When it comes to marketing in the travel industry, content is everything.
From entertaining travel vlogs created by influencers to blog posts sharing unique insight into destinations, having a killer content strategy is the best way to be remembered by potential customers and build a strong reputation in your area of the industry.
Not only is this one of the best ways to showcase your business offering, but it also helps you to clearly demonstrate your brand values and cultivate an image that is going to appeal to your target audience.
But continuously creating and distributing high-quality content can be a time-consuming task, especially if your travel business is only small.
When you find an idea that works or an approach that really resonates with your audience, you want to maximize the impact without having to dedicate too much time to doing so.
The solution to this is content repurposing.
And in this guide, you’ll learn everything you need to know about repurposing content for travel brands.
What is Content Repurposing?
Content repurposing is a method of updating, editing, or adapting existing pieces of content to create something new, often in a different format or for a different channel.
It creates a new piece of content that is independently valuable and relevant, saving time and resources and helping brands to produce a steady stream of content in the most efficient way possible.
An example of content repurposing could be taking a long-form piece of blog content that you have written about a certain destination and creating a series of social media posts inspired by each of the key points or recommendations listed in this article.
You could also edit the text to use as part of email marketing content, or as the caption for images shared on various platforms.
As a travel company, content is one of the key ways in which you are going to grow your customer base, inspire potential customers to pay for your services or products, and establish a recognizable brand image that puts you ahead of your competitors.
Repurposing content means you can maximize the impact of everything you create, ensuring greater reach and a more efficient marketing strategy.
What are the Benefits of Repurposing Content?
The biggest benefit of content repurposing is that it is a massive time saver.
Reduce Resources Required for Content Creation
If you’ve got a content schedule that requires multiple blog posts a week, social media posts every day, a regular email newsletter, and video updates for a variety of channels, you’re going to require a huge amount of resources to meet this demand.
Instead of coming up with entirely new ideas each time you need something to share with your audience, you can repurpose existing content and share this across your travel brand’s platforms or in different marketing campaigns.
Maximize the Value of Your Content
Secondly, repurposing content is a great way to maximize the impact of previous pieces of content that have performed really well.
Perhaps a video showcasing one of the travel experiences you offer that was shared by a huge number of people, or you spent a lot of time on an ebook full of unique advice for visiting a certain destination.
Taking the key ideas from these pieces and then changing their format means that you can capitalize on your success and ensure that nothing gets wasted.
Conversely, if a piece doesn’t perform well for some reason then content repurposing can be a great technique for giving it another chance at success.
We’ve all had social media posts that have fallen victim to the algorithm, or blog content that just hasn’t been shared at the right time. You can remedy these setbacks by repurposing the content and sharing it again.
Many travel brands create content that targets different segments of their target audience as a way of getting noticed and generating leads.
Better Serve Specific Audience Segments
Repurposing content can be an excellent way of taking an existing piece and editing it for a new audience, increasing the impact that the content has and giving you more material to work with.
Editing content into different formats also means that you can share it across different channels and target the different sections of your audience who use different platforms.
Target Different Intents in Search
Finally, content repurposing can be a really effective part of an SEO marketing strategy.
If there is a specific keyword phrase that you are trying to get your travel brand to rank for, approaching a topic in multiple formats or with different pieces of recycled content will maximize your chances of performing well for that search term and drive more traffic to your website.
Evergreen Content: The Key to Successful Repurposing
Before we get into sharing plenty of actionable ways you can start to repurpose the content your travel brand has created, it’s important to understand an essential part of creating content in the first place that can be reused and recycled.
If you want to get the most out of your travel content, it needs to be evergreen.
Evergreen content is a term used to describe any content that is relevant no matter when you are consuming it.
It tends to focus on sharing advice, making recommendations, or explaining concepts and ideas, as opposed to content that responds to a current event, ties into a passing trend, or describes an experience on offer for a limited time.
The majority of the content your travel brand produces should be evergreen if you want to develop a successful content repurposing strategy.
This ensures that you’re going to keep generating content that is relevant and valuable to your audience, no matter how much later on from the original publication date you recycle it.
Not everything you post or share needs to be evergreen. In some cases, you’re going to get the most engagement out of content that responds, explains, or capitalizes on something that is happening right now.
However, the majority of the content you share needs to be sustainable and have a long shelf-life.
Not only will this make things easier when it comes to repurposing your content, but it also means that potential customers are more likely to engage with older content and keep boosting its impact.
How to Repurpose Content: 8 Strategies for Travel Brands
Now that we’ve covered the basics of content repurposing, why it’s important, and the importance of evergreen content, here are eight of the best ways that travel brands can repurpose their content.
1. Give Existing Content a Refresh
If you’re looking for a relatively quick way to give content a new lease on life, then it’s definitely worth identifying pieces that haven’t been performing particularly well and deciding whether they could be improved.
This approach works best with blog posts. It can also be really useful if your travel brand offers downloadable content like guides, FAQs, and previous customer experiences.
