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Are you repurposing your Instagram content right now? Is it something you don’t quite understand or see the benefits in doing? In this blog, I’ll be sharing how to repurpose your Instagram content. I’ll also be diving deep on the benefits of using repurposed content in your overall strategy, and how to find the content you should be repurposing.
Ask yourself this question…
Are you constantly trying to come up with new ideas for your content? Always hunting for inspiration; reading blogs, checking your competitor’s posts, going to askthepublic.com? And because you’re always trying to come up with new content, you lose consistency and easily become overwhelmed. Well, I’ve got good news for you.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO KEEP CREATING NEW CONTENT.
It can become overwhelming and time consuming having to constantly create new content. Writing captions, creating graphics or videos, finding hashtags and including keywords…it’s a lot to do every time. But repurposing is the answer to all your problems.
What is repurposed content?
Simply put, repurposed content is taking existing content and re-creating it for use in a different format or platform, with the goal of making it more accessible, relevant, or appealing to a new audience.
The objective is to get more mileage from your content; increasing your reach with various audiences, and sharing your content in different ways to cater to everyone’s needs, without always having to create new content from scratch…because let’s be honest, no one has time for that.
It’s likely you have hundreds of pieces of content lying around somewhere, whether it’s already been posted or it’s hanging around behind the scenes waiting to be shared, but you’re unsure how to share this content to ensure maximum reach.
Keep reading as I share why you should be repurposing your content and I give you some advice on where to find the right content to repurpose. I’m also going to give you a few methods to repurposing your content that’ll help you start doing it right away!
Why should you include repurposing content in your content strategy?
There’s quite a few reasons why you should be using repurposed content as part of your strategy. My number one reason is because it’s simple, and I know you’re looking for an easier way to quickly create content that will have an impact with your audience. Here’s the thing: when you repurpose your content, you already know the content has been a success when you created it the first time so you’re just sharing it in a new way to cater to those people who didn’t necessarily see or enjoy the way it was presented before. Plus, you’re not having to create new content from scratch…it’s a win win!
Here’s some other reasons why you must be repurposing your Instagram content:
- Maximise your reach
Reach is one of the main objectives on Instagram. The more people you reach, the more people will discover your profile, your business and find you. That’s the ultimate goal, right? To drive people to your world and join your community. And when you’re repurposing your content across multiple platforms, this allows you to reach new audiences which is increasing your exposure to more potential ideal clients.
- Improve your engagement rate
If a certain piece of content has already worked and performed well, and it’s still relevant at the time of repurposing it, the likelihood that people will engage with the content is very high. It will also bring back the attention of the audience that engaged with the content previously.
And by creating a piece of content using different formats, you’re allowing your audience to engage with your content in different ways which will improve their experience and provide more interest with your brand. Gradually, you’ll start to build a loyal following.
- Makes your profile more accessible
Accessibility is so important in marketing. Whenever you’re creating content, you want to think about the experience you’re delivering and making sure it will meet everyone’s needs. This includes the way people interact with your content. The more diverse you are with your content, the more you’ll be including all people’s needs, including those with disabilities. Everyone will consume content differently (I personally prefer visuals rather than written content) so always bear this in mind when thinking about the ways you repurpose content.
- It’s all relevant
The trick with repurposing content is to make sure it’s evergreen. By this, I mean it’ll always be relevant to your audience and your business.
Want some examples?
– Brand designer = 5 questions to ask your brand designer before making the investment
– Copywriter = How to incorporate your brand voice into your copy
– Wedding Photographer = What to do for your photographs when it rains on your wedding day?
– Virtual Assistant = 3 top tips to help you save time doing admin
- Less time and energy consuming
There’s no doubt that creating new content from scratch is time consuming and can really demotivate you from doing it. That’s the beauty behind repurposed content. You can save yourself so much time if you already have the foundations already there.
Let’s say you have a Youtube video that you want to repurposed into a reel. After you’ve downloaded the video, all you have to do is snip it to the clip you want to show in the reel, resize, add captions and voila…you can post it! Whereas if you didn’t have that initial Youtube video, you would’ve had to find time to create the video yourself, edit it, and then do all the other bits. Even though it’s still a bit of work, repurposing content saves you so much more time and energy!
How to find the content you should be repurposing?
Now you know what repurposed content is and why it is important to utilise this strategy, you need to find the content that you can repurpose. Where?
- Look at your insights
A good place to start it by looking at your Instagram insights, or any of your social media insights. This will tell you what your best performing content has been recently (I’d recommend checking up to the last 6 months of content to get this information).
To do this, go to Insights on your profile > Content You’ve Shared and select the metric you want to measure based on your KPIs. This will then show you your best performing content from that metric.
