Ep 50: Repurposing and making the most of content with Stacey Meadwell, Susie Lober and Ayo Abbas
On the back of attending UKREiiF and other events happening in the current events season, this episode is all about making the best of great content through repurposing so that you get more out of your content.
This episode is an example of repurposing in itself, as it's a podcast version of our "It's A B2B Comms Thing' LinkedIn live series from 2022.
If you’re off to an event it can be all too easy to only focus on making content for the event. Once the event is done it is all to easy to do you wash up and forget about using the content you produced for other purposes. This podcast interview shines a light on what can be done to repurpose and reuse your content again and again so you get more value from your efforts.
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Transcript.
Ayo Abbas 00:04
Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of the Built Environment Marketing Show. And I am your host Ayo Abbas from Abbas Marketing. Today's episode is one, which was recorded last year live on LinkedIn, and I thought would be useful to share with you. It's all about repurposing and how to get the most out of your content. It's a good follow on from the events podcast episode that we did last time, because it really talks about how you can really sweat your assets and get the most out of content you're already producing. The live is part of a series that I did last year, which was called 'It's a B2B Comms Thing'. The episode is actually hosted by Stacey Meadwell and also features Susie Lober and myself. If you do like the show, make sure you do leave us a review at the end. And if you have any questions on repurposing, do DM me, I'd love to hear your questions. Anyway, let's get on with listening to the episode bye.
Stacey Meadwell 01:06
I'm Stacy Meadwell, former property journalist and I am now a content creator working with B2B businesses in the built environment sector. And my co host for this session, who's going to be doing all the techie bits in the background is
Stacey Meadwell 01:20
Ayo.
Ayo Abbas 01:21
Hello, I'm Ayo Abbas, I am built environment marketing consultant. And yeah, that's kind of what I do. And I'm pressing the buttons today.
Stacey Meadwell 01:30
Yeah, and we have a very special guest host today, Susie Lober. Susie is sitting in for Emma Drake. If you're, watching,hi, Susie, you'd like to introduce yourself.
Susie Lober 01:42
Hi, thank you for having me. I'm a freelance marketing consultant. And I specialise in working with architects.
Stacey Meadwell 01:51
Great, so let's crack on the topic for this session is repurposing this is all about getting more bang for your content books. It's about making the most of the time you've spent creating content without spending a lot of extra extra time. It's format is very simple. There's three of us will be answering three questions in 15 minutes. So let's kick off with the first question, which is it's me, it's me, I'm asking the first question. Is why repurpose I owe?
Ayo Abbas 02:25
So I repost. purposing is basically about, I guess, saving time, right? I just kind of think we put so much effort into a piece of content. So it's like, how do I get the most bang for my buck? How do I reuse this? How do I apply it somewhere else? You know, and I think it just saves you a lot of headspace. I mean, I know as I got busier, it's harder to keep posting every day, because you're like, it's a lot more work. So sometimes it's great to have a vote of stuff that you can go into and just adapt. And so I think that's kind of really important. But also I think like repurposing the fact that you think that people are bored of your messaging and what you're saying, but actually, people are so busy and get 1000s and 1000s of messages every day. It's like actually have even registered your content in the first place. So don't worry about repurposing. It's there to kind of, I guess save you brain space and headspace. I think that's really, really important that you do it. And yeah, I'm a big fan, that's for sure.
Susie Lober 03:18
I love to use the vault. I like that. I like the idea of the vault. But ultimately, it's going to save you time, it's going to save you money. And also don't forget that it's good for SEO as well. So by repurposing content, you can get more bang for your buck for SEO.
Stacey Meadwell 03:34
Definitely. And I agree with all those points. And just picking up on the point about who has hasn't seen remember that if you are putting content out on LinkedIn, and Twitter. That doesn't mean to say that all your connections and all your followers have seen that content. So actually repurposing and re pushing stuff out is you're reaching a wider audience. So let's go on to our second question, which is you Susie?
