So, there’s no doubt that you are going to offer an engaging experience to your audience by creating a new high-quality material through content repurposing.

Evaluating the Performance of your Repurposed Content

By now, you have created your own content evaluation process, so checking this final step of your workflow should be a piece of cake.

I’ll say it again, it’s up to you what KPIs you choose. Evaluating the materials generated through repurposing helps you improve the workflow, so don’t skip this step even if you have reached your goal.

Ideally, you will get to a level where your content repurposing workflow is so fine-tuned that you no longer have to set up a meeting or a brainstorming session to decide what can be repurposed.

Wrapping up

Your personalized data-driven workflow will reveal plenty of content repurposing opportunities. You'll start with the ones that help you resolve what's urgent. But you don't want to miss the opportunities that help you trigger long-term goals. 

While you might not always have time to invest in the latter, you can outsource them to an experienced B2B content writer. According to CMI, half of the B2B marketers do this for at least one content marketing activity. 

So, use every opportunity to create new effective pieces of content through repurposing. 

Get inspired by other examples of strategic content repurposing and start creating powerful data-driven materials for your B2B audience.

Featured image source: You X Ventures