How B2B Marketers are Using AI to Redefine Content Repurposing

Creating great content has never been enough. To connect, you’ve always needed to repurpose to maximise its impact. Every audience segment, every platform, every stage of the buyer's journey calls for tailored messaging.

Although never advisable, ‘create once, publish everywhere’ has often been the fallback for content teams overwhelmed by the demands of content marketing. But with buyers’ expectations growing for self-service and hyper-relevance, marketers must find innovative solutions to keep up. 

Enter artificial intelligence. AI is changing the content repurposing workflow, allowing marketers to "create once, repurpose intelligently."

Using AI tools, marketers can adapt content with unprecedented speed and accuracy. A single blog post, for example, can spawn a series of ideas for dozens of social media posts, a YouTube video script, and personalised email newsletters. Each piece of content can be fine-tuned for specific niches, platforms, and buying stages.

This isn't about taking shortcuts. It's about achieving one-to-one communication at scale and meeting the ever-growing demand for personalised, valuable content across every touchpoint of the B2B landscape.

The Ups and Downs of Repurposing Content

Reusing your digital marketing content offers a lot of benefits, but it isn’t always easy. For many digital marketers, however, the effort is well worth the reward. 

Benefits of Content Repurposing

To meet your goals, you need engaging, polished content that’s original, exceeds audience expectations, and is optimised for the distribution channel or platform. You also need to publish frequently to maintain engagement with your customers and stay relevant in your industry. Keeping up with that level of content creation is no small feat, particularly if you're working with a small budget or staff.

Rather than continually spinning your wheels creating new content from scratch, it makes sense to make optimum use of your existing assets. It not only saves you time and money but also keeps your content fresh and top-of-mind for users. 

Other upsides to content repurposing include: 

• Extended reach and connections with a wider audience 

• Affordable boost to your online presence and ROI 

• Easier distribution across multiple platforms 

• Updating and refreshing outdated content 

• Meeting audience demand for content variety 

• Making content more discoverable 

• Improving ranking on search engines

Above all else, using repurposed content enables you to get the most ROI from your resources, reinforcing your brand messaging without going back to the drawing board every time you want to publish additional content. 

Common Issues with Repurposing

While repurposed content is an excellent alternative to constantly coming up with the next great idea and producing new material, it still has its drawbacks. 

Manually adjusting content for various platforms is tedious and time-consuming. Every channel has specific requirements for style and format, which means your team could spend hours changing assets to ensure they’re suitable for each platform and audience. 

Maintaining consistency and quality across platforms is another challenge when you repurpose content. It’s easy for mistakes to fly under the radar when you spend so much time reworking the same assets. 

It’s also difficult to personalise at scale. Creating unique versions of your content for all your audience segments requires close attention to detail and, depending on how granular you want your targeting to be, can create an overwhelming workload. Tailoring and fine-tuning your repurposed content can be as labour-intensive as generating new content, particularly when you’re trying to add variety and avoid repetition while also maintaining your messaging. 

Key AI Capabilities for Repurposing

AI has multiple capabilities that make it an excellent option for repurposing content. Machine learning algorithms and advanced data analytics can automate and strengthen many aspects of your process. 

Content Analysis

Doing an exhaustive, manual analysis of your existing content is impractical at best, tedious at worst. Fortunately, AI systems can rapidly analyse enormous volumes of data, assessing factors such as engagement rates, audience demographics, and trends.

It can then use that information to make suggestions for prioritising repurposing, highlighting what adaptations might have the biggest impact on different platforms. It can help you with ideas for repurposing strategies that will better align with certain audience segments and demographics. It might suggest that you change the structure, format, length, or style of a particular asset.

The quality of the suggestions you receive ultimately depends on the quality of the training data and prompts you use. For AI to make evidence-based suggestions rather than theoretical ones, use it to analyse historical data on content performance across different platforms. 

As with any suggestions, it’s up to you whether and how to take and implement them. For the best results, you’ll need team members with expertise in interpreting AI insights and putting them into practice in your content.

Format Optimisation

While getting suggestions from AI is helpful, using it to speed up the process when creating content truly takes repurposing to the next level.

AI writing assistants can help marketers with content summarisation, condensing longer assets into short-form content. For example, you can use Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude to quickly create a series of social media posts from a single blog post. AI will generate ideas for different post formats and different platforms, complete with hashtags, emojis and visual suggestions.

You can also use LLMs for content curation. Provide the AI with a list of existing content and ask it to tag and organise it by topic, audience, or segment. You can then use this data to create email marketing compilations, blog lists, or collections. 

Video AI tools like Lumen5 and Pictory.ai can transform blog posts or articles into engaging video content. These tools use natural language processing to identify key points in the text and pair them with relevant visuals, creating short video summaries. This is particularly useful for repurposing written content for platforms like YouTube, Instagram Reels, or TikTok.

AI embedded in video tools is also making video captioning easier. This can improve accessibility and usability, bearing in mind that all users prefer to watch videos on mute from time to time, depending on their situation.

Transcription services, such as Otter.AI, can be used to repurpose audio content such as podcasts or webinars into text. This transcribed content can then be repurposed into blog posts, social media content, or even ebooks, extending the reach of your audio content to text-based platforms.