- Conduct market research
If you find you’re wanting to create new content but you’re still stuck with ideas, conduct some market research to find out what people are asking and wanting to know. Here’s how you can do this quite quickly:
– Ask your audience through polls/quizzes/questions on Instagram stories
– Use search engines to find out what people are currently searching around your niche
– Answer the Public or Ubersuggest are great tools to use to find out what people want to know around a certain subject. Just type in a keyword and a whole list of ideas will come up. If you’ve already written content around these subjects, go back to them and see how you can repurpose the content.
- Always repurpose evergreen content
Evergreen content is content that will always be relevant to your brand and niche. It will help your content perform well even after a couple of months because it still provides value to your audience. Not all your content will be evergreen, but I recommend at least 60-70% of your content should be. So when you’re looking to repurpose content, make sure it’s still relevant to re-share otherwise it won’t make too much sense and you’ll lose the engagement you’re aiming for.
Here’s some ways on how to repurpose your Instagram content…
And now for the juicy part of this blog you’ve been waiting for. Here’s how you can repurpose your Instagram content.
- Turn an Instagram carousel into a blog post
- Make your Instagram carousel into a reel
- Take your Instagram carousel and share it on your stories to add to a highlight
- Convert your Instagram post into a free download for your audience
- Take your Instagram post and transform it into an email
- Design an infographic for Pinterest from your Instagram post
- Go live on Instagram around a previously popular subject and post to your profile
- Create a podcast episode from your live on Instagram
- Convert your Instagram carousel into a Linkedin article or a Twitter thread
- Turn your Instagram post into a Youtube video
Are you getting the gist now? There are so many ways to repurpose content, even beyond Instagram, but this is just a guidance to what you could be doing right now. I suggest you create a repurposing system of your own, like this one here, that you can easily follow instead of panicking at the last minute with posts you want to repurpose.
There’s no question that reels are dominating Instagram and have been for some time now. I was one of the ones that initially refused to create reels; they weren’t for me, I didn’t want to show my face and I knew it was such a time consuming process which put me off completely. However, over time I’ve found a process that works for me, batch create reels in advance so I’m not spending all my time on them, and I’ve worked on my confidence and stopped thinking about what other people thought.
Saying all this, I can totally understand why people won’t want to show their face in reels and pretend to dance, point, or lip sync… it can be cheesy, I know! Plus, not every business will want themselves in their content and that’s totally understandable.
So if you’re reading this knowing you should be using reels in your Instagram content, but want a workaround where you don’t have to show your face, here’s 5 Instagram reel ideas you can create without being in front of the camera!
5 Instagram Reel Ideas that don’t require showing your face
- Screen Tutorials
Screen tutorials are a great way to show your audience how to do something. Some of the most useful and easy consumer reel content that I see on my feed is just phone recordings or computer recordings. There’s no need for all this fancy ass editing because at the end of the day, you want to educate that person to do this thing and if you over-edit something it can actually distract your viewers away from the actual message or tutorial. Sometimes simplifying is more effective.
Method: I recommend using a tool like Loom, Zoom or a screen recorder that may be an application on your desktop already to do your screen recordings. If you’re using your phone to do this, then it’ll most likely have a screen recorder installed (but make sure you have the microphone turned off unless you’re doing the voiceover as you do the tutorial). You can then use software like Canva to add it into a mockup and edit it. With the voiceover, you can either add this to the video in a separate app or you can just add it into Instagram straight away.
- Drawing tutorials
Another popular way to use reels is through drawing tutorials or simply writing on a piece of paper. You can see an example here of how this has been done. I’m sure you’ll agree when I say this is quite an effortless way of creating a reel. It’s quickly consumed, an easy way to portray a message, and doesn’t take too much time to create. If it’s deemed to be successful with your audience, you can brainstorm ideas and batch create these all in advance.
Method: The best way I would create these is by using a tripod so that you are hands free to do the actual drawing. Make sure you’re in an environment with good lighting so the video is good quality and readable. Place the tripod in a position (this may be above so it’s looking down to the paper, like a flat lay, or at an angle) and keep it in this position throughout so you get a seamless looking reel. If you want a filter on Instagram for the video, apply this and then use the Hands Free option to record (be aware of the time limit!) or simply use your own phone camera to video. Once the video is completed, think about how you want it to look in the reel. Do you want it sped up/slowed down? If it needs any extra editing, I highly recommend using the app InShot. I use this for all my reel editing.
- Stop motion
Warning: This can be quite a long process to create.
Stop motion is effectively taking many photos of you or an object doing something and converting it into a video. I’ve seen some really clever videos doing this, check out this one from Sand Visuals, and this one from Collette Peri. If you give this a try, I’d love for you to share it with me! I always love watching these kinds of videos.
