Increase consistency and reach with a content repurposing strategy

The New York Times recently challenged readers to turn a circle into 10 different images as a way to get their creative juices flowing. Thousands of readers used one circle to create an endless variety of doodles. It reminded me a bit of Contentful and how we empower teams to take modular content components and spin them into thousands of unique digital experiences across web, mobile, social media channels, voice search, digital signage, any digital channel. 

For our customers, repurposing content is more than a creative exercise; it’s the secret to how successful brands deliver omnichannel customer journeys that always seem fresh, relevant, and on brand. In this post, I’ll show you how content repurposing adds value through increased efficiency, greater reach, and more cohesive customer journeys.

Repurposing content is good for brands and customers

CapitalOne Shopping found that 90% of consumers expect a consistent brand experience across touchpoints. Multiple business units might be responsible for content creation on different channels or at various points in the customer journey, but from the customer's perspective, it's all one omnichannel experience. 

Repurposing content is one way brands can provide the consistent, high-quality content customers expect. It pulls content creation out of silos and encourages a strategic approach that results in cohesive customer journeys composed of a variety of content formats that work together seamlessly regardless of how customers choose to engage.

Brands can also repurpose content to get more value out of new content or give old content new life. Break long-form content into smaller pieces and extend its reach across multiple platforms, or refresh evergreen content by adding a video you made for a marketing campaign.

Repurpose content for seamless, cohesive customer journeys

The modern customer journey is multifaceted. People move fluidly from one device to another and across channels based on their preferences and needs in the moment. One person sees something they like in a YouTube video, visits your website for more information, checks out products in the store, and then downloads an app to buy it on their phone and track delivery. Another person might start their journey in a store and spend months following you on social media before purchasing.

Regardless of the path they take, every touchpoint needs to be connected and relevant to their journey. If something is off-brand or out of sync with the rest of the journey, that sets the customer back. These are often small things, like inconsistencies in product images or naming conventions, price discrepancies between channels, or old content that feels stale.

But here’s the good news – Brands can unify touchpoints by crafting content independent of any specific content format or channel and drawing from that modular content to assemble experiences across channels. Managing content in one place and repurposing it across channels results in tailored experiences that are on brand, authentic to the channel, and relevant to the customer. In this way, repurposing content becomes part of your omnichannel marketing strategy.

Increase content velocity and speed to market

Content repurposing is more efficient and faster than crafting every customer experience from scratch. With a good content repurposing strategy, you can:

• Ship new experiences faster: When you create and organize new content with repurposing in mind, you build a treasure trove of pre-approved components that teams can use to quickly spin up new formats and experiences. Reduced approval times mean you can ship new experiences in hours or days, not weeks.

• Roll content out across channels: Structuring content for reuse helps you extend top-performing content across channels and touchpoints in a meaningful way, without being repetitive, reaching new audiences and increasing the value of the content you’ve already created. Instead of creating channel-specific content in silos, cross-functional teams create modular content around specific topics that can be mixed and matched to meet customer needs on different channels and at various points in their journey.

• Scale into new markets with less effort: Global brands can reuse existing content to support multiple regions and accelerate launches into new markets. For example, Costa Coffee uses a “drag, drop, and tailor” method to localize existing content for sites across Europe, the Middle East, and APAC. With this approach, they can build region-specific sites in as little as 15 minutes.

• Empower content creators to use AI strategically: Increasing content velocity isn’t about replacing humans with generative AI; it's about empowering humans to use AI strategically. This human-in-the-loop approach includes using AI as an editing partner to improve quality, asking an AI agent to create variants for A/B testing, or using AI to generate social media posts.

Content repurposing best practices

Get the most value out of your content by baking content repurposing into your content strategy. Content repurposing workflows start with content planning and strategy. First determine what message you want to convey and what the content needs to achieve, independent of any specific delivery channel. Focus on creating core content that is brand-consistent and tailored to your customers. Then you can repurpose that content by personalizing it to each target audience and using it to craft unique experiences across touchpoints, channels, and regions.

