When they say content is king, it probably makes video and audio the crown and sceptre. If you have been keeping a close eye on content marketing trends, then you might have noticed that video marketing has become an indispensable part of any successful marketing strategy over the last decade.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that 68% of your customers have adjusted the amount of video they watch since 2020, with 96% saying they now watch more videos. It might even have to do with customers spending 88% more time on your website if it has videos. If the UK indicates global trends, audio is also hot content. In 2021, 75% of all UK residents had used online audio every month.

Regardless of the reason creative marketers and business owners are doubling down on video and audio because it works. Even though video and audio are often more expensive to produce than other content types, most marketers acknowledge that it gives a great ROI.

That said, I’m sure we have all had a time where we wished we could have done more with those hours of content that we painstakingly recorded, only to reduce it into a couple of minutes of the juicy bits; what a waste. The good news is we actually can do more with all that content if we repurpose it.

In its most straightforward form, repurposing content is making use of all or elements of content to extend the content’s usefulness. Depending on how you decide to implement it, repurposing content can work out in several ways.

You might choose to: use the same piece of content on a different platform, use an already existing piece of content as the basis for another, breathe new life into a piece of content by using different sequences or any other combination of those.

If you haven’t already started repurposing your video content, maybe it’s time you give it a go. Still not sure? Well, here are five reasons why you should be repurposing content.

Repurposing video saves you money

Not to start with the obvious, but when you repurpose content, you stretch out the lifespan of the content you already have, and by doing so, reduce the need to create new videos. You know as well as I do, marketing budgets are often spread thin, and we all can use all the cost savings we can find, especially if you have a small company.

Producing original videos can be very expensive. Make sure you do it once and then re-use the best moments to make the most of it, and save money and time in the process.

It also saves you time!

For any business owner, your time is the only asset more valuable than your marketing budget. Guess what? Repurposing video content saves you both!

When you make use of the best long-form content you already have, it means you don’t have to spend hours upon hours coming up with new ideas and then creating more original content. With everything else going on, who has the time to consistently come up with great content ideas, execute them, pay for freelancers or agencies, do everything else on the to-do list, and still be home in time for dinner?

If you quickly repurpose long videos and podcasts you can save between 1-2 days of your week that could go into ideating, planning, publishing and analysing the performance of new content. Also new content does not guarantee success, proven content does.

You can reach a wider audience

Each medium and social media platform you use to engage your customers requires a unique content style and taps into a different audience. You can’t publish the exact same videos on YouTube and TikTok and expect the same results.

Ideally, you want to create content for each audience you want to engage, but that might not be possible in most cases. The next best thing would be simply taking the content we already have and tweaking it to meet the unique audience and platform’s content requirements. That way, you can reach more audiences and tap into more markets with fewer resources and much less time.

Generate more value from premium content

Some content ideas perform better than others, and it’s often quite hard to get an idea that yields the level of engagement and performance you want. If you have been creating content for a while, then you probably already know that content creation is part science, part guesswork, and when you stumble on a great idea, you need to milk it for everything it has.

Repurposing content allows you to do exactly that. When you do this, you give the same brilliant idea nine lives, allowing you to drive your marketing goals with much less effort.

Repurposing content embeds messages

When we repeat a message, it makes it easier for our customers to remember our brand, product, or service and begin to like what we are selling to them. Psychologists call this the mere exposure effect.

The flip side of the mere exposure effect, as psychologists John Cacioppo and Richard Petty found out, is that if you repeat the same message over and over again, it eventually leads to scrutiny of the message and a general sense of skepticism.

So to get the best out of the mere exposure effect, you would have to communicate the same idea using a wide range of formats, sequences and moments. You also want to avoid feeding your audience the same video repeatedly. Repurposing lets you develop a wide range of content from the same original source material to drive the same message without boring your audiences.