Susie Lober 04:01
Yeah. So the second question is, how can you repurpose your B2B content? Oh, sorry. No, that's not the question. Nobody wants to be on the screen
Susie Lober 04:21
because you consent
Stacey Meadwell 04:22
to my touch and I take I'll take that. So how to repurpose there are so many so many, so many different ways to do this. So I'm just going to give a couple of examples. If you think of if you think of your content, as I've heard it referred to as a content pyramid I've heard it referred to as a hero piece of content and that hero piece of content can be any number of things could be an article can be an event could be a you know a podcast, all sorts of different things, but say let's take an event. I wrote a 900 word article from a 10 minute in have you? So if you have organised an event, and you've done a 45 minute panel discussion with three or four panellists, how much content how much? How much work? How many words can you get out of that panel. And it's not just about doing one article, you could probably do a series series of articles. I mean, it's second example is this. It's our it's a B2B Comms Thing live from our 15 minutes, just the first 15 minutes without even going into the second half of this, I normally write a 1300 1400 word article, you just I just transcribe it on AI and produce produce a blog post that then gives me content for the whole of the following week. And this and that's just scratching, that's just scratching the surface. I know, I know, you've suggested that at some point, you know, we turn we strip out the audio for these sessions and tournaments will podcast, what we do is we download the video, we put that on YouTube, that's another audience on YouTube. That's not that's your might not be on LinkedIn. And then we can we embed that video on our website. So there's lots of different things you can do just from one piece from one piece of piece of content. So I could go on because I'm but I don't want to cry. I know that I know that I own Susie will have lots of ideas, lots of ideas, but that's just, you know, a teeny amount of stuff that you can just do with an event as an example.
Ayo Abbas 06:30
I mean, I just following on from that, Stacey, I think even for our it's, It's a B2B Comms Thing. We could, for example, even to take the video and just like chop them into three questions and share those, it's, you know, five minute pieces of quick snackable content. So there is so much you can do. But I'm actually this week, I kind of use this week as my demonstration example. So it's storytelling week, it's National Storytelling Week, I've had a crazy week this week, which is still continuing. And I thought, oh, storytelling really caught my eye going to post this week. And all I did really was update a blog from 2019, which again, like Susie said, means SEO and my website's gonna go up from that I've updated. It's a useful blog, I share that direct direct link to that blog, as opposed on LinkedIn. Then I created a Canva carousel with the key kind of titles and the key bullet points laid out and released that as a story how to do storytelling, well, then I kind of created an infographic of this overall root process of repo repurposing, which again, which I haven't posted yet, but that's like talking through this whole process of what I'm doing. But you know, there's more I could do in terms of standout quotes, I could reference this LinkedIn live. So then from that one kind of blog, which was done in 2019, you can kind of see that actually, there's loads more content and loads more different ways of actually getting value out of it. So I think that's kind of what you need to think about is actually how do I really, I guess, milk this and get more bang for my buck? And I think that's the kind of one thing and actually you think about it, if I'd written a whole new blog from scratch, that would have taken me a lot more time than actually just repurposing what I've already got, which was a good piece anyway, or, like, I like to think that's kind of it. And also, when I think about it, as well, it's stuff like my podcast, I can get transcripts. From there. I can make blog posts, I can create audiograms, I can have quotes, there's loads and loads of stuff that you do. And in terms of a client example, I've got some clients who have done webinars over lockdown, which are highly amazing, really good webinars, amazing content, you're talking like 40 talks, 40, short, kind of five minute 10 minute talks. And actually, what we're looking at now is actually how do we download the audio and create a series that will go out in snackable bites as a podcast. And then what we'll do, again, is actually have quotes and have audiograms and have all of that around it, and have a much more kind of stronger piece of content. That's got a lot more life. So I think there's lots and lots we all can be doing, that's for sure.
Susie Lober 08:50
I think it's important to remember as well that different forms of communication are going to appeal to different audiences. So some people are going to be more visual, some people prefer audio, some people will want to read a longer article. Some people prefer infographics. So there's so many different routes that you can take in repurposing material.
Stacey Meadwell 09:09
Definitely. And that's coming back to the, to the example of this live that we do when I've done my created my LinkedIn content. And the week after that we've done this I've tried different different types of content. You know, I created a carousel with sort of like Q&A, with the Q&A with quotes and other key quotes in answer to in answer to each question. But the one area that I haven't delved into yet is all the comments and the questions that come in from our audience, you know, there's a whole wealth of material there to you know, to work with that we're only just scratching the surface really. And as you know, I am and Susie have both both said, there are so many different channels was to fail, you know, variably, we're on, you know, you're on more than one channel, or if you've got a website, you've got that to keep that filled, you've got your social, you know, your social media channel, you might have more than one social media channel. So a lot of content to create, but actually, you can repurpose a lot of what you've already got. And I think this leads us nicely. You know, I've you've kind of touched upon this already in your example. But let's, let's move on to our third question.
Ayo Abbas 10:28
Focused was actually me talking rather than just making a silly face. Should you reuse old content? I'm gonna go to Susy.
