The Gist: Cher is a master at making the most of her greatest hits. Here’s what you can learn from her about content repurposing.
Cher basically spent an entire decade on farewell tour after farewell tour, selling new tickets to play old songs.
Repurposing content, basically.
And if it’s good enough for freaking CHER, it’s good enough for you! 🙃
Because you’re GOOD at this content marketing thing.
As good as Cher is at performing, cursing, and rocking sequins with fishnets.
Plus, you’ve been in the content marketing game for awhile…
When you browse through your blog archive or Google Drive folder of past email campaigns, you feel proud.
And you should!
You’ve found so many leads and connected to so many customers with that content.
So why are you ignoring your best content so badly now? 🤔
I know, I know…you don’t mean to.
But you’re sooo focused on keeping up with new content creation and trying to come up with new ideas, that you’re not paying enough attention to your greatest content hidden in the archives.
Consider your 5 most successful blog posts of all time…how up-to-date are those these days?
If the thought makes you cringe a little, it’s time to Cher-ify your greatest hits.
“No matter how hard I try, you keep pushing me aside. And I can’t break through…”– Cher, Believe (and your old content begging for attention)
Tweet this!
You need to “take ti-i-i-iiiime to move on”…and tend to your greatest hits compilation
Once your company has been using content marketing for awhile, maintaining old content should be as much of a priority as creating new ish. This is the basis of minimalist content marketing.
Otherwise, not only are you letting some of the best content you’ve created go stale, but you’re also diluting it with new content unnecessarily.
Why are you making things so hard on yourself?!
Take a Cher-style retirement… 
The super productive kind of retirement where you’re still working, just on something different.
Like how she “retired” from music to be an actress and then got to slap Nic Cage in Moonstruck. 
And instead of creating more content to drown out your greatest hits, you’re gonna take those hits and amplify them.
Like how Cher’s produced multiple compilation albums and *hundreds* of different farewell tours based on music that came out decades ago.
Here’s how to get started:
How to Repurpose Your Greatest Hits
1. Choose your greatest hits
Certain pieces of content age better than others. You need to know what to amplify and what to let die. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That means the first step in remixing and remastering your best content is choosing what content you’re going to use with a short remix-focused content audit.
Look at all your old assets – blog content, social media posts, emails, and more – and how well they’re meeting your marketing goals.
Once you’ve revisited your old content and its success metrics, make improvements and optimization easier by placing each piece into one of four buckets:
- Outdated strategy and low content quality
- Outdated strategy but high content quality
- Current strategy and high content quality
- Current strategy and low content quality
Consider a piece of content’s strategy outdated if its audience, topic, or call-to-action isn’t aligned with your current marketing strategy.
2. Create your greatest hits album
Next, you should create your greatest hits compilation, like any good superstar. These are a fantastic way to engage your superfans.
Only where Cher would create an album for her fans, you’re going to create an email sequence for yours.
When someone joins your email list, they’re interested, they’re engaged, and they want to learn from you. That means you NEED to be putting your best foot forward when you email them.
And what better way to impress than with your greatest hits?!
Create an automated email sequence with 3-5 emails, each of them driving your new subscriber to the original content.
Ta-daaa!
You now have a new way to nurture and warm up new leads. If you don’t have a welcome sequence yet, you can use it for that.
If you do have a welcome sequence or sales sequence for new subscribers, you can have subscribers receive this afterwards to keep leads warm and engaged.
3. Go on tour
Finally, you can’t Cher-ify your content marketing without a fake farewell tour. And don’t worry, you do NOT have to dress like her (although why wouldn’t you want to?!).
It’s time to take your content out on tour – that’s right, it’s PR and promotion time. Let’s make sure that content gets seen!
Depending on your marketing goals and where your customers hang out, here are some ideas to consider:
- Building backlinks to improve SEO and referral traffic
- Syndicating the content to sites like LinkedIn and Medium to leverage their built-in audience
- Breaking long-form content up into short social posts
- Doing podcast interviews or joint venture webinars teaching the content’s information to someone else’s audience
- Creating a YouTube or Live video about the topic and using that as an ad
See, you’ve got SO many options to get new customers without new content!
You might not be able to go a whole decade without creating a new piece, like she did, but it’s a start!
Which pop star can save your content strategy?
They’re masters of making the most out of their content, and all marketers should be learning from them! But which pop star should you get inspo from first?