Turn Your Old Content Into Gold Content with Michelle Mazur [Rebel Uprising Podcast]

Intro (00:11):
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 (00:29):
One of my favorite topics is content repurposing. Why work hard all the time when you can work hard once and let that hard work go for you? This week I'm bringing an interview that I did on my friend Dr. Michelle Mazur's podcast, formerly called The Rebel Uprising Podcast now called Make Marketing Suck Less. In this episode, I chat with Michelle about how to get into the weeds of content repurposing, how to dive into the analytics, how to find that gold that's in your content, and what inspired me to really dive deep into content repurposing, which is being pregnant, which is funny because I'm pregnant again and I'm going to be doing this whole rodeo all over again. So I'm excited to geek out with you and Michelle in this episode. Let's dive in.

Michelle Mazur (01:26):
Andréa, welcome to the podcast. I'm so excited that you're here with us today.

Andréa Jones (01:32):
Yay. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Michelle Mazur (01:36):
Yes. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because in the Expert Up Club, we were having a conversation about repurposing, and you and I have something in common. We've been in business for quite some time. We have created a massive body of work, and there's some gems in there, but I'm finding it really hard to dig out those gems, resurface them, repurpose, reuse them. So I wanted to dive into this topic because I know we're not alone. If you've been in business for probably more than two years, you have a crap ton of content. So the first question I wanted to ask you is when you are looking to repurpose content, how do you choose what to repurpose when you're practically drowning in your body of work?

Andréa Jones (02:31):
Yes. So this whole conversation started for me when I was pregnant fairly immediately my energy dropped. So if I'm going at a hundred percent every day, I was operating at like 30%. I was like, oh, we have to change something very quickly. So that's when I started leaning in on repurposing. And so that's the big question. How do we know what to repurpose? And I think that especially as social media evolves, marketing evolves in general. It's not as easy as it used to be. We used to just take the same square graphic with a caption and post the same thing to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram,

Michelle Mazur (03:18):
Yes!

Andréa Jones (03:19):
We can't really do that as much anymore. So the repurposing conversation for me starts with the core concepts, the themes that happen in the conversations in your business. And so taking a deep dive into what are the themes that I talk about very often, and I use Airtable for this. Some of my clients use notion for this. You can use a spreadsheet, you can use a Google Doc. But just starting to list out the themes that I think represent what I work on, social media, mindfulness, content repurposing thing, values-based business. So those are the things that I like to associate myself with. And then I actually would go through my content and try to pull out micro pieces of ways that I would say this. I started doing it myself. And then full transparency, my team does it for me now. So I would listen back to my podcast on two x, sometimes 2.5 x speed to hear my little chipmunk voice and look for not just the things that I was saying, but how I was describing it. Analogies, stories, things that I think are a little bit different from what people say, and especially the bits that are relatable. So for example, one of the things that I said years ago was about taking your phone to the bathroom with you.

Michelle Mazur (04:55):
Oh my gosh, that is so relatable.

Andréa Jones (04:58):
We all do it, but we weren't doing that 10 years ago or 15 years ago. It's a new thing, right?

Michelle Mazur (05:04):
Yes, it is. It is.

Andréa Jones (05:05):
So now I bring that up a lot and it's in my digital database of this is something relatable that we all relate to and I reference to it again. So that's kind of where this whole process started. And when it comes to choosing what to pick, it's a mix of intuition and really knowing who you're talking to. So intuition on what I think will really illustrate my expertise the best, and then knowing how to translate that to language that my audience connects with.

Michelle Mazur (05:37):
Yeah, okay. How did you figure out the language that your audience connects with? Because I think that is also a big stumbling block for a lot of business owners.

Andréa Jones (05:49):
The thing is too, I tend to geek out about the data a little bit, a lot bit. But I started with my top performing podcast episodes. So podcasting is my main thing. We have over 250 episodes. It's what I spend the most time on. So I looked at the top episodes from the past couple of years and noticed where the trends were. And so I started with those concepts because as much as I love talking about the data, my data episodes just don't perform that well. I did one a couple months ago about engagement rates and I loved it, and people were just like, okay, so we're not going to pull a lot from that episode, but we may pull a lot from the episodes that really resonate with people.

Michelle Mazur (06:38):
Yeah, I think that's really funny. I am also a research data person, and I know that if I'm like, you need to do voice of customer research, people be like, I am not listening to this episode.