As you build your content repurposing workflows, keep these best practices in mind:

1. Structure content for reusability

A core principle behind Contentful is structured content. By unifying existing content from various sources, organizing it into content models, and breaking content (like web pages) into bite-sized pieces (images, headlines, body content, author, etc.), we help brands create a single source of truth from which all content-driven experiences flow.

Structured content sounds rigid, but it gives you the perfect blend of flexibility and consistency. It’s about organizing and managing your content in a way that makes sense for your business, for the content, and for how you're going to use it.

The process of structuring content helps you hone in on the core concepts you want to convey, regardless of the channels, so the intent of your content carries through as you extend its reach. Meanwhile, the composable nature of structured content lets you assemble and reassemble components into a variety of different formats: social media posts, blog posts, video content, webinars, in-store kiosks, and signage.

2. Unify content management across teams and tools

To create consistent customer experiences, you need to bring teams and tools together in one place. You want to break down silos, increase collaboration, and reduce context switching between tools. This is why Contentful focuses on integration, pulling content from silos into a centralized content platform where you can organize, structure and reuse content across the business.

With Contentful, everything and everyone is connected, so you can collaborate, coordinate, and orchestrate experiences effectively. Bring in data from your DAM, PIM, ecommerce platform, or other tools. Integrate translation, personalization, and localization tools into your workflows. Use our smart governance features to give each team member the access they need to be creative without breaking anything or drifting off brand.

Centralizing content management streamlines operations and makes it easier to produce a consistent flow of fresh content. Teams can spin up experiences across channels and touchpoints and manage them from a centralized source of truth. When something changes or you want to refresh your brand, you can update content in one place and push them out to all the places where that content appears. 

3. Be intentional about repurposing content

Repurposing content does not mean reposting the same content on every channel. Customers want fresh, relevant content tailored to them.

On the back end, the components that make up an experience are reusable, but the way you assemble and present them should be tailored to each touchpoint, or even each customer. You need to consider different formats, different points in the customer journey, what content the customer has already seen, and how each touchpoint ties back to the overall brand message and story.

Think back to the NYT challenge with the circles. Every doodle started with the same circle, but it presented the circle in new ways. It helped us see the circle from different perspectives. Looking at the doodles side by side, it might even be hard to tell they repurposed the same static image.

Content repurposing reuses written and visual content strategically, intentionally giving the customer new ways to engage, providing relevant content at the right time, and deepening the relationship with your brand. The key is to stay focused on the customer and how repurposing content in different formats provides them with a richer experience.  

See how Contentful Studio empowers teams to repurpose content in unique ways without waiting for developer support.

4. Contextualize content to increase user engagement

Data-driven personalization brings content repurposing to the next level. With Contentful Personalization, you can tailor specific components or the entire customer experience to create touchpoints that fit the context of the moment, increasing engagement, conversion, and loyalty.

Deloitte Digital found that consumers spend 37% more with brands that provide personalized experiences. And they’re more likely to keep coming back. More than half of customers (56%) say they’re more likely to become repeat buyers after a personalized experience, according to Twillio’s State of Personalization report.

Personalizing individual components makes content feel fresh and more relevant, while keeping the brand message consistent. It’s a great way to keep experiences on brand without getting redundant.

For example, Ruggable personalized homepage products to boost email campaign performance. Repurposing product content to create tailored homepage experiences resulted in a 25% increase in conversions. The washable rug brand also tailors images based on pet ownership to boost its appeal to both dog and cat owners.

Challenges

The biggest blocker to a successful content repurposing strategy is trying to implement a modern strategy on legacy tools that force you to work in content silos. Companies that are using multiple disconnected content management systems (CMSes) or cumbersome legacy systems that aren’t built for omnichannel delivery will struggle. 

