High-quality content is the pillar of a successful marketing and sales strategy. Creating large quantities of content is effective. But it’s also time-consuming and expensive, especially when you need to do it for different areas and multiple languages. To minimize expenses and maximize efficiency, consider developing content repurposing strategies.
Your best pieces can do their job across the globe in several languages. All you need to do is take a comprehensive approach to repurposing content. This guide includes a step-by-step process for making your content suitable for new localities and languages.
What Is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing strategies involve transforming existing content into new formats. Besides translation and localization, it can include changing the format from text to video or adjusting the content to fit new marketing channels.
The benefits of repurposing content aren’t just financial. They include:
- Broader Reach: Extend the visibility of your content across countries, audiences, and platforms.
- Save Time: Content repurposing reduces the effort required to create new content from scratch by leveraging existing material.
- Improves SEO: Enhance search engine visibility by generating additional backlinks and keywords through different content formats.
- Reinforces Key Messages: Reinforce important ideas by presenting them in multiple ways to appeal to audiences at different points in their journeys.
- Attracts Different Audiences: Engage various audience segments by catering to different preferences.
- Boosts Engagement: Increase opportunities for interaction with your content across multiple formats and platforms.
- Adaptability for Trends: This allows you to tailor existing content to current trends or industry developments without starting from scratch.
- Improved Brand Awareness: Expand your brand’s presence in different areas to increase awareness.
The goals of developing content repurposing strategies can differ from organization to organization. You can give old content a new life or adjust high-performing content for new audiences. The main objective is to achieve the highest content return on investment (ROI).
Content Repurposing Strategies for Localization and Translation
If you are trying to attract audiences that speak other languages or live in different countries, you need to repurpose content for global audiences accordingly. This doesn’t just involve translating your existing content into a different language. The process includes ensuring that content perfectly aligns with the new audience’s needs. Here is where to start.
Identify High-Performing Content
Ideally, you need to localize and translate your entire website to fit audiences in new areas. However, in some cases, you may want to start small. The first step is to audit your existing content and find the highest-performing pieces. They could be the first candidates for repurposing.
The best content for repurposing is evergreen content, which can simultaneously serve several purposes. This includes educational articles with CTAs and SEO-optimized blogs. While SEO must be addressed once again once the content is repurposed, some of the elements will remain the same.
To help identify the most suitable content, you can consider performing a content gap analysis with competitors in other areas to find what they are lacking. This will allow you to provide top-notch content that gives you access to a bigger market share.
Choose Areas and Languages
If you haven’t conducted market research yet, make it a priority. Identify which new markets and languages you want to target. This can depend on many factors, including your current audience, the desired audience, and your budget.
Once you identify the main areas and languages, go deeper into studying the new audience’s needs. The cultural and legal nuances of a new customer segment could require you to make significant changes to the content when repurposing.
Besides changing currencies, measurement units, and date formats, you also need to think about religion. Different religions may find different things offensive and inappropriate. Also, you may have to adapt to new holidays and days off.
Legal compliance is another important issue to consider when repurposing content for a global audience. The new target country may have certain requirements for its audience, especially when it comes to advertisements, claims, and disclosing information.
Create a Style Guide for Implementing Each of Your Content Repurposing Strategies
Before adapting content to new languages and areas, create a comprehensive style guide that contains terminology. This way, you can follow a standardized format and use approved terms while translating.
Ideally, the style guide you initially gave your writers should already have this information. However, if the old content wasn’t written with future repurposing in mind, this guide can be a North Star for translators.
You can start with a list of terms for articles and blogs and go on to the type of greetings and sign-offs for promotional emails. The more details you add to the style guide, the faster you can get the results.
Review Formats
Besides adapting the language and style of the content, you can also consider changing its format. This can be useful both for your existing audiences and the new market. For example, you may want to consider changing a blog post into an infographic or a video into a blog post.
Infographics are often the easiest to repurpose because they don’t contain large volumes of content. However, you may also have to change the images to suit the new audience.
Consider SEO in Your Content Repurposing Strategies
The SEO structure may also change as you repurpose content for global audiences. You would need to conduct new keyword research for the new country in a new language. While some keywords may be similar, the search volume can easily differ. You could decide to focus on other keywords for the new content.
You must also review meta tags, URLs, schema markup code, and other SEO elements to refine multilingual content for SEO results that strengthen your organization. Leaving them the same could hurt your SEO efforts.
Create New Repurpose-Friendly Content
To streamline your content creation and repurposing efforts, consider creating repurpose-friendly content in the future. Some approaches include:
- Using clear and simple language. This may not always be possible for complex professional content, but it works well for infographics and blog posts.
- Avoiding cultural references (idioms, humor, and regional information)
- Structuring content for flexibility (headings, subheadings, bullet points)
- Using global examples. If you have to use case studies, find those that are applicable to global audiences.
- Create modular content or content with smaller, usable sections that can be swapped out if necessary.
- Leveraging universal visuals
- Writing in a neutral tone
In some cases, you can also consider creating multilingual content for SEO. This can include using keywords that are relevant to global markets or several different regional markets.
Get Started Repurposing Your Content
If you are planning to target new audiences in the near future, start planning for content repurposing as soon as possible. By creating a structured repurposing process, you can see the results soon after you enter the new market.
At Vistatec, we offer a comprehensive set of localization, translation, and SEO services that can help you stay ahead of the competition. For more information, please contact our team at any time.