The Ultimate Content Repurposing Hack

Andréa Jones (00:00):
Sustainability is a trend I can get behind. And today we're going to dive into sustainable content marketing strategies, using content repurposing. I want to help you reduce, reuse, recycle, and get the maximum amount of content out of your message because thrift shopping is kind of fun and I want us to thrift shop and upcycle our social media content so we're not producing new content all day every day. You feel me? Let's get into this episode.

Intro (00:42):
Welcome to The Savvy Social Podcast, the show that blends stories and strategies to help businesses create engaged and profitable online communities using the unique power of social media. And now your host, Andréa Jones.

Andréa Jones (00:59):
By the way, today's episode is a follow-up from my platform agnostic episode. Y'all loved that one where I talked about how I am platform agnostic. I don't put my loyalty on any social media platform or any marketing platform. In fact, I like to use them all and cycle through how I use them. So today I'm going to talk about how I do that in a way that's sustainable, in a way that I actually can manage as a single person being the face of all of the marketing. Before we get into that though, I got to tell y'all a little b t ss moment because I just recently switched to Riverside and I'm loving it. The studio, first of all, is beautiful and I have recorded in the studio before as a guest, but I've never used it for myself. I went with the most cost-effective option, which isn't always the best option.

(01:53):
Riverside is actually not that much more, and it has so many more features. We are playing around with their text-based editing, which just makes my team's job 10,000 times easier. And they have this feature called Magic Clips, which helps with social media clips. So y'all may see some Riverside clips popping in your feed soon, but today I'm excited to share because our listeners are in for retreat. If you go to Riverside fm, they gave me a code to give y'all. It's DREA, d r e a, and when you use that code, you get 15% off any individual plan at Riverside. So you can actually start for free. Go to the link in the show notes, Riverside fm. It's like my tracking link and use the code Drea, D r e a, when you're ready. Yes, I'm affiliated with them in this code, but I'm not being paid to say this.

(02:41):
So y'all go check it out, tell me what you think and let me know if you like the final product. Alright, let's dive into today's episode. Oh, upcycling our content. Thrifting being sustainable. So for a little bit of background, I am a budget fashion girly when it comes to purchasing fashion, skincare, whatever kind of products, beauty products. I am the kind of person who likes to use something that is pocket friendly. I don't usually go for the most expensive options, not a name brand person. I don't own any, I think name brand items. And if I do, it's a waste of money because probably break it or something. And I've always been this way shopping with my mom growing up. That's kind of what she passed on to me. And then I used to run a budget fashion blog. This is actually one of my first adventures into making money online.

(03:43):
So I started blogging in 2004 for funsies. A lot of just my little thoughts and lots of conversation about Harry Potter. I was a huge fan, but the first time I actually made money through content online was through fashion blogging. Simply Fashion TV was my blog. My sister and I started it, but she didn't want to commit to it. So there's two videos with both of us in it and the rest is me. So it was part YouTube channel part blog, and I actually got brand deals. So I work with Steve Madden, some of y'all have heard the Steve Madden story. If not, there's a TikTok video on it. It was fun, but crash and Burn moment, I got paid to work with a Macy's, Goodwill Giant Tiger, which is a company here in Canada, kind of like Kmart. So I'm very Walmart chic, Walgreens chic.

(04:39):
I distinctly remember a moment where I was wearing this sundress that I got from Walgreens and a lady saw me in the mall and was like, oh, that's so cute. Where'd you get it? I said, Walgreens, it was girl, it was only $10, whatever. And the look, she gave me pure disgust. I was like, oh, you're not my people. Anyways, I say all that to say I'm a huge fan of going with things that are sustainable in the sense that they can work for me. Not everyone thinks Walmart, she gets sustainable. There's a lot of issues with child labor and how they produce their products and how the prices are so cheap. I'm not going to get into all of that. That's what my pocketbook can afford right now. So that's what I do. Okay, so that's the kind of vibe I'm bringing to this episode.

