The marketing movement by Refine Labs. You want to welcome back to the Marketing Movement podcast. This is your host for the day, Angelica Taylor. I am a senior brand marketing manager at Refine Labs.
And today we are going to be talking about repurposing content. This is something that we've touched on briefly on the Refine Labs LinkedIn page. And our CEO, Chris Walker, has mentioned it briefly a few times in the past. But I think it deserves some more love than that.
I actually saw a post on LinkedIn today that reminded me of this topic. So here we go. If you are creating and distributing content, then you know how much time and effort it takes to create one piece of content, regardless of whether it's a podcast episode, a webinar, or a virtual event, a blog post, or a long form LinkedIn post. So one of the worst things that you can do as a marketer, who is creating and distributing content, for any reason, whether it be for your company or for your personal brand, is distributing that piece of content once and never repurposing it again, never taking a look at it again, just checking vanity metrics and leaving it at that.
So to preface, I'm coming up on my two years at Refine Labs. I'll be hitting that milestone in the next few months, which is super exciting. I joined as employee number five as the sole internal marketer, aside from our CEO, who is a marketer himself. And our main focus is at that point, we're getting the state of demand-gen podcast off the ground and also fueling the Refine Labs LinkedIn page to separate the Refine Labs brand from that of our CEO.
So I really started noticing the value of repurposing content when Chris, our CEO, challenged me to post eight times a day on LinkedIn for a week straight. Obviously, I could not say no to that request, even though it sounded just absolutely out of reach, based on what I was doing at that point. So the first thought that ran through my head was how in the world am I gonna create eight pieces of original content in one day? I mean, some days I even struggled to get one piece of content out on the LinkedIn page, so eight just sounded pretty far-fetched.
But then something just clicked. I didn't need to create a new piece of content each and every time. I had been creating content daily for the past several months, and he had also been creating a ton of video, audio, and text-based content himself every day for the past several months. So I had plenty to work with.
I just needed to shift my mindset. So here's what I did then over a year ago. I went back a few months on the Refined Labs LinkedIn page, and I started turning video posts into text posts, extracting quotes from longer-form text posts, and turning them into quote cards, going back through old podcast episodes and micro-video clips, and turning them into shorter-form text posts. So within those eight posts each day, I maybe created two to three completely fresh posts from scratch.
The others took elements or messaging inspiration, and sometimes even direct quotes from content that I posted three months ago or longer. Obviously, I make sure that new posts reflected our current messaging. However, many of the core ideas were still relevant then, and some even are today, over a year later. So here's how we've evolved it today.
We now have a much more internal bandwidth to create original content, which is great. But our audience is growing much more quickly, and we're approaching about 100 employees at Refined Labs, which is insane, many of which are posting content on their own personal profiles on LinkedIn, being a guest on other people's podcasts, and hosting their own episodes now in the marketing movement. We consistently publish three episodes a week on the State of Demand Gen Podcast, host at least three live events a month, and have expanded our focus to include YouTube and TikTok on top of everything else that we're already doing from a branding content perspective. So we have a lot more original content being created, but we still find value in repurposing it, because in reality, it's still challenging to say something completely new and valuable every single day.
And certain messages you may want to reinforce more than others. So there's still a ton of value in repurposing content, even if your content engine is on fire, like ours is over here. While we don't post eight times a day on LinkedIn anymore, because that experiment yielded results that were interesting, but not necessarily promising enough to continue doing that forever more, we are publishing a lot of content. We still do go through past LinkedIn posts and repurpose them in different formats, whether that be a shorter text post, a quote card, or a slide deck.
We are essentially presenting the same information in a different light when doing that. And the engagement proves that this is a viable strategy, and given how fast our following is growing, the content that was published a few months ago that is revamped or reworked in another form is not going to sound redundant to our audience, because some of them might not have seen it, some of them might have, but we're not posting the same exact thing in the same exact format, so it still looks fresh and sounds fresh and so forth. So aside from that, we have found that taking photos of written notes or diagrams, screenshots from content on other platforms, like Twitter, and things about making sure to drive a ton of engagement, and allow us to bring content from one channel to another, because obviously we have different audiences on different channels. So in the same light, we now republish our TikTok videos, and it's a non-tik-tok, to LinkedIn from time to time, obviously in moderation.
So that was a lot of information. So here is what I recommend for you as a takeaway. So if you already have a podcast or a virtual event series or something of that nature, or invest resources in blog posts or other long-form content, that's awesome, keep it up. You have some somewhere and something to start with.
So I recommend applying the principles from what I just went through, based on what we have done and are currently doing at Refined Labs to your own content strategy. So turn that one podcast episode into five micro-videos, three minutes or less, and post those on LinkedIn. You can go even further and turn the main ideas into a slide deck. You can extract quotes from the host or the guest on the podcast and turn them into quote cards, or publish them to Twitter, take a screenshot, and then get those on LinkedIn that way.
If you have a blog post, I know some people are still very big on blogging, which is fine. You can take the same idea, although obviously not with the video aspect, unless you want someone to go on camera and recite the blog post in a way that does not sound like they are reading it. You can do essentially the exact same things aside from the video aspect. And if you're starting from scratch, starting the content engine from scratch, you can record yourself talking about topics that you're thinking about, things that you know your audience is interested in, or also record conversations that you're having with your customers, and certain internal meetings, although I'd be careful with that, sometimes the things that you're talking about internally are not things that you want to repurpose for any reason, but of course it depends on what kind of meeting you are in.
So I record those conversations, and then listen to them. In turn, those thoughts and responses into micro-video content, if it makes sense to do so, or you can just use the overall themes and thoughts and transcripts from those recordings and create text posts about things that matter to whoever your target audience is. So the main takeaway from my rant today is, don't make it more complicated than it needs to be. The goal is to create content that your audience will find interesting and distribute it in the places they will be able to consume it.
So continue creating great content, but don't think of it through section narrow lens anymore if you have not been repurposing your content. So create that one piece of content, that one great piece of content, and figure out how you can continue reworking it and redistributing it in different ways, and even on different channels. So revisit older content pieces as well, and see if you can rework them and bring them back to life in a different light. So that wraps up.
Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your feedback on this episode, or your thoughts or experiences on repurposing content. Make sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you're enjoying the content, and feel free to shoot us an email at marketing at refinelabs.com if there are specific topics or guests that you'd like to hear on future episodes of the Marketing Movement.