Method: For these videos to work quite seamlessly, you want to make sure your phone/camera is in a fixed position (maybe use a tripod) so the frame stays the same and it’s just the subject moving. This will be easier if there’s a second person to help you but to take the pictures you can either set it on burst mode so it takes lots of photos in seconds (and the second person can do this for you). Or you can set your timer on your camera (phone settings may be limited for this) to take photos every 0.5 second. Once you’ve got all your photos, it’s time to edit them. If you’ve used a camera, you can use video editing software like Adobe, or there’s plenty of Stop Motion specific softwares out there.
- Voiceover
Using any of the ideas I’ve mentioned above, you can easily apply a voiceover. All you need to do is mute the original video and record the voiceover separately. You can do this either inside the Instagram app or using a voice recorder on your phone. If you’re not showing your face, another way to build the know, like and trust factor is through your voice.
- Photo Collage
One other popular reels trend is photo collage, which is very popular amongst photographers (shock). This is an effective way to showcase your work instead of just your classic grid post. This would work great if you’re a product based business. You could use it to showcase a specific product, for example if you have a Christmas related product then you can share this around Decemeber time.
I did a version of this HERE and briefly showed my face at the beginning, but this could easily be replaced with a photo of your product/service.
Tip: With any of these videos, I always use InShot to edit the reel so I can get the timing of the images spot on. It will depend on the music you’re using, but I prefer to use music that I can time each photo to the beats like I have in the example above.
And there you have it. 5 Instagram reel ideas that don’t require showing your face or being in front of the camera. Now you have no reason to avoid using reels as part of your strategy.
Don’t want to do it yourself? I’ve got it sorted!
If you want to start creating reels in your business but have no idea where to start, don’t want to be the actual one to create them and just outsource, why not hire an Instagram manager?? I’d love nothing more than to see your business skyrocket through reels. Check out my offers here!!
Have you recently noticed a drop in engagement and wondered if your content on Instagram is engaging the right people? ? Are you getting fed up with putting a mixture of posts out but still not getting the results you really want?
Before you go mapping out your content plan for the next 90 days, we’re going to take it right back to the basics. In this blog post, I’ll be sharing with you my 9 step process you need to go through FIRST in order to create engaging content that speaks to your ideal client.
Firstly, I want you to read this carefully:
Your vanity metrics (we’re talking follower count, the amount of likes and comments you get) DO NOT define how successful your business is.
Of course, you want to increase your engagement rate so that your content is pushed in front of more ideal clients, but please don’t put too much pressure on yourself to increase the vanity metrics. Clients will come to you if you’re putting out the right content for them.
Now, let’s dive straight into my nine step process you should be doing before you make another piece of content for it to lack engagement yet again.
Process to creating engaging content on Instagram
- Identify your ideal client
Your content will be all over the place and not directed toward anyone if you don’t know who you’re talking to and who you’re wanting to nurture and eventually work with. Ideally you want to read back any content you create, put yourself in your ideal clients shoes and ask yourself if it resonates with you.
- Discover your ideal clients pain points
This will be linking to the first step as you want to do this along with creating your ideal client profile. The things you want to find out include their current struggles, what they want more of and less of, what’s stopping them from making a purchase, and what will motivate them to make the purchase. Of course, you can dive a lot deeper than this. There are lots of resources online to help you go through this, just give me a shout if you need pointing in the right direction.
- Writing your mission statement
What’s your mission statement? It’s a brief description that tells people exactly what you do, who you help and how you can help them transform their business from A to B. A little exercise to figure this out is to look back at your ideal clients pain points, write down a few things that they’re feeling before working with you, and where you want them to be after working with you. If you already have clients that can give you testimonials or feedback, use this to help create this statement.
- Audit your current content
Here’s a little bit of practical work you can do. Conducting your own content audit of your account is crucial as it’ll tell you what is currently working, what’s not working and what is missing. This way you can create more of the content that your audience is engaging with and you know they’ll need.
If you haven’t already, you can download my FREE content audit below.
- Market Research
Utilise Instagram to find out what your audience are wanting to know and what are they currently struggling with. You can do this research simply through Instagram stories, creating a questionnaire and asking people to fill it out for you in exchange to win something (like a voucher or 1:1 session with you), asking your current clients, looking at your competitor’s posts and which are getting the best engagement and why. There’s plenty of ways to do this and it’s the best way to get results/ideas for content as it’s coming straight from your audience.
- Create evergreen content
The majority of your content that you want people to save needs to be evergreen content. Evergreen content is a piece of content that will remain relevant for a long period of time. For example, I could share 5 ways to create a killer caption, and know that this will still be relevant in 6 months time (in fact, I did create a post around this here…and it’s still relevant!!)