If a post initially gained quite a lot of interest but engagement has now dropped, updating it is a simple way to renew interest and ensure that everything on your brand’s blog remains valuable.
This could be as simple as updating the title, taking a new angle, or targeting a different segment of your audience to see if engagement improves.
If you have content that makes recommendations, such as the best hotels, restaurants, or tourist attractions in a location, you can regularly update this content to ensure that it is still relevant every time someone views it.
A post’s SEO can also be improved by refreshing the content if you find and add relevant keyword phrases into the text.
2. Republish Old Content
If you don’t think a quick edit, new photos, and a different title are warranted, another way to repurpose older content is simply to republish it.
This is only really effective if the piece you are republishing is quite old, as you don’t really want your audience to recognize it when you share it again.
If the topic you wrote about is no longer relevant, you think a totally different tone and approach would be more effective, or your writing skills have improved and you think you can do a better job now, sometimes the most effective tactic is to delete and try again.
In certain cases, it’s the best way to massively improve the impact of a piece that has already been written.
3. Cut, Copy, Paste and Edit Your Text Posts
One of the easiest ways to start repurposing content is to take text that you have written from a blog post, ebook or email and turn it into something else.
The written word makes up a huge proportion of marketing content produced by brands, and it’s likely that you already have a huge archive of text posts to start working with.
You should never just copy and paste content word-for-word. But with careful editing, it can be relatively quick and easy to create entirely new written content out of existing pieces.
This technique is particularly useful if you’ve spent a lot of time writing up a long-form guide to a destination, holiday type, or travel experience.
Although quite a lot of time will be needed to produce this initial piece of content, you can then:
- Create multiple short blog posts from it.
- Use this text for social media posts and image captions.
- And use quotes or snippets in emails and other customer communication.
4. Combine Blog Posts to Create Ebooks
Ebooks and other long-form pieces of content are often the most time-consuming to create, and yet they’re also often the most valuable.
Whether you’re using them as a lead magnet, showcasing your expert knowledge of a certain location or type of holiday, or want to offer incentives for potential customers, it’s a key format that is used in numerous marketing strategies.
If you run a blog for your travel business, you likely have sets of blog posts that all focus on similar themes.
A great way to create a new piece of longer-form content is to identify which posts work together thematically and then create “ultimate” guides from these that can be shared in ebook form.
5. Make an Email Newsletter From Blog Content
Email marketing is a particularly effective strategy for engaging your audience and moving potential customers down the buyer funnel. However, it can sometimes be tricky to decide what you’re actually going to share in these messages.
A great content repurposing technique is to use existing blog posts as inspiration, condensing the subject of these down into a couple of paragraphs and then including a link to the full article to generate more traffic to these pages.
This is a particularly effective strategy if you’re publishing several pieces of content a week on your travel company’s blog. It enables you to create a newsletter that rounds up all this content every week and ensures that your audience isn’t missing out.
It can also be a vehicle for sharing any other news, offers, or content from your brand.
6. Condense Topics Into Social Media Posts
If you’re struggling to think of what to post on your travel brand’s social media accounts, consider recycling ideas from your blog posts.
Maybe there’s a particular piece of advice that you want to share with a wider audience, or you’ve offered unique insight into a destination that you know your followers will find valuable.
You can either take direct quotes from your blog posts and turn them into Instagram graphics or edit down paragraphs to a condensed form that can be shared as a Twitter thread or Facebook post.
Bonus: Include a link back to the original post to encourage more engagement and get your audience reading as much of your content as possible.
7. Create Video Scripts From Written Content
Video is one of the most effective forms of content in maximizing audience engagement, and this is particularly true of the travel industry.
There’s no better way to inspire wanderlust and show potential customers what they could experience by traveling with your company than through video. It’s also a brilliant tactic for adding a personal touch to content that will build brand affinity and have a more emotional impact on the viewer.
Trying to come up with an idea for a video from scratch can be really difficult, but if you use an existing blog post as a script then all you need to do is sit down and press record!
This can be a great way of explaining a topic, showcasing a customer testimony, or just condensing a post into a short video that can then be shared on social media or as part of an email marketing campaign.
8. Turn Transcripts Into Text Posts
To turn that last piece of advice on its head, another great method of repurposing content is to take transcripts and then edit them into text pieces like blog posts.
Whether your brand hosts a podcast or you’ve just produced lots of videos, you can use software such as Descript to quickly create text files that can then be edited and merged to create new, unique pieces of content.
Quotes can be turned into graphics, small clips of video or audio can be animated with their text, and you can easily create blog posts that feature the highlights and key takeaways from interviews.
Summary
The possibilities of content repurposing are vast, and the benefits of such a strategy for a travel business can be massive.
Once you’ve started looking at every piece of content as the potential springboard for several others, you’ll be able to create an incredibly effective content strategy for your brand that ensures your audience always has something new and valuable to engage with – no matter how they find you or what platform they follow you on.
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Featured Image: Tom McLoughlin/SEO Travel
Article image: Red Deer/Shutterstock
