Content Reuse Isn’t Cheating; It’s Surviving Scaling
Perception
You think reusing content is lazy or uninspired. You want each piece to feel “fresh”, “new”, and “original”.
Reality
Starting from scratch and reinventing the proverbial wheel for every content and marketing project doesn’t mean you’re creative; it means you’re inefficient.
Nobody wins awards for being the busiest or the most overworked. No seriously, they don't.
Why It Matters
Enabled and data-informed content reuse:
- Reduces everyone's' workload; writers, designers, strategists, SMEs, ... seriously, everyone benefits.
- Improves time-to-market.
- Preserves brand consistency.
- Increases ROI of each asset with every (re)use.
What Most Teams Get Wrong
- Falling into the mindset that being creative means “having to start from scratch” every time.
- Not having the governance (consistent metadata, tagging) technology (DAM), and or processes in place to enable content reuse.
- Don’t think about or build reuse into the content lifecycle planning phase.
- Only the final asset form of content is shared; the individual content BOM components are not made available via DAM or other asset repositories.
What to Do Instead
- At asset creation, ask: “How can these content components be reused in other/future projects, campaigns, etc.?”
- Tag assets clearly for ease of findability and discoverability to enable reuse.
- Include reuse metrics in asset KPIs.
- Store and share the complete BOM (bill of materials of content components – text blocks, quotes, images, graphics, video, etc.) that were used to create the final assets, campaigns, etc.
Seventh Bear Take
Content reuse doesn’t decrease originality. It’s what smart and effective teams do to survive, scale, and stay creative (and sane).