- Inspire & Educate
Obviously there are other content types you want to be sharing in your content plan but these two particularly work if you want your audience to save your content. Inspirational content could include sharing your story, a quote you live by, or a business win…and the educational content could be a how to, checklists, top tips and hacks, or guides. The list of ideas can be endless! I’d start by looking at your content pillars and brainstorming ideas under each of these that can be listed under inspirational or educational content.
- Always include a call to action
We’re diving a little deeper now but I wanted to include this as it’s super important! In every single piece of content, you need to be adding a call to action. You’ll see at the end of this blog post, I’ve asked you all to come join me on Instagram and DM me if you found this helpful. And you’ll find I do this on everything I put out there; social media posts, blog posts, emails, webpages…everything! Your audience needs to be told what they need to do next. If they want more tips, ask them to follow you and turn on your post notifications; if they need help and want to outsource, tell them where to go on your website; if this post was helpful, ask them to tag a friend in the comments who would also find it helpful. The list of calls to action is endless! And don’t forget, it doesn’t always have to be a selling call to action, it could simply be a question that you want people to answer in the comments.
- Create social media templates
To make the process of creating content less time consuming, I’d highly recommend designing a bundle of branded social media templates that you’ve tried and tested already and know will appeal to your audience. I use the PRO version of Canva to create any marketing asset in my business. I’ve had it for about 5 / 6 years now and it’s definitely a tool I couldn’t live without in my business. Ultimately, you can always get a designer to create templates for you so you can quickly make a copy of the template in Canva, edit the content and schedule or post it.
And voila! I gave you a lot more information there than I intended on giving but they’re all super important and I want you to get this process right from the start. And I’ll be here every step of the way to help you in creating content that connects, nurtures and converts your audience! In fact, I have a free download for you which has 100 content ideas, so you’ll no longer get stuck with what to post next. Grab it here!
Want to make sure you’re nailing your content strategy? In this blog I’ll be sharing with you the mistakes you need to avoid in your Instagram content. And to avoid making these mistakes in the future, I give you some advice on how to fix them!
Keep reading and take note of any you think you’re doing right now. We want to avoid these as they could have an impact on your content performance, and it will look like you don’t know what you’re doing.
Mistakes to avoid making in your Instagram content
Let’s dive right in!
- Using the same hashtags in every post
Before you go running round the house panicking about finding different hashtags for every single post, don’t worry. Apart from branded hashtags, you want to avoid using the same 30 (or however many hashtags you’re using) in every post. It won’t help you grow your account or reach new audiences. Hashtags don’t do all the work for you, your content does that, but they do help push your content out there to new people and potential ideal clients.
My advice would be to spend some time each month or quarter to review your hashtags and research more. Make sure you keep them categorised under each content pillar in your business and add them into a spreadsheet or keep them somewhere safe so it becomes easy to choose them when creating new content. If you really want to get on top of your hashtag research, I highly recommend investing in Flick.Tech. Flick is a great system that helps you analyse and review your hashtags in great detail. It makes the process easy for you, giving you accurate analytics of each hashtag you use in your content and allows you to group the hashtags you want to use regularly. Click here to check it out.
- Not making use of all content formats
Instagram now has different types of video, grid posts, guides, collaboration posts, stories, live video…the opportunities for creating content are endless! This can be a little overwhelming at first but choose one format to start with, that you may not have tried yet, research into how your competitors are using them, and have a go.
Let’s take reels, for example. We all know how big reels have grown since Instagram released the feature in 2019, and they are a great way to grow your account and reach new audiences that don’t even know you exist yet.
And don’t forget to take a look at your existing content and repurpose it using a different format. This is an easier way to create content for your socials, just by using the content you’ve already created and that resonated with your audience.
- Using too many CTAs
Calls to action need to be included in every single piece of content you post but stick to just the one. Having too many calls to action will confuse your audience and they’ll end up not taking any action because they won’t know which route is best for them to take. It’s overwhelming when you are asking a lot of your audience, so keep it simple and stick to the one.
- Speaking to too many people in your content
The aim is to make your readers think you’re speaking directly to them, as if they were in the same room as you just having a conversation. Read this blog back to yourself, who am I writing it for? YOU. There’s no ‘everyone’ or ‘they’ or ‘people…it’s all about you.
- Wrong keywords or no keywords at all
Instagram content is now searchable by keywords, so you want to be making sure you’re constantly using keywords you want to be searchable by.
How to fix these issues? It’s simple. Do a content audit of your most recent posts to find out if your content plan is working and targeted towards your dream client. If you don’t know where to go to do this, click HERE to download my FREE content audit! It helps you understand if your current content plan is spot on, or if it needs some work, and I show you how you can fix any issues.
