It’s time to face the facts: your team may not always have the time or bandwidth to regularly produce original content, and that’s okay. After all, content production is time-, concentration-, and resource-intensive. If a big project comes up that ropes in all of your team members, or if your content budget is already stretched to the breaking point, it may not be a bad idea to look back through your existing content pieces to see what can be repurposed for additional mileage. By stretching the impact of content your team has already produced, you’ll be multiplying the effectiveness of the time and effort already sunk into the content project, while minimizing the amount of work that needs to be devoted to what would otherwise be a fresh content initiative.

Be sure to also see our related post on What Gated Content Can do for ETF Issuers

Shorten or stretch existing content for a different audience

Your original piece may have been a 500-word blog article, but you can think of that piece of content as just a starting point. Perhaps you re-post that article in a drastically abbreviated form on social media. You could also think about using the 500-word article as a springboard to a lengthier, more “high-brow” piece of content, for example a 2,000-word whitepaper that expands and expounds upon the skeleton of the existing work. In the case of expansion, a significant chunk of the work is already done, including the research and outlining, so while it will still be a significant amount of work to (for example) quadruple the length of a blog article, it will be markedly less resource-intensive when compared to drafting a similar piece from scratch.

Turn it into an infographic

Although they’re surprisingly persistent and common in finance, in the world of marketing, walls of text are a big “no-no.” Of course, long form writing still has its place in blogs and reports, but in general, if you’re trying to communicate a complex idea to an audience, there may be no better way to repurpose a piece of existing content than to convert it into an engaging, colorful, well-designed infographic. This will by necessity involve “boiling down” the existing content to its absolute essence, the handful of sentences (or sentence fragments!) that get the main point across and would best accompany what is a primarily visual medium. Converting a blog article or other piece of text to an infographic can often be a highly-involved collaborative effort between a writer and a designer, but the results are worth the effort.

Turn it into a byline opportunity

If the existing piece of content is particularly compelling and well-written, it might be worth reaching out to relevant publications to see if they would be interested in publishing it either as-is or in an embellished format. This option can be especially appealing when content-writing resources are stretched thin, as it often requires minimal editing or revisions before submission, and can translate into a significant PR boost if the submission is accepted for publication.

The bottom line

It isn’t always easy to find the time and resources to produce fresh content, but with a little imagination and a small amount of extra work, existing content can easily be repurposed to provide extra mileage on a shoestring.