In January of 2025, Taylor Swift charted #1 on Billboard, breaking a record for most Number 1s on the Top Album Sales list with a new version of an almost six-year-old album. The 2025 repressing of Lover (Live from Paris) heart-shaped vinyl sold 100k copies within 45 minutes of its release, and continued to sell out every time it was restocked on the online store.
Taylor Swift’s strategy of repurposing content, while unique for a singer, is very common from a business perspective. 94% of marketers repurpose content, indicating that reusing content is not a new concept… and yet, are you exploring the multi-facet reuse of your content?
Since July 2020, Taylor Swift has released five original studio albums, four studio album re-recordings (“Taylor’s Version” produced before Taylor was able to buy back her original catalog of recordings), presentation variants, deluxe editions, and live albums totaling 36 albums to date, with 20 million+ units sold. Swift has had a stratospheric few years of breaking records—including becoming the first musician ranked as a Forbes billionaire primarily from songs and performances— partially due to her intelligent “content” reuse. What can we learn from this? Read on to find out.
Results
Before delving into the ways you can reuse content, what results can you expect when you put in the foundational work to enable intelligent reuse?
Broaden Your Target Audience
Statistically speaking, if you increase the amount of content you produce, you are more likely to reach a wider audience. With the development of the Eras Tour (where each era represents one of her 11 studio albums, spanning several different genres), many Taylor Swift fans began to classify themselves by their preferred “era”, or the album that made them a fan of Swift. With each album and re-recording, she’s endeared more fans to her, based on their preferred genre.
The same can be said for reusing and repurposing content. By using Structured Content Management and effective content reuse, you decrease the overhead associated with creating and managing content. This effectively enables more systematic ways to reuse content and frees up time for content producers to create new and interesting types of content. This results in both an increase in content and the opportunity to broaden your audience. Moreover, content reuse frees up content producers’ and content marketers’ time, paving the way for two vital capabilities: personalization and experimentation.
Increase Customer Engagement with Personalization
In this day and age, most marketers use personalized content to reach their customers, but 74% say they struggle with scaling that personalization. While structured content alone can enable personalization of content in a more systematic way, when you combine structured content with the power of a knowledge graph, you also pave the way for effective personalization at scale. Using a combination of metadata applied to content components, data known about customers, and a knowledge graph, dynamic content can be created and scaled to reach more segments of customers. By giving customers relevant and personalized content for their needs, you are more likely to increase customer engagement and satisfaction.
Increase Conversion Rates with Experimentation
As a final highlighted benefit, deploying Structured Content Management enables your organization to run experiments on content, fail quickly, and adjust the content strategy as needed. While page variants and A/B testing can be deployed with traditional content management, it is not the same as being able to test an individual content component and run many different experiments quickly. This could be presentation experiments—does a CTA perform better on the side rail or above the fold embedded in the body content—but could also be which content performs best when presented in the “related content” section, an infographic or a blog? What ultimately comes from experimentation is an invaluable feedback loop that enables your organization to develop high-value, high-performing content that increases engagement metrics such as improving conversion rates.
Types of Reuse
Now that we’ve covered the benefits, let’s turn our attention to the types of reuse that are possible. Swift’s 36 record-shattering albums have three core reuse strategies: visual change, audience change, and assembly change. While there are certainly more than this, we’ll look at the same three methods in this blog: a new presentation, a new lens, and a new assembly. When it comes to your organization’s essential content, how can you reuse your content in the same ways without it becoming stale?
Change the Presentation of Content
Visually, many of the albums Swift has released in the last 5 years have thematic visual ties with the album art. Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) was released in three different shades and hues of purple: Orchid Marbled, Violet Marbled, and Lilac Marble. It’s not uncommon to see people create “Franken Variants,” where they’ve taken an LP from each version and put them together. The parallel to content strategy is the presentation changes made when employing multi-channel marketing. You may have written a long-form blog, but you’ll send it out in an email, on a social post, etc. Social posts can vary depending on the site, and many digital asset management systems (DAMs) support the ability to create automatic derivatives that fit the particular parameters of a social media channel (e.g. Instagram is 1080 x 1080 pixels, while LinkedIn is 1350 x 440 pixels) without creating an entirely new copy of this content.
