By: Sara Balaban, Employer Brand Content Creator
Last year, we delved into how to create meaningful content that can stretch beyond the festivities of the holiday months. Since then, you’ve created content illuminated by the beautiful images of your design team, and you’ve celebrated with good cheer as the engagement of this content burst like a bottle of bubbly on New Year's Eve. You’re thrilled at the results, but now you’re wondering how to continue that creativity and get more engagement in the process. While we love a shiny new present, re-gifting your existing content with a touch of sparkle may be just the thing to share this holiday season and beyond.
So, save your time, money, and emotional energy for the cookie-baking and gingerbread house-making, and get ready to revisit your “old” content in a new light. In the spirit of another triumphant and celebratory year ahead, here are five reasons you should re-gift your existing content to maximize your employer brand and help you start the new year off with ease.
Have yourself a merry little timesaver
While the holiday slow-down upon us, this is actually an opportune time to keep people engaged with content you know performs well. Take advantage of this rare time to mine through previously posted content and adapt it as needed to create topical new pieces that won’t take too much time or energy. Think of your resourcefulness as creativity, put yourself in reverse, and go through archives and older content you’ve already drafted or executed. You might be wondering how to go about this in a simple way, and luckily, you’ve already done most of the work! The platforms you post your content on can share the analytics in just a few clicks, so you can determine what content is most relevant.
Take LinkedIn, for example; you can filter your posts by engagement to see what has performed best to determine which pieces of content to prioritize and repurpose. Consider working off of content with a flexible concept so you can turn it into a content series and build equity. Try shifting your content by changing the lens or the angle of the message, update it with some fresh copy and design, and you’re ready to go!
All I want for Christmas is budget-friendly content
Budget. One of the most common words any employer brand or TA leader is bound to run into. But, who said great content requires spending money? That’s the beauty of re-gifting! Not only is it economical and time-saving, but it’s also a free effort to work off of content you’ve already created. As a gift to yourself, your team, and your brand, review the content you’ve worked so hard to create throughout the year. After evaluating what performed best, it’s time to pull out the glitter and bows before officially re-gifting that content.
Here are a few of our favorite re-gifting ideas:
Refresh your blogs to maximize SEO or to update a new company benefit.
Pull impactful quotes from blogs, employee stories, or internal newsletters and flip them into featured content.
Translate videos or podcasts into written forms of content.
And with the money you’ll inevitably save by going this route, you can create a “re-gifting checklist,” which can highlight the core messages, platforms, and templates to build from to use in the future.
SEO is coming to town
If you haven’t been focused on bringing SEO into your content, ‘tis the season to give your content a little extra love. Repurposing your content can help you grow and refine your online presence, promote your content and brand, and assist with your distribution process. It can also help you improve how you show up on different search engines, another reason why we love the concept of re-gifting.
With the support of analytics tools like Google Analytics, you can quickly assess which content has the most potential to take your SEO from old to new again. Look for metrics like traffic, keywords, broken links, and overall performance, and then you can update your content to reflect the relevant information and keywords you want your audience to engage with. Just because your content has already been published doesn’t mean it’s old news. Reviving your existing content by focusing on SEO optimization might help increase engagement and give you updated content to share. Check out Hubspot’s guide on reviving blogs for SEO.
Rockin’ around the consistency tree
When it comes to your employer brand messaging, there’s nothing we love more than driving a consistent message, and shifting and re-gifting your content will do just that! At this stage, you know it's a great time to reinforce your brand message by using content you know has performed well, and it’s equally a great time to spruce up the content that needs a little extra attention. Not only might this help drive even better results, but It’s also beneficial to keep reinforcing these messages for external and internal viewers.
Have a holly, jolly group of ambassadors
Part of building and maintaining a strong employer brand means championing it from the inside, and what better way to do that than by leaning into your incredible workforce? While those OOO messages may be abundant around the holiday season, this is still a great time to plan for weeks to come with fresh “new” content for employees to engage with. Consistency in your brand messaging is key, and consistency in providing content (and different versions) to your employees is equally important. Your employees are a legitimate audience to test and create your content with, and your next great content piece might even come directly from them.
If you encourage your employees to tag and use hashtags on their posts, you likely already have a beautiful stream of content to sift through. In other words, re-gift employees with the content they’ve already created! Think about all the heart-warming and impactful content you’ve seen your employees share. Why not repost or re-tweet it with some updated copy? Not only is that new and authentic content for your audience to see, but it’s also budget-friendly, and your employees will probably appreciate the recognition.
Yes, it’s beginning to look a lot like OOO message season, but re-gifting content is not just a seasonal effort. When that content creativity brain freeze sets in, future you will be appreciative of the work you put in now!
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