Susie Lober 10:38
Yeah, well, I think the answer is absolutely, yes, yeah, we do need to be reusing old content. But I think an interesting thing to draw in here is that it's not just about material that has been created for marketing. There's lots of different things that you can draw in from across the business from your own day to day work. So whether it's a really carefully crafted statement you've made for a design and access statement, or a CV, or a case study that you've reworked for tender documentation, you can then bring that into your marketing. So it's about really reaching out throughout the business and using what you've already got in in clever ways. But yeah, absolutely, you should be reusing old content. I think sometimes it can be easier than with other things. Yeah, if you've done a webinar, and you've got some long form content of a thought leadership piece, that's a lot easier to then break down into lots of other pieces of content. But if you don't have that material, and you're feeling a bit sort of overcome by that, there's lots of other things that you can do, you know, there's there are quick wins that you can do in terms of repurposing social posts, pinning to pinning them to the top of your feed, changing them into slide decks, it can be more tricky for sort of news posts. So for example, if you've done a planning permission announcement or a site update, so you need to be a little bit careful that you are keeping it relevant. It's not just a case of just retweeting something that you tweeted last year or re sharing an article, you need to be a little bit clever about it, really, really look at it, revisit it and then make it relevant again,
Stacey Meadwell 12:25
that's a very good point. And it comes back it comes back to what I was saying about about, you know, updating and tweaking, tweaking what you've already what you've already done, there is a whole, you know, you will have evergreen content, you will also you know, you may have had, you may have written about a particular topic that then resurfaces in the news, so there's nothing to stop you then dusting that off updating it, maybe tweaking it a bit and, and reusing it. I mean, it comes back to what I said that didn't answer the first question about how many people see your social media feed, how many people will have seen that tweet, how many people will have seen that post? Just because you you wrote just because you used something six months ago, if it's still relevant, still pertinent. There's, there's no shame in actually just reusing that piece of content? If it's a good piece of content, then yes, I would say milk it for whatever it's worth.
Ayo Abbas 13:21
Yes, I guess the only thing I want to add was I also I did a review for an architectural firm, probably about 18 months ago. And it was really interesting that when their content is literally top-notch, beautiful publications, all of that kind of stuff. But actually, in terms of kind of digital marketing, and being digital first, a lot of that content could definitely cuz it was still evergreen, and it could still be used, and it was always gonna be relevant, and it was beautifully written. So you're kind of like, actually, if you start doing digital marketing more and going digital first, you can reuse a lot of that and start using that in a much smaller format. So it doesn't have to be a whole booklet, but actually, you can use them as separate essays or, you know, separate guides. And actually, so I think there's a lot that can be repurposed, if you think in that manner. And I think it's just switching your mindset slightly. I've actually this can be tailored or tinkered for another purpose. And that's kind of what you need to be doing. And yeah, I think that whole thing that you said about articles, and actually, when it's a new story suddenly comes up, you tweak it slightly, use the right hashtags, see it fly again. And I think I think that's the kind of stuff what you do. And that's, I think that's, I guess, being a lot more smart about your marketing, to be honest. And, and yeah, and the resources that you have,
Susie Lober 14:27
I think a great place to start sorry, Stacey, you know, make a list of all the evergreen content that you've got. So that means you know, your case studies and your projects and the stuff that's always going to be relevant. The other great part about using digital marketing is you can also then look at what's performing well. So go back and look at your top-performing posts, your top performing blog posts, your articles, and those two things will give you a great starting point of what to repurpose.
Stacey Meadwell 14:55
Yeah, that's a very it's very important. I wanted to just pick up on something that you said idea seems to be about different people preferring different mediums. And it can be, you know, there are so many different things you can do, it can be really overwhelming. And I think sometimes it's a case of just building up. And you know, take your top of the pyramid bit over your hero piece of content, and maybe do you know, work out sort of the next layer down, and then maybe the next time we put something out, I think, Okay, well, how can we go even bigger on this one? And, you know, one of the things mean, I do it was my LinkedIn posts all the time, sorry, you know, secret out there, I repurpose my LinkedIn, my LinkedIn posts, I keep them all archived. And if I'm short on time, I just I will, I will tweak. But sometimes what I'll do is I'll turn it into a different format. So I've done this with posts, and I've turned it into a short video, I've turned the post in the written post into a carousel. So you can you know, you don't necessarily have to do everything at once. Stop, stop building it and you know, see what see what works and what resonates with your audience, because you'll find that different types of content and different ways of repurposing will work better than better than others. And it's a great way to sort of experiment and see how to how to reach different parts of your audience, you know, through different channels through different mediums.
