Today I want to talk to you about upcycling and making more of what you’ve already got as it pertains to content.
Personally, my family tries to be as sustainable as we can be in most of the things that we do. A lot of that has to do with either not purchasing things we don’t really need or making the most out of what we already have.
Sometimes that means upcycling or repurposing. Turns out, that is also a great practice in marketing.
If you’re doing any sort of content marketing, and you should be, then you know that it takes commitment and resources to do it properly. Even making a 15-second Instagram Reel can take hours.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could upcycle that content into something new? Something bigger? Something different? That way you don’t have to be in a perpetual state of making more new things.
You might be thinking, “yeah Nick, that’s why I take that Reel and post it on YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Facebook Stories.” Well, that’s okay but that’s called crossposting and that’s not what I’m talking about.
What I’m talking about is something bigger, maybe something even more valuable.
If you’re familiar with the Never Ending Content strategy then this might sound familiar.
Essentially, it’s the reverse of that strategy. Rather than take one big piece of content and break it up into smaller pieces you take your small pieces of content and turn them into one big one.
Here are a few examples of how this can shake out.
- Turn your blog posts into a quarterly magazine, an eBook, or a Podcast
- Turn your podcast into an eBook, or quarterly magazine
- Turn social media posts themed around the same thing into a podcast episode or eBook
- Turn your email series into a podcast, eBook, or mini book
This is nice because it can make the daunting task of creating something large, like a quarterly magazine into a much more tangible goal.
Authors say if you want to write a book just commit to writing a few pages per day and eventually you’ll have your book. This strategy follows that same logic.
If you’ve got 3 months of consistent content then you’ve got enough to upcycle some of that into a larger piece.
But, why even do the larger piece of content in the first place if it essentially exists in fragments already? Good question.
The larger pieces of content that we mentioned above – podcast, book, eBook, mini book, quarterly magazine… all have a greater perceived value to them than email, blog posts, and social posts do. People think they’re harder to make and they’re not wrong.
So, by putting in that extra effort you elevate your school’s brand.
Curating content into one place vs having it spread around in little bits and pieces is also beneficial for your audience because it saves them time.
Finally, you can ask your prospect to trade their contact information for this larger piece of content, something you can’t do or won’t be as successful with smaller pieces of content.
Join me on LinkedIn to get my smaller pieces of content throughout the week and let me know what you thought of this episode by sending me a message there.
