How to repurpose your episodes into different formats

Creating a video series can be a bit of work and when you are done, you might start to think that you have done all that work just to have one piece of content.

Not on our watch.

There’s this genius thing called repurposing and we are going to show you how it’s done. Repurposing simply means breaking down your video episodes into different formats that you can use for a long period. We will be discussing -

1. The concept of repurposing 
2. Repurposing formats

So we have been discussing the episodic marketing framework which consists of four pillars that differentiate the average video from a dedicated original series that gets you a lot of bottom-line results for your company. 

We've been able to cover the planning and production stage so that means we are now on the fourth pillar and in the third stage which is probably one of the most important stages in creating episodic series for your business. This is the repurposing stage which is also split into formats, channels, and use cases. 

The concept of repurposing 

When it comes to creating episodes, you can't just create content and expect people to come and find your content. Especially if you are creating long-form content such as videos that are anything from 10 to 15 minutes or more. Just because you have recorded this content and you know that it is good does not mean that everyone else will automatically know about it. You also have to do everything in your power to actually promote that content and one of the easiest ways to do that is by repurposing said content.

Repurposing is essentially the act of taking these videos that you have created and finding ways to cut or chop them up into smaller pieces of content that can then be used to promote your initial video or overall content. For this post, we are going to be talking about formats which basically answers the question - how do you repurpose your content, and what are the different ways to do so?

Repurposing formats

So when it comes to formats, there are four formats that have proven to be valuable for the purpose of repurposing content and they are - video, audio, image, and written. Now you may be thinking, isn’t the original content itself a video? Well yes but even though it is, you can still get smaller video snippets from that. As for audio, you can take the audio from the video, polish it up and repackage it as an audio podcast. Then from there, you can also create image content by, for example, taking all the golden one-liners that were mentioned (all the interesting insights or statistics, basically anything that really stood out to you as the person working on this series) and find ways to turn those into standalone style quote images much like the ones from motivational speakers or influencers like Richard Branson or Elon Musk. 

Last but not least, you can also create articles from your video content. Now, these are actual articles and they are different from plain transcriptions of the video. For these articles, you can list down the top three to five topics that stood out to you from each episode and then find ways to create a write-up about it. This write-up could be in the first person from the perspective of the host or it could be in the third person from the perspective of a narrator or someone who's watching the video.

So those are the repurposing formats that can be followed when trying to chop up content. Where it gets more exciting is when you start to unpack all the different types of micro-content across video, audio, image, and written. 

Video snippets

For the video snippets, there are so many different ways that you could unpack those. For example, you could decide to create snippets for every Q and A which means you could create a clip from moments when a question was asked and answered. Or you could choose any part that was funny, moments when someone was laughing or just any interesting reaction that could be ideal for a clip.

A common choice for a video snippet is also one where someone goes into story mode and starts telling a story about something that they've learned or maybe failed at and what that taught. This type of content is super relatable to people and it is great to catch the attention of people who might just be scrolling down your brand’s social media page. If you need help with getting ideas, feel free to check out our website for more examples of video micro-content.

Image micro-content 

For images, you can apply some of the same ideas such as the question and answer, pop that into an image form or if you want to focus on numbers, you could get a notable statistic and use that. There is also the option of creating infographics based on a process that might have been described by one of the guests or maybe even by somebody from your company.

Written microcontent 

Written micro-content can be in the form of a quick summary, a short SEO optimized article, or for example, a top 5 lessons learned article. One of our favorite types of written microcontent is one where you take an episode, see where it ended and then write a sort of additional part after that episode, basically something to continue the conversation so when people actually watch the episode, they can read that article as a continuation of the conversation which could be very cool in case they had any sort of questions or just wanted to know more about what was said in the episode.

Audio microcontent

This is basically the art of taking the audio from your videos and polishing them into a stand-alone audio podcast which you can then publish on podcast hosting websites. You could also create one to two-minute snippets of the audio podcasts (more popularly known as audiograms) and then promote those on your social media.

Once again, you are welcome to check out our website as we have tons of free content that could help you out with repurposing. Next up in our episodic series is channels and we’ll be looking at the different social media channels that we can use for repurposing. As a parting gift, if you need a tool to use in creating video snippets, here’s one that we’ve been able to rely on. You’re welcome!