(05:29):
There are a lot of people who do not agree with what I'm about to say. There are a lot of people, content marketers, marketers specifically, who think that there is the one true way of using social media and their time budget is not my time budget. So they're working with teams of people, they're working with big brands. Sure, you can create custom content pieces every single day for TikTok three to five times a day. Some of them say yes, okay, that's nice and great and all, but my budget is not your budget. My pocketbook looks different from your pocketbook. So today I'm going to talk about how I approach this and give you levels to it based on where you are in your business. So if you are an individual, doing this looks totally different. If you have an assistant, looks totally different than if you hire a team.

(06:21):
The goal with this kind of content marketing strategy is to have the TV commercial effect, the TV commercial jingle effect, right? I'm saying tv and I feel like that's also dating me because my daughter is not going to know commercials like that. Hers are going to be YouTube commercials. We watch a lot of YouTube in this house and yeah, we skip after five seconds, whatever we can. Totally different world. Anyways, that's beside the point. There are jingles that we know, radio jingles, TV jingles, commercial jingles. We can kind of sing them in our heads because we know them. There's a lawyer in Buffalo because we get the Buffalo station here and I could sing his telephone number, why I heard on the radio a million times. So we want that effect with our brand. We want people to associate our message, the core of our message with what we do.

(07:17):
And to do that, there's a level of repetition that's needed, but we don't want to be so repetitive that people start to tune us out. We want to still be memorable. There is an elegance to all of this. I posted this on Threads last week and y'all, I'm loving threads, but I posted that reposting is not repurposing. So I'm not talking about copying and pasting things the same thing to all platforms or even taking the same post that you posted last year and reposting it today. Okay, there's a time and a place for that, but honestly y'all, it's not working. It used to, okay, this strategy used to be what I teach, but I changed with the times and I changed with the times because that strategy is no longer working, just taking a post. And same thing, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, formerly known as Twitter.

(08:13):
I always laugh when I say that anyways, it's not working. There's a little bit of finessing that goes with this. And yeah, I want to show you today how to do that without literally bending over backwards and spending all of your time on social media. So the first thing that I do with my brand, with my client's brand, what I tell my students to do is to start with research. Some of this research is internal, some of it's external. So I want to start with the internal research of where do you want to spend your time, especially if you're doing this yourself. If I tell you you got to be on LinkedIn, it's amazing. And then you log in and you go, this is not for me, then I can't tell you to go spend all your time on LinkedIn because you won't like it there, then you won't spend time there.

(08:59):
Okay? So we do need to have a primary vertical where we spend our time, a primary platform, and I'm using LinkedIn as an example because this is a social media podcast. But honestly, this strategies for all marketing, all marketing. How do you want to spend your time and how do you want to deliver that? One of the lessons in our framework training inside of the Savvy Social School is about your way of delivering your content. My personal preference is through speaking particularly through video. I am a video girl. I like video content. If you ask me to write a blog post, it will take me five times longer to write a blog post than it will take me to record a video. That's just my preference. So if I decide to go all in on writing and blogging and these deep insightful carousel posts, it's going to take me a million times longer.

(09:54):
That may not be the case for you. Maybe you're a writer and if I say do video, you're like, oh my gosh, video, I can't do that. Figure out that method of communication that works the best for you. So now we have where we want to show up, we have how we want to show up. Those are the internal research things that we want to figure out. Then there are external research. Where's your audience spending time? We want to find the overlap between where we want to spend time and where our audience is actually spending time. So an example is one of our past clients really likes Pinterest and was spending a lot of time there when we dug into the data though, as much time as they love spending on Pinterest and as much traffic that was going over to their website from Pinterest, that traffic was not converting, it was bouncing.

