More than one small business in two has only an hour a day, or less, for all of its marketing: 56% to be exact, according to the Constant Contact survey of small businesses in 2024. In that hour there are prospects to answer, a website to keep up to date, a newsletter to send. Creating content comes last, when it comes at all.
Content repurposing answers that problem with a simple question: what if the content already existed?
What content repurposing means
Content repurposing, or content recycling, means getting several posts out of content that already exists. It is usually applied to long-form content: a podcast becomes ten clips, a webinar becomes three articles, a conference talk becomes a series of quotes.
All of that assumes you produced the long-form content in the first place. If you have neither a podcast nor a webinar, the method seems to have nothing to do with you.
It does, though. Every week you produce hours of long-form content without calling it that: your calls.
Why a client call is the best source
A professional spends 14.8 hours a week in meetings on average, according to the survey by Reclaim.ai, a maker of calendar software. Even if only a fifth of that time is spent advising a client, that makes three hours a week in which you say exactly what a prospect would like to hear.
A call has three qualities that no shoot has:
- the question is real. It is asked by someone who has the problem, in their own words, which are also the words other people type into a search engine;
- the answer is not recited. You talk the way you talk, with an example that comes to mind, with no script and no take to redo;
- the time is already spent. The call would have taken place anyway. Whatever you get out of it is a bonus.
That is the idea we argue for in our manifesto, and that we have set out for consultants in Document, don’t create.
The method: from call to short in five steps
1. Choose the call and tell your guest
Not all calls are equal. Keep the ones where you answer questions. Before you start recording, say so, and say why. We have written down the sentences to use: it takes one, at the start, and a clear yes in return.
2. Hold the call as usual, with two habits
Do not perform for the camera: being natural is what gives the passage its value. Two habits help a great deal all the same, and they make the call better for your client too:
- restate the question before you answer. “You’re asking me how to set your price.” The passage then makes sense without what came before;
- give a whole answer before you digress. One idea, one example, one conclusion. The nuance comes afterwards.
3. Spot the passages that stand on their own
Listen back, or let a tool do it. You are looking for passages of 12 to 90 seconds that make sense without the call around them: a question and its answer, a mistake to avoid, an example with figures. We describe the six kinds of passage to keep in a separate article.
4. Edit for the phone
A short is watched vertically, often with the sound off. So it needs a 9:16 frame centred on the person speaking, captions, and an edit that takes out the silences, the hesitations and the false starts.
5. Post one short at a time
One per working day, not five on Monday. Each short carries one idea and stands alone: the order you post in does not have to follow the order of the call.
A sample week, from a single call
Take a 45-minute advisory call with a client who is preparing to launch an offer. The example is made up, but it looks like what you find in a call of that kind.
| Day | The passage | Length |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | The question they opened with, “what price do I launch at?”, and your answer | 50 s |
| Tuesday | The mistake you see in almost all your clients at this stage | 35 s |
| Wednesday | The example of a launch that worked, told without a name | 70 s |
| Thursday | Your rule for deciding what to take out of an offer | 25 s |
| Friday | What you advised them to do the very next day | 40 s |
Five posts, less than four minutes of video in all, drawn from a call you had already planned. The following week, another call.
What not to expect
Not every call yields five shorts. Some yield eight, others none: a planning meeting, a progress check-in where you go through a list, a call where your client talks more than you do.
That is normal. Repurposing does not manufacture anything: it finds what is already there. If no passage stands on its own, there is no short, and that is better than posting a bad one.
The four mistakes to avoid
- Posting a passage that needs context. If the viewer has to know which client it is about or what was said before, they move on to the next video.
- Leaving your client on screen without their agreement. Nothing that shows them, lets them be heard or quotes them is posted without them.
- Posting everything on the same day. You use up a week’s material in one go.
- Forgetting the captions. A good share of videos are watched with the sound off.
By hand, or without thinking about it
By hand, the chain is long: record the call with the platform, wait for the file, download it, import it into a clipping tool, choose the clips, reframe them, caption them, export them. Clipping tools do the second half of that work well; we compare them with Dailies, OpusClip for example, feature by feature.
Dailies shortens the chain by starting from the other end: the extension records the call you hold in Chrome on Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Zoom. A few minutes after you hang up, you find up to eight captioned vertical shorts, without their silences or their hesitations. One switch blurs your guests. Dailies handles calls in French and in English, including when you switch from one to the other, and its extension’s interface is in French. You download the ones you like and post them yourself: Dailies posts nothing for you.
Key takeaways
- Content repurposing starts from what exists. Your calls are the long-form content you already produce.
- A passage worth posting makes sense on its own, in under a minute and a half.
- Restating the question before you answer is often enough to make a passage stand alone.
- One call gives a week of posts, at one short a day.
- Nothing is posted without the agreement of the person who was on the other side of the call.
Sources
- Constant Contact, Small Business Now, 2024: a software vendor’s survey of small businesses.
- Reclaim.ai, Smart Meetings Trends Report, 2024: a software vendor’s survey of professionals.