Copying and pasting content from one system to another or page to page, is an inefficient and error-prone way to repurpose content. Without the ability to manage content centrally, updates are slow and painful.

Using Contentful to unify systems and streamline operations is a game-changer for many brands. 

Here are some great examples of content repurposing from customers like Kraft Heinz, KFC, and Bang & Olufsen.

Kraft Heinz leans into content repurposing to support 200+ brands

Delivering tasty experiences for 200+ brands around the world is a monumental task, even for a brand as big as Kraft Heinz. To keep the flavor fresh, the iconic brand implemented a composable approach with Contentful, allowing them to structure content into a content model designed with content repurposing in mind.

Now teams can create, reuse, and recombine content into new experiences across digital channels. Repurposing content helps them craft innovative experiences like Ai.Oli, an AI-powered recipe generator that engages users with recipes for all ability levels and tastes.

With reusable content in place, the brand introduced workflows to facilitate cross-functional collaboration and shrink content production timelines further. Since the rollout, campaign teams have been able to launch new campaigns in weeks, not months. 

Throughout the process, they worked to balance brand consistency with individuality. “As we began building the content model, we paid special attention to elements that would refresh the digital identity of Kraft Heinz’s signature sites. We then provided options for its 50+ sub-brands which balanced individuality and connection with the parent brand,” Andrew Kirby, Managing Director of Apply Digital North America, explained.

The results speak for themselves: Satisfaction is up 28% and, for one brand, conversion rates have increased by 78%.

KFC improves consistency and boosts sales

When hard-coded, market-specific websites became too costly and cumbersome to maintain, KFC, the quick-serve restaurant known for Finger Lickin’ Good® chicken, turned to Contentful’s modern digital experience platform.

With Contentful, KFC can use the same content across its web and mobile experience, effectively eliminating the excessive copy-and-paste processes otherwise required to manage such content. In the future, the company plans to extend this use case to digital drive-thru signs and in-store kiosks.

To improve consistency while supporting localization, KFC houses core information in specific content types with tight governance. Meanwhile, each market has the option to customize its menu, homepage content, and other areas of the site to reflect local offerings, promotions, and preferences.

“We're seeing a lot of creativity come out of our new tech stack. For example, a lot of our Australia locations have secret menu items — these offerings are built by team members who create their own twists on KFC classics,” Ashley Travis, Sr. Director of Digital Experience & Product Growth at KFC Global, said.

Improving consistency while keeping some local flavor is a winning combination, accounting for a 43% increase in YOY transactions.

Bang & Olufsen

Luxury Danish headphone and speaker maker Bang & Olufsen knew they needed to meet customers where they were at — in their unique regions and languages, and on both personal devices and in-store displays. But, for many years, the brand didn’t have the tools to get there. 

Switching to Contentful empowered Bang & Olufsen to choose the best tools for their business needs and integrate them into a unified system. Now they can populate in-store digital experiences with consistent content, regardless of the store’s presentation technology. This provides customers with a seamless browsing-to-buying experience and has helped the brand launch in-store digital signage.

The changes have led to big ecommerce gains:

• Ecommerce conversion rate increased by 60%.

• Cart-to-checkout rate of progression more than doubled.

• Average order value increased by 13%.

• Conversion rate from online store search tripled.

Parting thoughts

How customers interact with content and brands is evolving. OpenAI’s recent acquisition of IO underscores a growing shift in how people are engaging with content. Brands need flexibility and agility to respond quickly and meet customers where they are now and in the future.

Brands with well-structured, easy-to-manage content and a platform that can ship experiences to any digital channel will find it easier to adapt. They’ll be ready to integrate new channels or devices into their content workflows without having to reengineer their systems. 

For Contentful and our customers, that means we can be excited about the possibilities because we’re confident our platform is future-ready. Curious about how Contentful can streamline content operations and position you for continued success? Let’s chat.

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