(10:39):
And so while the numbers on the surface looked great, all these impressions, all this website traffic, we actually saw way more conversions at a higher cost, like client lifetime value from Instagram. And so we took the Pinterest effect over to Instagram and she's having a lot of fun there. So think about where your audience is also spending time as well. And so we want to do this research because we want to figure out where we're spending our time at least 80% of our time so that we can kind of funnel our energy into that platform and then we can take content repurposing this upcycling somewhere else. Okay, the next step to this is finding your cornerstone content. And again, this is kind of outside of social, but it impacts social media and it's what I do, and I may be talking a lot more about this in the future, but social media is kind of like the side dish to my marketing strategy.

(11:33):
We've been talking a lot about this internally in my company as well. Social media is great and it is what we build our business on. But so, so much of what we do relies on other marketing things. And my cornerstone marketing element is this podcast. When I create this podcast, I'm thinking about social media content. When I create this podcast, I'm thinking about email content. When I create this podcast, I'm thinking about YouTube content. So yes, the podcast is my cornerstone content, but I'm thinking about how I'm repurposing clips into social media content. I'm thinking about how I'm taking some of this copy, the stories that I'm telling and turning it into email content. I'm thinking about how I'm going to create this as also a video on YouTube. And so when I record the podcast, I think about it with that in mind. I intentionally speak a certain way on this podcast so that it can be turned into social clips.

(12:37):
And this took a lot of practice, y'all. I'm an interrupter and I interrupt myself. So if you're like me and you interrupt yourself when you're recording audio video content, you got to start thinking about the end goal. This podcast is going to be turned into clips for social media. So girl, you cannot interrupt yourself. Otherwise, the clip on social media won't make any sense. And yes, it took a lot of practice to do this. I actually had to listen back to my own self on my episodes to figure this out, which I'm not a fan of. I don't like listening to myself, but sometimes you got to do what you got to do, and this can work in so many beautiful ways. My client, Linda, for instance, Linda Taliaferro, she is an executive coach for black and brown women in corporate America, records a live stream. So she goes live regularly on YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook. And then my team turns that into social media, content, newsletter content, blog content, her new LinkedIn newsletter content, all of the things all Linda has to do is show up for that live stream and then it's repurposed to all of the places.

(13:57):
We also did this for one of my past clients, Kara Loewentheil, worked with her for three years and she touched probably 2% of her Instagram feed. The rest was me and my team three years where she showed up in her podcast audio only podcast. She's not really a video person. My team turned that into carousel posts, other Instagram reels, static one image posts, Instagram stories, use it to promote her offers through storytelling. There's so many ways that you can leverage this cornerstone content, but you got to think about the cornerstone content from the place of this is going to be repurposed later. This is going to be repurposed later. I'm going to talk about how to do that, but I want you to think more about what's your primary content piece. Now, for those of you who are individuals, solos, my wear, all the hats, business owners, I see you, I hear you.

(14:58):
This is still possible. Even if you don't have a primary content outlet, like a newsletter or a podcast or a YouTube video, you can create your social media content with this in mind. I have a student in the Savvy social School who loves creating reels and has a strategy where she creates her reel and then the reels that do well, or maybe even they don't do well, she'll then take that same content and turn it to a carousel post. So the topic for the week is the same one reel, one carousel post. It's the same content in two different ways. This helps maximize her reach, it solidifies her message. We all know not everyone sees every single post we post anyways. And then she can take those or repurpose them to other platforms. The reels become toss, the carousel post becomes the carousel post on LinkedIn, which is more like a P D F.

(15:50):
You can take that same content and reshare other places. With that repurposing in mind, we got to start from your preference and your cornerstone content. All right? We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I'm going to talk more about how to incorporate trending content, how to save all of this and more when we get back.

(16:11):
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(16:51):
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(18:22):
All right, let's talk about topical content or trending content. I've been using the word topical more though because it's not always something that is trending. Trending has a context of it being like a viral dance or something like that. Sometimes it's just topical. And when I'm approaching creating content strategies for my clients and for myself, my goal is to have about 80 to 90% of it being that cornerstone content, which is my message, my philosophies, my theories. And then the other 10 to 20% is topical. And the reason we want to do this is we want to speak the language of our people. What are they thinking and feeling right now? What are they going through right now? What else are they seeing in the feed? The content in the feed and their experience, yours should kind of assimilate with that content to some extent.