Andréa Jones (06:54):
It's so funny how that happens. I mean, we have to look at it, but someone described it to me as feeling like they're doing a weigh-in on some wacky diet plan where they felt like they had to step on the scale every week to see how much weight they lost. So that's how it felt then was like, oh, okay, I relate to this and I don't want to be the person who says step on the scale every week. So I have been trying to find ways to illustrate that a little bit more, make it a little bit of a lighter lift. But I love it so much that I'm like, how do you not want to dig into your Instagram reel analytics and see how long someone watched an Instagram reel, what

Michelle Mazur (07:37):
You're like, you're going to learn so much. It's so cool. And I think a lot of people are like, oh yeah, I'm going to learn how much I suck at this versus, oh no, I can figure out what's working. Double down on it. So alright, so you've resurfaced what to repurpose. So what are your next steps as you and your team start repurposing your content? What is the process that you go through?

Andréa Jones (08:06):
Yes, so I use this on social media, but first in other areas in my marketing, which I think is key because a lot of repurposing talks about reposting to social, but social is the last step for me a lot of times. So right now we're doing a lot of this with our email marketing. So I like to write storytelling based, almost like marketing mindset style newsletters every week. And so looking back at the top performing ones and during pregnancy, and when I first had my baby, I was just straight up these perform well in five years ago, we're going to share 'em again. Now we're just going to update, swap out IGTV for TikTok and we're going to go

(08:52):
Readjusting it to fit the present day. But then we started getting more elegant in pairing ideas. And I think this is where having the database is helpful because in my Airtable base, I call it the digital brain, I can go back to an analogy I use social media is dating, but I want to make a new reference to today. And so I may take social medias like dating and then pair it with a new concept. I don't know, polygamy we don't want, polygamy is not for everybody. So we're going to be focused on one social media network instead of dating them all. So it's some people, it's great for them. For others it may not fit for your lifestyle. So taking an older analogy and concept and then pairing it with maybe something new that I said. And that comes from reviewing my digital brain. So I'll literally just comb through and look and repurpose that to the newsletter. And then they also become social media posts. So if something really resonates with my email list, then I'll turn it into social media content. And so it really starts with the larger podcast down into the email newsletter and then it goes into social media content.

Michelle Mazur (10:07):
Yeah, it's funny. That's exactly what I teach inside of the club. I call it the content waterfall. It's like what is your overarching theme for what you're creating? And then what are the supporting pieces, which are your blog posts, your podcast, and then you take it and get your newsletter from that. And then it trickles down to social media if you want to be on social media.

Andréa Jones (10:29):
Right? And I think, so this is the other thing about this is we've been able to produce more content with less effort. And people keep saying, Andréa, it seems like you're everywhere. And I'm like, not. I promise you. It's like a lot of repurposing, even taking simple things like a social media post that worked well in the past and recording it as a TikTok or an Instagram reel, or taking a carousel post and turning that into just one static image instead of 10 slides. So we're saying a lot of the same things and we reuse a lot of content. We just kind of reformat it as we reuse it.

Michelle Mazur (11:12):
Alright, so I already hear kind of an objection in my head that I know people are going to have, but what if somebody knows that I've said this before?

Andréa Jones (11:21):
Yes. Is, and I forget the psychological term for it. Something about feeling like a spotlight is on you. Yeah, the

Michelle Mazur (11:29):
Spotlight effect. Yes. Yes.

Andréa Jones (11:34):
Because we see our stuff all the time really value it. And so when people say that, I ask them to think of one social media post they saw last week.

Michelle Mazur (11:43):
It's so rare.

Andréa Jones (11:44):
It's so rare to remember one, we kind of remember the concept maybe or how we felt, but we don't remember it word for word. And we consume a lot of social media content. Remember poop scrolling. We're all doing this. So it's reinforcement in a way that's very similar to a commercial jingle. The first two or three times we hear it, we don't really remember it, and then suddenly we're like humming it in our heads. It's not because of one time of seeing it. And so when we repeat ourselves in our marketing, it actually reinforces our values, our concepts, our philosophies in a way that's very manageable to us as a person putting ourselves out there in the world.

Michelle Mazur (12:29):
Yes, I agree. One of my best performing social media posts is something like, I can't remember what I ate for dinner three nights ago. Why am I going to remember what you posted on social media two weeks ago?

Andréa Jones (12:41):
Yes, exactly.

