Repurposing White Papers for Maximum ROI

After consuming such a large chunk of time and effort, it makes sense to consider repurposing white papers, or at least the research behind them. After all, you want to get as much mileage out of the investment as you possibly can. Here are a few ideas on how to recycle the content.

Slide Shows

A white paper is the ideal candidate to convert into a slide show that can be used both for live presentations, and for posting on the various slide sharing sites. The advantage of a slide show is the information is digested down to bite-sized bullet points. A busy executive or engineer might justify the time to flow through a slide show far more easily than to read a white paper. Of course, the full white paper should be made available in case somebody is actually interested in learning more. Placing a link to your landing page is a simple way to do that.

Once the deck is ready, there are a lot of options. In-person presentations are the most obvious, but webinars are also a viable option to consider. If you don’t have the resources for a webinar, perhaps there is a webcast that would love having you as a guest.

Finally, post the slide show to various slide sharing sites. Some are SlideShare, myBrainShark, SlideBoom, and Scribd.

Blog Posts

White papers are treasure troves full of blog post ideas. A decent white paper will provide ideas for several blog posts, and all the research is done for you already. At the end of the blog post, you can link to the white paper landing page for those interested in more information.

The white paper can also be used as source material for social media content. While you could simply post a link to the blog posts, using slightly different content on each platform is ideal. Even if the blog post is recycled in its entirety on the company Facebook page, at least new content is being posted regularly. That helps with search engine optimization.