And text-to-speech makes it possible to take content the other way too. You can create audio content by converting text to AI-generated voice recordings, such as providing a read-out of your blog posts as we do here on our blog.

Tone and Style Adaptation

Another strength of AI repurposing tools is adjusting content tone and style. AI can suggest changes to your content to suit different channels and audiences, such as making the text more professional for LinkedIn or more casual for Instagram. It can also help with article spinning, rephrasing existing articles to produce new versions suitable for reusing on platforms like Substack and Medium.

These adaptations help ensure brand voice consistency across all channels while adapting to platform norms. 

Beyond basic differences in style, AI can also help you break through language barriers that could limit your market. While translation should always be checked by a fluent speaker to pick up any idiosyncrasies, AI can help to speed up the process of localising content to connect with a more diverse pool of prospects and customers. 

High-Impact AI Repurposing Use Cases 

While every kind of AI content repurposing has the potential for significant value, some methods are especially powerful for your core metrics and customer engagement. Remember that you’re not limited to turning blog posts into social media captions or webinars into short-form videos. AI also offers a way to scale personalised, targeted, relevant experiences with repurposed content.  

AI can assist with personalising content based on buyer personas, stage of the customer journey, preferences or behaviours. It can simplify the process by analysing audience data and adjusting your content to make it more interesting and engaging for various groups.

For example, you could repurpose high-performing blog content to enhance your account-based marketing (ABM). Customise content to address the specific needs of different members of the buying committee, industry verticals, or companies. You could even use it to kick the process of hyper-personalising content for specific high-value contacts. 

Because the tools work so quickly, you can generate multiple variations of repurposed content and test its effectiveness, using the results to define your approach to content moving forward. 

Laying the Foundation for AI-Driven Repurposing

AI can improve your operational efficiency and enhance your customer engagement by automating data-heavy tasks and delivering tailored experiences across various digital channels. However, before that can happen, you’ll need to establish some groundwork.

Taking these steps will put you in a prime position to begin creating and publishing your repurposed content with the help of AI. 

Define your goals 

Decide what you want to accomplish by using repurposing as a tactic. For example, do you want to expand into new markets? Into new platforms? Do you want to support an objective to increase lead generation or improve customer retention?

Conduct a content audit 

Use AI to analyse existing assets to find high-performing and evergreen content. Whether they’re whitepapers, videos, or blog posts, focus on content that you could adapt for multiple formats and channels.
Tag each piece of content by topic, buyer persona, and stage in the customer journey to facilitate AI-driven personalisation through marketing automation platforms.

Develop modular architecture 

Make your marketing more agile by breaking content down into smaller, reusable components that are connected but not dependent on one another. For example, keep track of key messages, data points, and customer quotes.
To streamline repurposing, design templates for different content formats that can be easily populated with modular components.

Map Content to the B2B Buyer's Journey

Define key touchpoints and information needs at each stage of the buying process. Then, create a content matrix that aligns existing assets with buyer personas and journey stages. Finally, identify opportunities to repurpose content for different stages. For example, turning a technical whitepaper into awareness-stage blog posts.

Assess and Enhance Data Infrastructure

Evaluate your current data collection and management practices with AI in mind. Remember that AI is only as accurate as the data you provide it with.

Part of this is ensuring your data pipeline compliant with relevant regulations (e.g. GDPR, CCPA) and that your customers are aware of how their data is being used.

Select and integrate tools

Research the tools and platforms that will make content repurposing most efficient and effective. Evaluate tools based on their ability to handle complex B2B use cases such as account-based marketing. Plan for a phased implementation, starting with pilot projects to demonstrate value.

Consider factors like integration capabilities, scalability, and alignment with your tech stack. Many marketing automation solutions have begun integrating AI tools and capabilities into their platforms. For example, HubSpot AI has a Content Remix tool to transform blog posts into different content formats.

Upskill Your Team

Effective use of AI requires a culture of experimentation and continuous learning. Work to identify skills gaps in your marketing team, then provide training on AI concepts, tools, and best practices for content repurposing.

Establish Governance and Quality Control Processes

One of the primary limitations of AI is that it can’t always understand the full context and intent of the original content. It may miss out on nuances that have a substantial effect on how customers receive and respond to the information. As a result, AI might create repurposed content that has errors, misinterpreted messaging, or unclear statements.

Your team will need guidelines for maintaining brand consistency across repurposed content and approval workflows to ensure AI-generated content meets quality standards. Create processes for human review and refinement of AI-generated outputs.

Repurpose and Revitalise Your Content 

AI is transforming content repurposing. It's not just about doing more with less – it's about making every piece of content work harder for you. With AI, you can quickly adapt your message for different audiences and platforms, keeping your content fresh and relevant without starting from scratch.

The ability to personalise at scale is a game-changer. Imagine the impact of being able to turn a whitepaper into a targeted campaign, tailored to a specific industry or decision-maker.

However, to be effective strategies will need to do more than have AI fill in the blanks. You need to combine AI's efficiency with your team's creativity and strategic thinking for the best results.

Don't let your great content go underused. Let's put AI to work for you. Book a demo with 1827 Marketing today and discover how we can transform your content strategy. Your audience is waiting for the personalised, high-value content that AI-powered repurposing can deliver.