Michelle Mazur (12:43):
And people are like, oh, because I feel like especially in the online space, there's like create content, create content, create content, and you're on this hamster wheel, but you've created some good shit that needs to come back to the surface. But I think we're afraid like, oh, well, people are thinking, I'm not working so hard. It's such a weird mindset. 

Andréa Jones (13:11):
It is. And if we look at big brands, they're doing this too. I challenge you when pumpkin spice Latte comes around, it's the same stuff. They maybe change the colors a little bit, some of the language, but it's the same content every year for pumpkin spice lattes and Starbucks. And now other companies do the same thing. It's not like Starbucks has a monopoly on pumpkin spice lattes, but it's kind of like a thing that happens every year around the fall. And they reuse the same content and they post the same content to across all of their channels in their email marketing on their website. So if a major company with teams and teams of people are doing this, I promise you have permission to do this too.

Michelle Mazur (13:55):
And especially they know it works. It's been optimized. They have tested it, they know what works. They know that they can change things. It's the same with their Christmas promotion. We all know we're going to get a new kind of red cup and they're going to have some new drinks, but they're just repurposing all of that. And I think I have a background in corporate, I'm like, look at how these big companies are marketing and do that not to the scale, but some of their principles really work for no matter what size business you have.

Andréa Jones (14:32):
Exactly. And I think that's part of the permission that I'm hoping that I can give experts and business owners is we hold ourselves to high standards and we want to be creative and have creative outlets and produce custom content, but there's only so much we can give. And so I'm not saying everything has to be repurposed, but if we can start thinking about our content in a way that we're going to repurpose it one day, we may actually make different decisions about how we create that content too. So for instance, my podcast, I record audio and video and it goes on YouTube, and I tend to interrupt myself a lot when I talk. So pulling a clip from the podcast was becoming challenging for my team. And so we sat down and talked about what clips they were choosing, and they told me, Andréa, you keep interrupting yourself. So we are having trouble picking out a clip. So now when I record podcasts or if I'm on podcasts, I try to be very mindful about choosing my words in such a way that this can be repurposed later. Let's finish the story, Andréa. Don't interrupt yourself. And that has really helped, starting from the very beginning of my creative process and going, this is going to become other forms of content one day has really helped me create a better creative process right at the beginning.

Michelle Mazur (16:01):
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Alright, so we are going to get nerdy and talk about data. So how are you tracking what works when it comes to your marketing?

Andréa Jones (16:12):
Yes. So I again, use Airtable. I'm an Airtable like fan girl, and I input certain data points, followers is kind of top of the line. If this number is growing, it's very lightly. I'm headed in the right direction. I look at engagement, not the number, but the engagement rate. So out of all of my followers, what percentage of them are engaging with my content? That's more important to me than engagement as a number by itself. And then I look at intent or intent to take an action. So if we're on Instagram, for instance, how many people actually went to the profile? How many people actually click the link in the bio, kind of what I want? So I track those numbers on a larger scale, and I looked at them month over month to make sure I'm headed in the right direction for repurpose content. Specifically, I look at my top performing content pieces. So every single month I do keep track of three to five posts that did really well. This is so that I can just straight up repost them again next year.

(17:24):
Now I will say this engagement rates have gone down. Just overall, this is where I'm geeking out on my podcast. So even though I'm straight up reposting something that worked well last year to this year, overall percentage of my audience that is engaging has gone down across the board. So that specific post has actually gone down as well. So let's say last year it got 70 likes. This year it got 60 likes. So the engagement has gone down a little bit. But if I start really digging into it, it's 60 completely different people. So to me, it's a win because I'm reaching new people with this content piece that I already created. The kind of friend to this, the partner to this strategy is also creating new content as well. So by repurposing my content, I'm able to then make space test new theories, test new content as well, because I don't have time to create new content every single day. So the time that I save by repurposing, I then test new strategies and new content pieces. And so then the following year, hopefully I'll have newer, fresher content to then repurpose again.

Michelle Mazur (18:38):
Interesting. All right. I want to follow up on engagement rates. I find this interesting. So what is happening? Why are they going down? I think this is good to know because if you're doing a social media experiment and it doesn't seem to be working, it might not be you.