(19:16):
It shouldn't feel so far removed that they go, oh, this is an ad. And we all know what we do with ads. We skip them, right? We skip them. So we want our content to feel like it's organically created for social. We want our content to feel like it fits with the flow of the feed. We want our content to be relevant to what's going on in our client's lives, and we want to read the room basically what's going on in the world around us. And the essence of your message can stay the same. Okay? I'm not asking you to become a trending dancing girly, we don't need that from you unless you want to be you. What I'm asking for you to do is to respond to things that are happening in the world around you. And I recently created an Instagram reel about this because I'm seeing a lot of people post content that feels like they filmed it two years ago, or they're writing content that feels batched and it doesn't quite fit what's happening in the world around.

(20:17):
And so I'm not saying you can't batch, I'm a batcher. I like to batch. But before you post, read the room and figure out if this batch content fits with what's happening in the world around you, or create some content that actually does fit with what the topics that are happening in the trends that you're seeing. And total side note, we do this in the Savvy Social School through trend savvy y'all who are in the school, or if you've purchased Trends Savvy separately, we help you with this. We give you the topical content that you can respond to. So one example of this is my client, Linda. I like using her as an example because her business is just beautiful. Linda Taliaferro, y'all. Okay, so this video came out September 12th, y'all. So recently, it has 72,200 views, 72,000 views. The topic of the video is really about gaslighting in the workplace.

(21:12):
And this is not new. Linda's been talking about this for years, and it's all about how to navigate yourself. But how she brought this topic up was through Coco Gauff, a tennis player, very young tennis player who actually became the youngest American woman to win the US Open since Serena Williams recently this year. But Coco had a video that went viral because Coco called out a ref. That ref was not calling things appropriately. Coco went up to the ref and said, excuse me, you are not calling this appropriately. And even the announcer in the video was like, she's not wrong, but the ref was not having it. And so Linda said, Coco, thank you for standing up for yourself. This ref was basically gaslighting you trying to tell you things that weren't happening that were right. And this is Coco's workplace on the tennis court.

(22:03):
And so Linda made the connection between Coco standing up for her and her workplace on the tennis court using something topical and relating it to how black and brown women should stand up for themselves in the workplace. Because statistically, this group of people gets gaslit the most. So you can see how Linda turned topical content, cocoa being gaslit, and even subsequently going on to win the US Open. So Linda turned cocoa being gaslit into an example of what this looks like in the wild. Y'all see this happening and then don't let it happen to you. Here's how in the video. And then it got 72,000 views because it was topical. And Linda's not dancing in the video. She's not lip syncing, she's not being funny. This is a serious conversation, and it still had a lot of momentum for her brand. So when I say infuse topical content, that's what I mean.

(23:00):
Okay. Okay, next step. The best step is building out a digital brain. Now, this is probably going to be its whole own podcast because digital brains are a beautiful thing, and it's something that we officially started doing for our clients about a year ago, and now we're teaching it to our students, and it literally saves hours in content repurposing. So what is a digital brain? It is basically the ultimate repurposing tool. It's a digital database of your framework, your approach, your analogies, your thoughts so that you can repurpose things again and again in a more eloquent way. I like to use an Airtable base for mine. You can use a spreadsheet, you can use a doc, but this is your approach to doing things. And the key to the digital brain is saving your commercial jingle. And you know how I talk a lot about that commercial jingle effect?

(23:56):
It doesn't just come from remembering, oh, maybe I've said this before. You kind of have to cement it. You have to cement it in yourself first, and then it's easier to share again and again. And so as you start saving your analogies, so one of my analogies, for instance, is social media is a lot like dating. Boom, in my digital brain. So when I'm talking about social media, I'm talking about how it's like dating. You don't just put out an outfit, pretty outfit and show up and be like, I'm here like me. And I feel like that's what we do with our content. Sometimes we got to connect, have that connection with other people. It's not just about how we look on the outside, it's about how we help people feel, how they feel when they interact with us. That's like dating. So when I'm talking about social media, social media is like dating.

