4 ways to repurpose marketing materials

 

As someone who is charged with getting the word out about your company’s products and services, you probably develop a lot of material each month. Some of it makes it through to the “approved” pile and others don’t see the light of day.

The messages you create that don’t make it through could be in the dark for a variety of reasons: budget constraints, change of venues, additional products or services that need to be marketed first. But that doesn’t always mean that your messaging was bad or that you can’t re-purpose it for another time.

Instead of reinventing the wheel with each marketing task you’re given, think about re-purposing content and ideas. Here are 4 ways to re-purpose your current marketing materials:

Copy

The copy you wrote for your latest advertising campaign might not have been used for your latest billboard or TV ad, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be used somewhere else. If the messaging is good, use it. Copy written for marketing materials can be re-purposed on blog posts, online ads, short 1-minute video clips, Q&A formats, etc. Keep a “copy” folder for items that are still relevant to your company but didn’t make the final cut. Then, grab that folder the next time you need to come up with marketing copy. Check out these 10 additional ways to recycle content.

Presentations

PowerPoint or Prezi presentations can be re-purposed in a variety of ways. The easiest is to keep your latest presentation on hand and just make minor changes to it the next time you’re requested to present on a similar topic. Additional ways you can re-purpose presentations include cutting out pertinent pieces of information to be used for things like:

• Company blog posts
• How-to videos
• White board tutorials
• eBooks or white papers
• Sell sheets
• Service brochures

Design

Much like you would re-purpose furniture or home decor, the design files you create for your company along the way can be re-purposed as needed. Maybe your boss didn’t quite go for the new layout of the services brochure you worked hard on, but it could fit quite nicely as the layout for the company newsletter. The point is, don’t trash your design files just because they didn’t work the first time. Sometimes opening those files are just what us marketers need to spark our creative juices for the next go-round.

The same can be said for print versus online marketing materials. Rather than recreate advertisements for small-scale print, large-scale print and the Web, think about ways that you can re-purpose designs you’ve already created for other mediums and scale them down to fit the new intended purpose.

Video

Video is a great way to capture emotion and engage on a personal level with your audience; and you don’t necessarily need a large production budget to utilize this tool. Take video footage of things that you’re already doing: hosting client happy hours, sitting in on your CEO’s state of the business presentation, etc., and use the clips in a “get to know us” video promo. Video is also a great way to reiterate content you already have in print or blog form.

For example: Do you have industry-specific blog posts that talk about upcoming trends? Take those same posts and break them in to 1 or 2-minute video segments to post alongside your blog or on the homepage of your website. Short videos like these are also great to share on social media. For additional video marketing tips, check out this post by Business 2 Community.

We all wear many hats when it comes to marketing. Just remember: Before diving deep into a fresh new project, take a minute to think about the marketing materials you’ve created in the past and how they might help with your messaging in the future. More times than not, a good portion of the work has already been done; it’s just a matter of re-purposing it for the right channels and audience.