Andréa Jones (18:57):
Yeah. Yeah. It's very much like when the economy goes down. It's not just your business that's seeing less business, business seeing less business. What's happening on social media right now? A few theories that are happening is the post pandemic thing where we spent so much time on the internet during the pandemic that we crave other outlets at the moment. So there's just not as much logging in. There is way more content than there ever has been. So the feeds are very crowded and it's highly competitive space, and people are changing platforms. So the only platform where engagement increased was TikTok. TikTok saw 5% increase across the board from 2021 to 2022. Every other platform saw decreases in engagement. So people are going to other platforms. And I think there are other things that aren't even considered in this. Platforms. Like a Substack to me feels like a social network, even though it's long form content, it's very social, but it's not often included in these reports on social networks. So I have no idea if people left Facebook and Instagram to go to substack. I don't have that data, but one of my theories is that they're going into smaller containers to be in community with people.

Michelle Mazur (20:18):
That makes sense. Well, even from a psychological view, we're all seeking a place to belong. And sometimes when you go on Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever you feel somehow othered. So finding the smaller communities on substack or paid communities that fit your identity, I feel like that's where people to go. They want to just be with their, I'm thinking of the Cheers theme. Sometimes you just want to go where everybody knows your name. Yes,

Andréa Jones (20:58):
You've nailed it. I feel like that's what I feel in the expert up club because I don't fit in a lot of marketing spaces because of the way that my philosophies about marketing are different from other marketers. So I don't fit in that room and then I don't fit in the room with traditional business owners because I'm in the online space. And so I do sometimes feel like in social media there's this expectation as a marketer that I'm going to show up in a certain way and I just don't, don't have the time to live and breathe Instagram all day.

Michelle Mazur (21:34):
Oh my gosh, yes.

Andréa Jones (21:36):
I don't fit in a lot of these places. And so I definitely see that shifting in the future of people finding their intentional group and they're spending a lot of time there instead of trying to be mass marketed to literally everybody out the world.

Michelle Mazur (21:51):
Exactly. Exactly. Alright, so I have one final question for you. What's one thing you're doing to make marketing suck less?

Andréa Jones (22:01):
Oh, having fun. So this is where content repurposing has opened up space for me is I am just playing on social media a little bit more. Instead of everything being so structured and it's having some really good emotional benefits, we'll see what the reports say at the end of the day. But emotionally, I feel like I'm having more fun connecting when I can show up with a little bit more of a human side instead of a marketer and a business owner that I'm trying to make money. So this sometimes means just sharing my thoughts, asking questions, participating in a little bit of a different way, and it makes marketing suck less because then it doesn't feel like I'm just looking at all of my followers as dollar signs.

Michelle Mazur (22:49):
Yeah, it's interesting because threads has been really good for that. For me, I just kind of go and post if I want to post a picture of my cat, I posts a picture of my cat. If I have something snarky to say, I'm just snarky. I told someone I'm choosing the chaos strategy when it comes to marketing. I feel like it's, marketing can be such a heavy lift, especially when you're juggling client delivery and sales. It's a lot. And if we can have just a tiny bit more fun with it and just be who we are and say the things that we want to say, it definitely makes marketing suck less for me too.

Andréa Jones (23:29):
Yeah. I feel like though you're very unapologetic about your approach anyways, which I admire. And so I feel like that's why I'm attracted to people like you and Maggie Patterson. You both just say what's on your mind. And always I feel like I filter a little bit. And so absolutely. On threads, I'm like, can we say the fuck word here? Can I play a little bit? I don't usually do this, but let me let loose a little bit. And it feels good. It feels really good.

Michelle Mazur (23:58):
Yeah. Well, I think there's so many rules that go along with social media, especially like you're on LinkedIn and you're like, your post needs a great hook, otherwise no one's ever going to read it. And then you need to do it storytelling in this specific way. And there's so many rules that when you can just let loose and say whatever you want to say, it's just so reading.

Andréa Jones (24:22):
Yes, a hundred percent. And I do think that's the direction that social media is going. And it gives me a tiny bit of an existential crisis moment where I'm like, oh, am I in the right place? I feel like what I've been teaching for the past decade is changing, and now I have to think about where this is going. But if I just lean into the community side of it, I feel really good about let's just be a human, make connections and enjoy.

Michelle Mazur (24:52):
Yeah, I love it. So Andréa, tell everyone where they can find you.

Andréa Jones (24:56):
Yes. So I'm at onlinedrea. That's online, DREA, everywhere on social. So if you search that, you'll find me. And then my website onlinedrea.com. We have the podcast. I have lots of freebies right on the homepage that you can sign up for and just enter into my world and get my different perspective on social media marketing.

Michelle Mazur (25:17):
Alright. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been a great conversation.

Andréa Jones (25:23):
Oh, thank you so much for having me.