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Repurposing and reusing content allows publishers to achieve the productivity dream of doing more with less.
Whether it’s collecting virtual dust in the archive or trapped on a single channel, many are sitting on a goldmine of content ready to be melted down and reformed into new opportunities to engage with and grow audiences. But you can’t just slap on a fresh coat of paint: successful repurposing requires an efficient backend, multidisciplined journalists, and a helping hand from emerging technology.
At our most recent AOP CRUNCH event, we gathered an array of industry experts to share their advice on how to extract the maximum value from content without burdening its creators with unnecessary work. From the power of AI to the power of nostalgia, here’s a roundup of the day’s discussions on how publishers can transform unused content from a liability into an asset.
Cutting-edge tools streamlining content strategy and organisation
The day began with presentations from two companies providing solutions that can aid publishers in the planning and legwork of repurposing content.
First, Simone King, Client Service Manager at Ipsos, demonstrated Ipsos Iris, a site-centric and panel-based audience measurement tool which provides over 500 profiling variables encompassing attitudes, behaviours, and demographics. Iris enables publishers to plan and optimise the distribution of repurposed content based on audience composition and usage habits. Publishers can then analyse the performance of distributed content versus native traffic to assess the incremental value of different media mix strategies.
Next, Ben Martin & Dan Reeves, Co-Founders of LOYAL AI, shared how their AI-powered content optimisation tool can accelerate the organisation and activation of archive content, as well as automate CMS functions such as SEO, named entity recognition, and internal linking. With many archives containing tens of thousands of items, Martin and Reeves believe content repurposing is the ideal use case for AI’s data-crunching capabilities, allowing publishers to pour their efforts into strategy and outcomes rather than laborious backend sorting.
How WIRED leverages nostalgia for audience growth
WIRED recently celebrated its 30th birthday, and Audience Development Manager Nathan May shared how the publication is utilising its rich past to drive audience growth in the future. After a tour through the highlights of WIRED’s archive — which included an audience-pleasing topless cover photo of Bill Gates and a few wildly inaccurate predictions — May discussed how nostalgia can be leveraged to engage audiences and create a sense of connection with the brand’s history and ever-changing identity.
Images of iconic outfits, hairstyles, and tech from the past perform especially well on social media, where WIRED’s shifted from entirely link-based posts intended to drive traffic back to the site to a 50/50 split between link-based and standalone engagement posts. By balancing posts tailored to perform well on social media with those that promote site content, WIRED was able to reach out to new audiences, without any negative impact to site traffic.
Another repurposing success story was the WIRED Classics newsletter, a curated selection of weird and wonderful archive content that has seen consistent growth and now reaches 30,000 subscribers. The newsletter is written by Research Editor Eve Sneider, who does not just resurface archive content but provides commentary to put it into context and provide a modern perspective, which May credits as the secret to WIRED Classics’ success.
“There is no silver bullet [for audience growth],” said May. “Anyone working in audience will understand what I mean.”
“There are many small iterations and changes that you make on a daily basis and, over time, you start to build on that growth.”
Upskill, automate, and optimise: the pillars of successful repurposing
Paola Roccuzzo, Content Director at Foolproof, emphasised the technical and logistical realities of content repurposing and reuse. The CMS must be effectively organised and structured to facilitate repurposing, which — as LOGIC AI’s founders would agree — Roccuzzo notes is a task well-suited for AI. Publishers also need to invest in upskilling their content creators to be comfortable with the technical tasks involved in storing archival content and distributing new content across multiple channels.
“You need to structure [the content in the backend] in a way where you can automate these things,” said Roccuzzo.
“Repurposing requires an editor … but with reuse the effort is done upstream, by configuring the technology properly. And that [reused asset] is usually a smaller part of the content … it’s not the entire piece that you wrote, but it might be a block of it. So, when you structure content, you have to decide: can any part of this be reused?”
The technical side is not the only area where content creators may need to be upskilled, according to Suswati Basu, Head of Audience at NationalWorld. In today’s media landscape, successfully distributing content across multiple channels inevitably means producing video content. Helping journalists become comfortable in front of the camera and thinking about video from the offset can help publications explain a story through a wide array of mediums to maximise audience reach.
Suswati also sees video as essential to building audience trust:
“There’s been a massive shift from brand loyalty to individual loyalty. You need to have faces to your brand; people are more likely to follow the individual journalist. The way TikTok algorithms work, you’re not gaining followers through someone scrolling, you’re gaining followers through someone liking the individual. So we need to have that kind of presence, even from a local point of view. And actually, with local [publications], it’s even stronger.”
The unique trust that local publications command is now being better reflected in Google Search. Peggy Richter, Google’s Strategic Partners Lead for News, noted how the addition of ‘Experience’ to the company’s EEAT search rating helps to connect its users to local sources:
“If you think in real life, if you want to go to the best local restaurant, you ask a local person to get the best advice. And that’s what search is always trying to do: get the best answer for the moment that person is searching for. That’s what local stands for, and that’s exactly why there’s such a push for it.”
Grace Forell, Principal Producer and Presenter at Which?, highlighted the need to match content, channel, and audience. Content that caters to paid Which? members demonstrates the value of membership with the in-depth articles the publication is known for. Unknown audiences, on the other hand, are better served with short-form content focused on free advice and consumer advocacy.
To source content, the social team at Which? combs through member articles for bitesize nuggets that can be repurposed in a digestible format. For example, a short-form video on how to wash trainers was split off from an in-depth article on the best detergent, while a feature on the consumer rights of car owners spawned a highly successful TikTok post (1.3 million views and counting) on how to claim damage from potholes.
“Know what you want from each channel, because repurposing for the sake of repurposing is pointless,” said Forell.
“It feels nice, because it feels like you’re getting a lot of value out of your content and your resources. But if you don’t have an endgame, then your time might be better spent creating new content which is relevant to a bigger audience … Having sturdy workflows in place is really important. Putting a lot of time into how content gets commissioned, who it needs to be checked by, who decides which channels it’s going to, who’s editing it and making sure regular meetings are in place.”
Keeping up with audiences’ insatiable demand for content is challenging in a world of ever-expanding platforms and shifting media preferences. But by learning how to turn one piece of content into many, publishers can amp up their output without compromising quality or creativity. And — as we saw with WIRED’s birthday trip down memory lane — digging into the past may even provide new perspectives on a publication’s core purpose and identity.
Richard Reeves
Managing Director, AOP
