Do you sometimes feel like your B2B content just isn’t giving you enough? We’ve written before , back in 2011, about how to squeeze more life out of your content. We came up with four ways for B2B content reuse and wrapped them up in a handy mnemonic – the ABCD of making more of your content assets. Since that was a long time ago now, we’ve taken that mnemonic, given it a polish, and reused it (see what we did there?) to help our 2016 audience.

The ABCD of content reuse

Alternative formats

This is about presenting the same story or messaging in a different way: could you turn copy into a video, for example, or split a paper into a series of blogs? You could even take a blog and break it into a series of tweets. This way, you can exploit different media, content vehicles or channels — print and digital; words and pictures; in person and online. You could even provide for different languages through translation.

We recently wrote and published a blog that we’ve also made available as a cartoon , if you want to see what we’re on about. Remember to consider whether your audience will be reading on different devices (mobile, tablet, desktop, etc), or whether you can add to the user experience through interactivity, for instance.

Building on content

If you’ve addressed a topic for a certain purpose, why not add to what you’ve said for a different purpose? You could give further explanation and detail for those who need it. For example, you could turn the subject matter of a thought-leadership piece into a primer for a sales team.

You might find that one aspect could be expanded into a new piece in its own right. Or you might choose to create materials for customers at different stages of the B2B sales cycle by cutting up and adding to a piece of content.

Complementing

We can create material or tools that provide further substantiation or support for our messaging, such as customer testimony or an ROI calculator. This could also include a specific social media campaign that supports the release of your content or opinion pieces that create conversation and interest around the topic of your content.

Distributing wider

When we wrote about this in 2011, we talked about backing up your content with tweets, blogs and emails that point to your content. While that’s still true, there’s another way to extend the reach of your content – reposting it.

When you tweet about a piece of content, it probably stays on your audience’s stream for about 10 minutes before being replaced by newer tweets about world news and pictures of cats. In the worst case, your audience may miss it entirely when you post it.

Why not tweet about your content again at a later time? That way, you stand a better chance of your audience seeing your content, and indeed you may access an audience who would otherwise have missed your content entirely. The same goes for LinkedIn posts or emails.

You can also experiment with posting at different times to catch different audiences. You can research the best times online and some social scheduling sites provide reports for the best posting times for your audience.

Don’t let anyone tell you that it’s lazy to repurpose your content; getting it right can take some work, as we’ve said before. Once that’s been done, though, you’ll find that you’ve given your old content new legs, increasing its ROI and stretching your budget further than you might have believed possible.

This doesn’t just apply to written content; have a look at this blog for our tips on how to make your B2B video content go further too.