Ayo Abbas 16:21
Hi, it's Ayo here, and I just wanted to tell you a bit more about the show. the built environment Marketing Show was set up during lockdown one as a way to help firms do better marketing. It was very much about having the conversations that I have with my friends and showing what best practice really is. In terms of me. Well, I'm actually a generalist marketeer. So I guess I know lots of things about marketing and how to put everything together. So I could be talking about you know, PR, or understanding what to do next strategy wise, or figuring out how to get in front of the right audience or what messaging you should be using. Those are all things that I'm kind of really Skilling and understand how to do for my clients. I now work for myself, and I set up my own consultancy at best marketing in 2020. And I'm working with a range of engineering and architectural firms, and even prop tech firms who really want to, I guess, talk the language of their clients and their audiences and do something a bit different in terms of their strategy and content. If what I do sounds of interest to you do email me at Ayo@abbasmarketing.com. And there's a-y-o, or head to my website, which is www.abbasmarketing.com. For more info. There's also a link in the shownotes by
Stacey Meadwell 17:34
Jimmy show where it is said transcribing quote mining is part of my marketing plan in the future, but always hard to find the time and fought unfortunately. Yeah, it is I mean, it's still a time, but coming back. So I think I made the point of actually the time spent repurposing versus the time spent creating the original content. Actually, it's it's a lot less time in going back to the my example of the getting the 900 words from a 10 minute chat. How long would it have taken me to write 900 words from scratch, or even the sort of 1300 words I get from from doing an article on this b2b comms, it's probably about an hour and a half of just editing just to kind of get edited into something interesting at all our rums and ours and all the other bits that we put in when we're talking naturally. That's to how long it would take me to write a 1300 word article from scratch. It's a small amount of time by comparison by comparison. And it's, you know, yes, it is more time, but it's less amount of time, then actually starting over again.
Susie Lober 18:41
And there's also AI that hopefully should be able to help you a little bit with the transcribing of audio. That can save you a bit of time as well.
Ayo Abbas 18:50
Yeah, I think AI is a really interesting one, there's stuff like Meet Edgar. And it kind of takes your posts and your blog posts, and it kind of chunks them up into different social media posts. I've tried it before. I mean, I didn't love it that much, because I'm too much of a control freak. But actually those types of apps are getting better. So some exploring some of those and also on when Susie said about get finding your blog posts and things that work already in your existing content. There's also a tool called Shield, which is kind of gives you much better metrics on your LinkedIn performance. And that's also worth checking out because then you can kind of see what types of posts work over the year, what you know how people are really kind of digesting your information. So you could literally sort like your top 10 posts from the past year and kind of then use those as your main kind of repurposing kind of focus, what formats they were, what people liked, what level they were, and you can kind of really analyse and go down on to that. So I kind of use shield to kind of I probably log in once a month and kind of see how stuff is going and it gives much better analytic analytics than LinkedIn.
Stacey Meadwell 19:50
What was that app you mentioned? I
Ayo Abbas 19:53
just want to like Meet Edgar but there's loads of them and they kind of like AI. They kind of take your posts and kind of repurpose them like chunked them up into other posts, and then you can just tweak them. So it's a quick way of repurposing. I didn't love it that much. So I kind of don't use it anymore, but it is I tried to finish it
Stacey Meadwell 20:09
in terms of the transcript, I use Otter to transcribe, which is, which is great, it's fairly, it's fairly accurate. And it's easy, then because you can just read through and just pull out what pull out the bits that pull up the bits that you want. I mean, and I use that point, you know, for, for not just for social media content, but for all my writing, when I'm interviewing people, I just, I will try and transcribe everything. So I've got a verbatim, and it's just really, really, really handy. And it also gives you a sense of just how much content there is how much content there is, and comment from Caroline. Hi, Caroline. My best post was to hijack a client's construction site, I had a dodgy image, two sentences, three hashtags to tags, and I have had a lot of action and meeting and potential new client, boom,
Susie Lober 21:00
using interviews, I think, techniques, I know that we've got a lot of people listening who perhaps work in content creation and work in Marketing, and often you're dealing with with very busy people who don't really and time is coming up a lot in the comments, you know, that they'd love to repurpose, they'd love to do this, but it's the tightest question of time, and it's just no time to do it. I've definitely found that just grabbing somebody for a 10 minute phone call a 10 minute interview, whether it's one of you know, one of my clients, whether it's just I need an architect to talk to me about a project for 10 minutes, and then I can get loads of content for them created. Or whether I'm conducting a client interview on their behalf a bit of you know, post occupancy or something else, you can get an awful lot out of an interview, which is a lot easier to get content for than it will be having a blank sheet of paper, you know, if you say somebody, tell me about this project that you're working on, can you can you give me 500 words, you get nothing, or you get a lot of procrastination, but if you say to people, can I just have 10 minutes on the phone, that's a really good way of generating content.