(24:41):
I'm going back to that analogy again and again and again as an illustrative point. And I may use different examples. I have a little joke about how some of us are in our house waiting for the mailman, come knock on the door, and we hope that that's the one. And then we're disappointed that that's not the one because it's the only person that we're seeing. And instead, we need to go out and be with the people. And social media is the same way. You can't just sit back, wait for people to come to you, you got to go to them. So I have all of those saved in the digital brain. If you are a solo entrepreneur, you're doing this yourself. This may be just some jotted down notes about how you approach the stories, analogies, and framework that you use to tell your story.

(25:24):
As your business grows, you can easily get an assistant to help you with this. They're watching your videos, they're listening to your podcast interviews. They're in on client calls, and they're jotting these things down for you. So when it comes time to create content, you use the digital brain first to create that content, and now you're repurposing things that you've already said. And then as you grow, you get a team to help you. And this is what my team does with our clients. We show up on social media as our clients. We are them, they are us. We are them on social media. And our goal is to make it look like they're the ones posting. And I think my brand is a great example of this. I film the videos, yes, but my team sends me the video ideas. Sometimes they write out whole ass scripts for me.

(26:12):
I said it somewhere in a podcast probably, but I'm not writing that caption. I told you writing takes me forever. I'm not writing the caption. I write my newsletters every week. My team writes every other email, and it sounds like it's coming from me because they use the digital brain, and that's the exact strategy we apply to our clients. A lot of our clients are coaches, thought leaders, experts. They have a unique perspective on the world. They're very unapologetic about the way that they approach their work, but they just don't have the capacity to be able to do all of that, right? So they hire us and we do it for them. So your digital brain is your hub, your digital hub. And no matter where you are in your business, whether you're working by yourself, solo show, independent business owner, or you're starting to build out your team, this digital brain becomes such an amazing resource for scaling up your content repurposing.

(27:12):
So with that, now it is time to repurpose, repurpose Away. You have your cornerstone content, then you're taking that content over to social, then you're tweaking it to all the other platforms, right? We're not just copy pasting to every platform. We're being elegant about it. So yes, you can take a TikTok and post it as a reel and as a YouTube show, and even on LinkedIn, but you wouldn't really take Instagram carousel post and just post it over to Facebook. It doesn't look good. So you're going to take that concept, the content, the core idea behind that post and tweak it for a platform like Facebook or tweak it for a platform like LinkedIn. You can just straight up repost some areas that I'm seeing this work really well is something that can go on X, formerly known as Twitter, can go straight over to threads.

(27:58):
But that same content posted as say an Instagram story, doesn't necessarily have the same energy or have the same vibe. So we're going to test it out. What works for one platform may not work for another, but we definitely want to get life out of our concepts. So maybe you say it in an Instagram reel and then you write it as a carousel post, or maybe you film it as a video, transcribe it, turn it into an email newsletter. Or maybe you're like, Linda, you live stream and have your team repurpose it or like Cara you podcast and have your team repurpose it. Or maybe you take your written content and then you turn that into a B-roll video on Instagram reels or on TikTok. All of these examples are excellent ways to repurpose your content and use that digital brain as the foundation of how to repurpose those.

(28:48):
And y'all, this goes way beyond just social media content or even content marketing. I'm talking about we use our digital brain for sales pages, for website copy. We use it when responding to clients. We use our digital brain. So this is such an important resource for you. And as I said at the top of this episode, it's not the way that everyone wants to do it. Okay? I'm a budget fashion girly, Walmart chic. Not everyone, Walmart chic. Not everyone wants this sort of strategy. So if this is not for you, you can move on along. But if it is for you, I hope we had a ton of value out of this episode. And before I go, just quick reminder, we use Riverside FM to produce this. If you want 15% off, go to the link in the show notes and use DREA, D r e a at checkout, get you a little 15% off. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye for now.