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In Jason Miller’s 2014 magnum opus, Welcome to the Funnel, he riffs on several high-level concepts related to marketing, including the Big Rock, the blogging food groups and the 6 golden rules of social media. While each one of these concepts can stretch well beyond the world of marketing, one in particular carries over to public relations better than the rest: the Leftover Turkey analogy.

Imagine your typical Thanksgiving. You cook up a giant turkey and serve one glorious meal to your entire family. Afterwards, you proceed to slice and dice the remaining meat for weeks, repurposing the bird for tasty soups, sandwiches and casseroles. The same can be done with content.

Miller describes Leftover Turkey as a method that you can use to feed the marketing machine by looking for opportunities to repurpose content that you already have created. Some examples in regards to content marketing include turning:

 

1. Research reports into infographics
2. Webinars into blog posts
3. White papers into SlideShare presentations
4. Interviews into podcasts
5. Evergreen content into updated and improved content

The basic premise of Leftover Turkey is to look for opportunities to repurpose information that you already have, which can also be part of a larger PR strategy. You just need to find pre-existing content, or even fresh content, that can be diced up into something new and exciting. When used just right, those PR turkey slices can spread existing ideas that align with your core message to a wider audience.

Some examples of how the Leftover Turkey analogy can be applied to PR include:

1. Turning blog posts into bylines

When we’re writing a blog post on how a certain technology works or why we’re a great alternative service to a specific pain point, we can repurpose these posts and put a different spin on them for a byline. We wouldn’t make them carbon copies of the original post, but we wouldn’t need to reinvent the wheel if the information is already available. We would just need to make them easily digestible and apply changes where necessary. The whole idea here is that if we have a topic that we find to be media friendly and relevant to readers, we can push it out to a larger audience simply by modifying it into a different format.

2. Turning case studies into pitches

Chances are you have many success stories with customers who have raved about the benefits of your products or services. Why keep those case studies confined to your website? Many times, PR professionals can write up a pitch that outlines those success stories specifically for media outlets. The press generally wants an outside voice regarding your products or services anyway, so this is an easy win-win that often gets readers interested.

3. Turning almost anything your company does into a blog post

Press releases, company announcements, executive speeches, media hits, events attended, thoughts on a topic and awards won can all be repurposed into a blog post. In Welcome to the Funnel, Miller explains that your blog is a symbol of your company’s wealth. It’s a form of social currency and a harbinger of future revenue. So you should be consistently adding information to your blog that you already have on tap. As a bonus, this will also improve your SEO and influence search rankings.

The bottom line is that Leftover Turkey enables you to produce more PR content faster, and therefore increase the likelihood of a media hit. More importantly, those irresistible turkey slices help you extend your story to a larger audience by obtaining more potential hits on a variety of platforms and outlets.