Stacey Meadwell 22:08
And if you structure your questions, you've already structured your, you know, structured the piece on how you can how you can spice it up. You know, if you kind of think about what you know, you ask your questions in a particular particular order, which is something that I have done, it's something I did with that 10 minute chart that I turned into a 900 word article, we had, you know, had specific questions in specific order, bang, bang, bang, it was then really, really easy to turn into turn into content, it can be really overwhelming the amount of stuff that you can do, which is why I'd sort of say, you know, segment, start off, have a have a plan and go okay, from this, I'm going to do three things. And then the next time thing, okay, well, can we do four things? Can we do five things and kind of build build from from that, which is kind of what we're doing with these LinkedIn lines, isn't it? Isn't it? If you know, each each one we do we learn things, and we get new ideas for new stuff that we can do. And, you know, this time next year, we'll be you know, producing a month's worth of content. Maybe.
Stacey Meadwell 23:22
Yeah, but, I mean, it's, it's things like, I mean, I know you mentioned, you know, we've touched upon, we've touched upon podcasts, Susie, if you're a fan of podcasts, but certainly I know, I, you and I are a fan of podcasts and audio has their own, you know, has their own podcast, but there is, you know, that is just right, for so much content, because it's a conversation, it's like, it's like a panel that's, you know, that you've had, there's so much material there that you can, and so much kind of multimedia stuff that you can do, you can do as a result
Susie Lober 23:57
is any tips on how to make something relevant, or how to get the context relevant, you know, when you look at an old blog post, maybe about a news item or something that has come up again, for example, you know, one of the things I've done before is crisis communications. And I've written about that and then revisited it. So maybe that's something useful to discuss if you guys got any, only any tips on how to relevant I think
Ayo Abbas 24:23
I do. I did. So I did a blog about haters, too, always getting the communications wrong to the public. And I think obviously, as like different announcements were made about HS2 over the past year, what I would generally do is think, Okay, well, how does this announcement impact what I'm saying in that blog? And then I would go in and just update it in that with that in mind, so I would either mention the announcement or do something like that might update the SEO and then actually then use whatever hashtags are being used around that announcement. And then that's that blog being used again. So I think it's just kind of thinking right, what's the context of what's being announced at the moment is the spol still relevant and what do I need to do to update it? And then just Yeah, and then just thinking, right? How can I reshare this and get more bang for this? Because I think that's kind of what you need to do. But just ask yourself the questions, you know, is it? Is it still relevant? Is it still timely? And what's the announcement? And how does it relate to what I'm posting. And once you've kind of got that in your head, and I think you've got some kind of really good ways of repurposing really,
Susie Lober 25:24
into the latest hashtags is a really good good one, as well
Stacey Meadwell 25:29
as some of these big, big news stories, so just let you know, the guests that keep on giving, you know, these big projects, particularly they ramble, they ramble on for a long, long time. I mean, one of the, one of the ideas I would have is, if is always setting yourself up for repurpose content, say, if you predict it, you know, if you make predictions about something, you know, say there's a white paper coming out and you know, make do write about what you think should be in that white paper or what you think will be in that white, then when that comes up, almost then just repurpose what you've written as you know, as a response to what's actually in it. And you can do that with you know, started the year predictions you get to the end of the year and go Well, what you know, what was I was I was a right, and you're still using an element of that content, you just need to kind of update it with a bit of additional additional information. So it's an easy way of creating new new content with elements of original content. So We're nearly out of out of time. So thank you to Susie for being our guest host and for today. Thank you very, very much. Thank you, everybody. So great to see you. Again. We're not I don't know I'm saying Great to see you because I can't see you but I'm pretending that I can see
Ayo Abbas 26:56
you there Thank you. Bye. Take care. Bye.
Ayo Abbas 27:04
Thanks so much for listening to the Built Environment Marketing Show. Don't forget to check out the shownotes which will have useful links and resources connected to this episode. You can find that on bass marketing.com. And of course if you liked the show, please do share it with others on social as it helps more people to find us. See you soon.
