How to repurpose your school's marketing content

If you juggle multiple roles or are a school marketing team of one, you might be familiar with the pressure to produce engaging content every week but not having the time to do so! We get it: good content takes time. But what if we told you there was a way to create content without having to reinvent the wheel every time?

Here's every marketer's secret weapon: content repurposing. That's right, you can create up to five (or more) different pieces of content from one original piece! Below, we'll walk you through the steps and give you practical repurposing ideas.

What is content repurposing?

First things first, let's define content repurposing. You'll be relieved to know that content repurposing is about working smarter, not harder. It's about getting more mileage out of your existing content pieces by repackaging them in different forms and then sharing those new pieces across your diverse digital marketing channels. What it's not about is sharing the same content over and over again (that's a little boring).

Here at Digistorm, we ensure that every new piece of content created can be split into at least five smaller, bite-sized content pieces. That means at least five spots in our editorial calendar are filled instead of one.

It's about getting more mileage out of your existing content by repackaging them in different forms.

How school marketers can repurpose content

Now that we've covered content repurposing and a few of its benefits, it's time to get stuck into the practical ways school marketers can get started. First up, we recommend performing a quick content audit to see what's available for you to work with. Next, you'll want to toss aside anything that seems outdated and make a list of your evergreen content pieces. These are pieces of content that are always relevant to your audience.

Below, we'll show you how to repurpose a blog article into five new pieces of content.

1. Social media posts

Turning your blog article into bite-sized social media posts is content repurposing 101! Sure, you might have initially created one post on each social media channel to share your article, but why stop there? Instead, you can break your blog article down into ‘microblogs' to highlight key pieces of information and encourage your audience to read the complete article. Look for any key statistics, quotes, images, or infographics that stand out — these will form the basis of your new social media posts.

2. Video content

If video is a big part of your school's digital marketing strategy (and it should be), then you might like to think about repurposing your blog article into a quick, engaging video. Whether you use YouTube, Vimeo, or Instagram TV, your blog article is an excellent basis for a video script. If you jump over to the Digistorm YouTube channel, you'll notice that we've created a range of bite-sized videos to explain a range of concepts like product feature updates, SEO, social media tips, and more! Guess what? All of these videos started with a written blog article that we adapted into a short and engaging video.

3. Newsletter editorials

Are you looking for a topic to write about in your next school newsletter? First, revamp your blog article content by changing the tense or tone to suit a quick newsletter editorial. Then, similar to your social media posts, you can share a few key ideas from the article to grab attention and encourage readers to read the complete article.

4. Guides and resources

While we've primarily talked about cutting your content down into smaller pieces, expanding it is another way to repurpose content. If you've written a blog article that's around 800 words, chances are, there's a lot more you could share about the topic. If you've read any of our guides, you'll notice these are far lengthier than your average blog article. This is because we like to dive into topics that we know will be of great value to our audiences and discuss them in more granular detail.

5. Email series

Let's say you've written an article about what to expect on the first day of school. This is great information for families that are new to your school and are wondering what they might need to bring or be aware of for a successful first day. To repurpose this content, you could break it down into three to four tips that can be sent through an email marketing campaign to your new starters in the weeks leading up to the big day.

Final thoughts

So, there you have it! Five ways to turn your blog article into new pieces of content. Content repurposing takes a bit of planning to get it right. Still, in the end, your content calendar will thank you for it. Of course, there's no limit to what you can do. All it takes is a little creativity and insight about how you can provide extra value to your audience.

A quick word of advice: just because you have all of this content at your fingertips doesn't mean you should flood your audience with it. Review your content calendar and strategically plan when to share each piece of content so that it's engaging rather than overkill. For example, if we share a written case study with one of our schools on the Digistorm blog, we'll wait at least four weeks before releasing the video copy.