What are other ways you could create a new presentation of the content, though? When we design Content Models at EK, we emphasize decoupling content from presentation to enable this kind of reuse. When you create a model for a content type, the focus should be on what information is being communicated rather than how it is presented. An example of this could be a social proof component. Perhaps when writing up a use case of your product by a customer in long-form content, you have quotes from customers. Within the body of the long-form content it may have a particular styling, but you also reuse the quote on landing pages as social proof, and on these pages it uses more of a card style. If you decouple the customer quote from the styling needed in different channels, you can automatically populate the different styles without keeping multiple copies.
This not only saves time from creating all new components every time they are reused, but also decreases the risk of mistakes that can be introduced through manually copying the content. We saw this recently with a client who used social proof throughout their marketing website on many different pages, but through a content audit, it was discovered that one of the quotes was misattributed to another customer in an entirely different industry. The customer then had to go through the entire website (10,000 pages!) and scrub the quote. If they had already implemented Structured Content Management, they could have changed all instances with a single content update.
Update the Tone or Perspective of the Content
For Record Store Day in 2023, Swift released a version of her Folklore album that had only been seen in a Disney+ special, The Long Pond Studio Sessions (LPSS). This record was an acoustic version of the pandemic release Folklore, recorded at Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond Studios. While many may wonder why you would buy another version of an album you already have, many fans prefer the LPSS version because Swift sounds more raw than the studio version. While it is infamously difficult to get the right tone on the internet (e.g. if I don’t use exclamation points or emojis, I’m worried you’ll think I’m cold), tone of voice can still be incorporated in content and be consistent with your organization’s branding. In the same way, when you’re communicating information with a group of stakeholders, you may shift tone depending on the make-up of those stakeholders. You’ll communicate information differently to a group of executives compared to a group of individual contributors, or a group from IT vs. a group from HR. How can you use this with your customer-facing content?
Perhaps your company writes a lot of thought leadership, and a customer can browse this thought leadership via an abstract or summary of the content. While you may have originally written the abstracts very technically, you may have since realized that your audience base is predominantly newer professionals who do not know all of your industry’s lingo. Using this insight into your customers, you could then update the abstracts to be more beginner-friendly to prompt more engagement with posts. While this could be a manual change, there’s also the possibility of using generative AI to adjust the tone or comprehension level of the abstracts to speed up rewriting and repurposing. Additionally, this paves the way for personalization by having variations of components tagged with different audiences. When a certain customer is identified as belonging to a certain group, content could be dynamically updated via a graph to be more appealing to the customer. This increases engagement and customer satisfaction.
Use a New Assembly of Content
On many levels, music is an assembly. A song is an assembly of notes and phrases, an album is an assembly of songs that tell a story, a playlist is an assembly of songs curated in a chosen order to mimic an event or a feeling. One of the things Swift did during the Eras Tour was include a “Surprise Song” section in which she would play one song from her discography on guitar and one on piano. While at the beginning of the tour, she was playing single songs on each instrument, by the end of the tour, she was making “mashups” of songs where she would seamlessly mix multiple songs together for a new creation. I Hate It Here x the lakes, The Manuscript x Long Live, I Think He Knows x Gorgeous—over the course of several months, Swift created many new songs that were assemblies of parts of other songs.
When talking about Structured Content Management, we frequently compare content components or modular content to Legos. By creating reusable “legos” of content, you enable many different assemblies of those legos. This could take many forms—marketing landing pages or generation of proposals—but one of the easiest examples to understand is learning content. Internal trainings are ubiquitous in many organizations and often a sore spot because they can be irrelevant to an employee’s position. For example, perhaps you have a training on harassment that employees are required to take, but because the course is packaged as a single unit rather than broken up by the lessons within, all employees end up learning about topics that are more relevant to people managers. This could mean that the employee “checks out” when consuming that lesson and is more likely to disengage from the rest of the training. By creating smaller blocks of content, you could then have a personalized assembly of topics tagged with individual contributors and a personalized assembly of topics tagged with people managers without having to create multiple copies of the same course.
Conclusion
While certainly not the first (or the only! or the last!) artist to develop methods of reuse, love her or hate her, it’s clear that Taylor Swift is a mastermind when it comes to engaging and expanding her fanbase. You can use these same techniques with your organization to expand your customer base. When you employ a clear content strategy and leverage methodical content engineering and content operations, your organization’s content has the potential to develop into a true business asset. If this has sparked your interest and you’re ready to get serious about bringing your content to its highest potential, give us a call.