We all know we should be doing more recycling, but did you know this brings commercial benefits when you apply it to your marketing efforts too?

Every year a lot of time, hard work and budget goes into creating marketing campaigns and assets. At the same time, (in our super busy and noisy world) audiences’ attention spans are diminishing from information overload.

This means there’s plenty of scope to recycle, repurpose or reinvigorate your marketing. Not only will it save you money; it can also keep you firmly on your customers’ radars.

This article examines how to make more of past marketing approaches, material and successes.

Give your ‘effective frequency’ a boost!

Recycling your marketing is an excellent way to increase the impact of your campaigns in a cost-efficient manner.

Research suggests that a marketing message takes multiple exposures to impact consumer behaviour significantly. The exact number of exposures needed varies according to the marketing approach, the audience and the message, but an average is between 5 and 7 times.

This is known as the “effective frequency,” i.e., the number of times a consumer is exposed to a message before it influences their purchasing decision.

7 ways to recycle, repurpose and reinvigorate your marketing

With that in mind, here are some of the best ways to recycle your marketing to remain visible and relevant to your target audiences.

1 Repurpose your content

Repurposing old content is a great way to breathe new life into your marketing efforts. For example, you could turn an old blog post into a video, an infographic, a podcast etc.

Don’t be afraid to update articles and white papers and reshare them. Always republish an updated article with the current date to signpost it’s had a makeover and is relevant. Often the core of a lot of content is still current, but refreshing the examples and language for recent times can make it feel all shiny and new to an audience.

You can also openly celebrate content you’ve done before to prompt a discussion. For example, if you did a survey several years ago, can you rerun it to comment on the differences/trends today? Can you use the original results to discuss why things are the same or different now?

In business, things tend to go in cycles (e.g. economic highs and lows), and many things have happened before. If a theme, topic or customer need is ‘hot’ again, dig out what you did on it in the past. In adapting that for today, you can beat slower competitors as you don’t have to start the creation process from scratch.

2 Reinvigorate social media posts

Remember, when you have repurposed content, share it on your social media platforms. We’re not just talking about sharing your updated blogs here.

Think more broadly about all the different marketing you’re doing. For example if you’ve just done a webinar, could you create a series of short ‘soundbite’ video/audio clips to share on social media? If you’re running an ad campaign, could you do a ‘The Making Of’ social media story to explain how it came together, or release teasers in the run-up to its release?

Do revisit popular posts from the past to see if you can update and repost them. Could you take that original theme/approach to create a series of fresh updates? A quick win is to use fresh images for your posts to give them a ‘new’ feel in people’s feeds.

3 Create evergreen content

Another highly resourceful approach is to create timeless content that can be reused or repurposed over time – known as ‘evergreen’ content.

Good examples here are how-to guides, lists of tips or checklists. The more practical they are, the more likely they’ll be used. Be mindful of any dates in your evergreen content. This can suggest content is outdated, even if it’s still highly relevant. If you need dates/years included, update them every year.

4 Leverage past successes

With marketing, there’s often a misconception that everything has to be created from scratch. As we mentioned before, business and consumer behaviour experience cycles. Similarities can also be found in specific seasons.

So if you are feeling a sense of déjà vu in your markets, think back to when you first observed that audience behaviour, customer need, or trending topic. What campaigns worked well at that time for you? Can you dig them out and dust them off to create something quickly that resonates now?

Similarly, reflect on your past successful marketing campaigns. Which can you update or repurpose them for a current campaign?

5 Collaborate with other brands

Collaborating with other brands in your markets is a great way to generate more exposure for your business. You can cross-promote each other’s content, host joint webinars or events, or even co-create new content.

If you have previously run a campaign in collaboration with another business, is there an anniversary coming up you could celebrate? Do they have content you could reshare and mention the partnership again?

Events can also be repurposed. If you ran a seminar in the past which is relevant now, could you redo it as a webinar? If you did a webinar that is still current, can you reshare it as a recording – perhaps with a short introduction added explaining why it’s still relevant?

6 Update your website

It’s amazing how many businesses don’t regularly update their website’s home page, news or blog area. For the website visitor, seeing fresh and current content reassures them the business is ‘active’ and encourages them to return.

Make more of:

• adding new or updated blog posts
• creating fresh landing pages
• sharing the latest customer reviews
• update your product/service pages with new images or descriptions
• keeping your team page and profiles up to date and current

Collectively this can make a significant impact with minimal time and budget. As well as impressing website visitors, it will also help your site’s search engine optimisation.

7 Repurpose your newsletters

You may already send out a newsletter or e-bulletin, but did you know that you can also create and share a newsletter from your LinkedIn company page?  When someone follows your page, LinkedIn will automatically invite them to receive your newsletter.  This is a great way to communicate with the LinkedIn community. In doing so you can repurpose content from past posts, blogs, articles or your traditional newsletter. Bear in mind that LinkedIn newsletters tend to be shorter and punchier to be more engaging in that environment.

And finally…

Remember to save even more time by using marketing automation software to schedule posts, emails, and other campaigns to go out at different intervals. This can help you reach your audience regularly and tailor communications to resonate with any time-specific trends.

There’s a temptation in marketing that everything has to be created from scratch to meet the latest customer interests, needs and tastes. Yes, good marketing should have the customer at the heart of it, and while things change, short attention spans mean it’s OK to repurpose, reignite and remind.

Using these methods, you can recycle your marketing efforts and generate more engagement from all your content and campaigns. It’s a great way to save time and money while resonating effectively with your target audience.

If your organisation would benefit from a review of how your previous marketing efforts and collateral could be repurposed, please get in touch, and contact us or tel. 01483 429111.