Making derivative content isn’t a strategy. It’s a tactic. And it’s not a particularly difficult one. Create a hero asset—the kind of thing you can get people to fill out a form to download—then chop that asset up into a bunch of pieces. Your white paper might become an infographic, your webinar might become a blog post. Whatever path you choose, that hero asset can become a whole bunch of new content.
And it might all be saying the same thing.
By now, everyone’s on board with the tactic of creating derivative content. Buyers love snackable, shareable content, right? But there’s more to seeing success with any content than just making it. Here’s a look at how to approach content repurposing strategically.
Create content for your strategy.
You didn’t create that hero asset by accident. It was designed with a purpose, both for your marketing efforts and for your audience. When it comes time to create derivative content, though, it’s easy to subscribe to the “more is better” mindset and just create as much as you can.
If you don’t bring the same kind of strategic thinking to the repurposed content as you did the original asset, you risk lowering the ROI of your marketing efforts, rather than improving it. Instead of being able to focus on one piece of content designed with a specific goal, now you’re managing a large amount of… stuff?… that’s supposed to do… something? And if you’re spending the time to repurpose content, only to find that it’s not helping you drive results, you’re wasting money, not saving it.
How do you make sure that you’re repurposing content in a smart way? Be aware of why you’re doing it in the first place. Before you do anything else, look for the places you can make your go-to-market strategy more effective by utilizing repurposed content. If there isn’t a place for new content, consider whether it’s worth spending the time to make it.
Once you’ve found a spot, remember that your hero asset doesn’t do the same things a conversation with your sales team would. It sets that conversation up. Similarly, your repurposed content should set something up. That’s likely pushing traffic to the hero asset you’re repurposing. If that’s the only way you’re using it, though, you’re missing out on some real opportunities. We’ll talk more about those later, but whatever direction you choose to go in, you should know what you want your audience to do next.
Ask yourself the same questions you asked for the hero asset. Who are you repurposing the content for? Where are they going to encounter it? What questions do they have—and how can your derivative content answer them? When you give that context to your repurposed content, it’s easier to create content that supports your GTM strategy instead of falling into the trap of just making more content.
Design your content with repurposing in mind.
The quickest way to repurpose content is to take a big piece and chop it up into smaller ones. What makes that complicated is that those big pieces like webinars and white papers are big for a reason. They tackle big ideas, using up as much space as they need to make the point, and finding bite-sized chunks that can be cleanly pulled out can be tricky. So, you assign someone to re-work and re-write and before you realize it, you’ve spent a lot of time on what you thought would be a quick task.
The solution to that, no matter what form your “big” content takes, is to build it to be easy to take back apart for repurposing.
We’ve taken an aggressive approach to this idea with our monthly Coffee Break webinar series. They’re live events, which means there’s always a chance the session we’ve planned isn’t the one that happens. That meant whoever was in charge of pulling clips for social first had to watch the event, either live or on-demand. Even if they wanted to lean on generative AI (GenAI), it still took longer than we’d like, and there was always the chance a speaker would take four minutes to make a great point we really wish they made in two.
So, we added a new segment: Piping Hot Takes. We give each speaker the floor for one minute and ask them to give the spiciest take on the topic we’re discussing. It’s fun, the speakers love it, and we know exactly what our social clips are going to be before we record the webinar. (Here’s an example.) If other awesome moments pop up, that’s icing on the cake, but our social team can plan for three clips, and we don’t burn time finding snippets to match their calendar.
This same approach works for other formats as well. A chapter in your next ebook deals with the top five mistakes your target audience makes? Each of those mistakes can be their own social post, and the biggest mistake might get its own blog post. And if your designers are working to turn your survey results into graphics, there’s no reason those designs can’t match the aspect ratio for social platforms.
Repurpose to refocus, not restate.
The quickest way to repurpose content is always to make as few changes as possible, but if that’s the only thing you’re doing, you’re likely missing some opportunities. One of the major ways derivative content can earn its place in your overall marketing campaigns is by doing things that the original content might not be able to do. That might be engaging with a different audience, highlighting different takeaways, or getting way in the weeds about something that you wouldn’t want to devote as much time to in a hero asset.
When you’re thinking about using derivative content to extend a hero asset, it’s important to keep your overall strategy in mind. You could extend that piece in a hundred different directions, but you should think about creating those extensions in the places that matter most.
The short version of that math looks something like this: what are the audiences that stand to gain a lot from your hero asset, but would be the hardest to market to?
Sometimes, you’ve got info that you know would be useful to a specific audience, but it’s trapped in a resource they have no interest in. From experience, we’ve learned that enterprise orgs are rarely interested in going live with a webinar. (Thanks, lawyers.) So, if you have a great resource about live webinars, there’s a good chance that audience is going to just skip right past it.
However, if your asset includes something like comparison data between live and on-demand webinars, that means you have data about on-demand video. That might be exactly the kind of info someone at an enterprise company is looking for.
By repurposing that data into a new piece of content, you’re able to speak to an entirely different audience you wouldn’t have reached before.
And if that person gets a little curious? There’s a link to the hero asset where they can learn a little more about why they should revisit the “live” idea. But either way, you’re answering their questions, building that relationship, and we’ve built on the effort we used making the hero asset to create something that speaks to an entirely different audience.
Mine your back catalog for new opportunities.
Marketing moves fast. Chances are good that while you’re marketing your current hero asset, someone on your team is already at work on the next one (and hopefully they’re thinking about how they’ll repurpose it!) That speed often means even good performing content loses its shine before it’s outlived its usefulness.
Repurposing content is a great way to get more value from some of your older content and drive more eyes to the newer content in the process. You can do that with the processes we described above, but there are other, even easier ways when you’re looking through your content archives.
Six months ago, you published a blog post about the best performing email subject lines. This month, you’re hosting a webinar about the current state of email marketing. You should absolutely be resurfacing that blog post to promote that webinar, even if subject lines might not come up. The topic’s relevant to the audience, and the CTA writes itself.
“Now that you’ve improved your open rate, learn more about the trends driving top-performing email campaigns in our upcoming webinar…”
Some content might need a refresh before it’s ready to make another appearance. A quick way to breathe new life into an old piece is to grab a quote from a subject matter expert, directly speaking to the current state of your topic. One quote and a paragraph about how GenAI has changed the way we think about subject lines makes that blog feel much more up to date.
Improving your ROI by leveraging the content in your archives isn’t rocket science, but it can be hard to remember to do. Focus on what’s performed well in the past and look for different angles that fit your current strategy.
The Iron Horse Insight.
Creating derivative content that doesn’t serve a strategic purpose actually lowers your ROI. It’s not about volume—it’s about creating the right extensions that either reach new audiences or add meaningful depth for those already engaged with your content.
