Repurposing Content and Making the Most of your Employee Stories
So, you’ve uncovered some great team member stories from within your organization to be used for your next recruitment marketing campaign, now what?
These stories don’t have to be ‘one and done.’ By their very nature, stories can be repurposed within different contexts. Think of each story as your base from which to draw several pieces of content that can be repurposed throughout multiple employer branding and recruitment marketing campaigns moving forward.
Repurposing Content From One Story
A great story needs to be two things: engaging and telling. An engaging story is succinct, has a beginning, middle, and conclusion, and is told in a way that holds the listener’s attention. From a content perspective, the story also has to be “telling” of your organization and truly demonstrate and best depict what the culture there is like.
Another way to think about it: after consuming this story, what has the person learned about who you are as an organization that they would not have known otherwise?
In Summer 2017, the Stories Inc. team conducted our own storytelling video project to create content surrounding our team and how our culture sets us apart from other agencies.
Let’s take a look at an excerpt from an interview with one of our videographers, Christian. Highlighted are the portions we utilized to tell his story about “running backwards with the gimble.”
This is how the story turned out in video form:
Now that we had the story, we knew that we could repurpose the story to create more content. First, we considered some takeaways someone consuming this story might have as a means to guide us in repurposing the content:
- Stories Inc. is always looking to improve how they are shooting their videos.
- Christian is a very technically skilled videographer willing to go above and beyond to get the best-possible shot.
- Capturing the “wow” factor is the goal of every project.
Ultimately we repurposed Christian’s story in three ways: one, for a static video that would live on a landing page on our company website; two, a longer-form culture video that was a part of a marketing campaign, and three, a video to embed within a job description. Let’s break down how it happened:
Static Company Site Content
A large part of Stories’ brand is being personable, fun, and relatable on top of being technically skilled at what we do. Clients trust us to get their team members to open up in front of the camera; creating as many touch points and opportunities to gain that trust is essential to our success.
Keeping this in mind, we zeroed in on the second takeaway from Christian’s video, Christian is a very technically skilled videographer willing to go above and beyond to get the best-possible shot.
We want to prove ourselves as personable AND technical. This story takes care of the latter, so that meant we had to dive back into the transcripts to find the former:
We put the two stories together to create “Meet Christian,” an opportunity for our audiences to get to know Christian as both a person AND a professional. In fact, we loved the video so much that we created something similar for each member of our project team, too.
Longer-form Culture Video
Returning to our three takeaways, the first and the third felt like they could be combined to communicate one unified message: a culture of relentless improvement in order to wow our clients. Christian’s story did just that, so we dove into the two other project team members’ transcripts, Scott and Caroline, to see what else we had to support this topic for a longer-form video.
We found two other points of interest. The first was the concept of filming in some extreme locations. Capturing the interviewees in as natural of an environment as possible takes the content to the next level and ensures we are staying authentic to our client’s brand. To demonstrate that, both Caroline and Scott had described filming in an active airplane cargo shed:
The second point of interest was that Caroline had also told the same story of Christian running backwards with the camera, only from her perspective. While the overall messaging was the same, Caroline’s perspective added some additional details and engagement that rounded it out nicely.
We decided to use our original Christian story as the bones of the overall video, spacing his different segments out and weaving Scott and Caroline in throughout. Here’s how Christian’s :40 story turned into a 1:40 Project Team Culture video, dubbed “Running Backwards for a Story:”
Video Job Description
The third repurposing of Christian’s story came about more organically. When we were recently looking to hire an additional videographer, we were brainstorming what we value both in a team member and a videographer in order to put together a job description:
- Dedication to client success
- Attitude of relentless improvement
- Advanced technical skill
Revisiting our original Christian story, that story captured both the technical aspects of the position as well as the characteristics we valued in a videographer. So, with just a few clicks we were able to upload it to the job description to provide valuable insight to potential candidates.
One story… three pieces of content
Who said that one story needs to stay one story? Starting from our original standalone story from Christian, we were able to create three original pieces of content that served three diverse purposes within our content strategy.
And once you uncover your team’s stories you will be able to, too.
