Webinars are a key part of acquiring and retaining customers. But many marketing teams are still unclear on how to leverage the content webinars create and use these evergreen assets in future campaigns.
As a B2B marketer myself, I get it - planning and executing a successful webinar takes A LOT of time, resources and coordination. And it’s usually worth it.
From high-level education videos to success story webinars to pre-recorded demos - interactive visual content can help connect brands to their prospects in a more human way than email or white papers ever can. In fact, 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders say that webinars are the number one channel to generate high-quality leads.
So, the last thing you want to do is waste your efforts. How can you transform your webinars into an endless supply of content? We actually just discussed best practices and tips with Content Marketing Institute, watch the on-demand webinar here or read on!
What to do Before and After Your Live Webinar
Let’s start from the top - how do you create an evergreen webinar? Having an angle or topic that is virtually timeless is the key to repurposing webinar content.
For example, if you're going to run a webinar this coming January about Marketing Trends for 2020; the title will be important in order for you to continue using this asset. Try using a title like The Future of Marketing. Or try a different angle like The Guide to Marketing Forecasting and dive into how exactly how you came to select the trends. You don't want a potential lead to come across your webinar in November of next year and wonder why you're promoting an asset titled Marketing Trends of 2020.
Another way to develop evergreen topics for webinars is to let your best performing marketing assets inform your webinars. For example, do you have a blog post that performs really well year over year? Update and refresh the content into a webinar. You can easily repurpose the most important information and actionable advice from the blog post and even produce additional marketing assets, like nurture emails.
Here’s the thing — webinars require a significant amount of prep work. So much so, that it’s easy to forget about the after-life of a webinar. But, it’s a mistake to run a webinar and then let it collect virtual dust in an unvisited section of your website.
In fact, webinars are a gold mine of marketing assets with so many nuggets of content that can be pulled out and used based on your needs.
For example, we recently led a webinar with a media partner that offered more of a storytelling aspect than some of our other webinars. After the live event, we pitched a few articles with different angles using the content from the webinar; we created infographic-style images using data shared during the webinar; we created a few different style CTAs that could be used across our own marketing workflow; and we promoted the gated on-demand version to different segments of our database.
We easily (and quickly) developed over five new assets from ONE webinar. This beats slapping the webinar recording on your website and then forgetting about it.
Repurposing webinars is a great way to provide valuable information to your audience without having to create net new content from scratch. So let's break it down - here's what our team usually does after a webinar.
First and foremost, we send out the recorded version to all registrants and publish it on our Resources section of our website. We also transcribe the presentation and use that content to create blog posts, guest contributions to other sites, and sometimes even use the messaging across other Sales and Marketing initiatives. Another great way to use the transcription is to actually post the full text along with your webinar recording. Not only does this provide a huge SEO boost, but it's also offering your readers another way to consume this type of content.
Unfortunately, people don't have the time - or attention span - to sit through an entire webinar but a lengthy visual presentation can easily be reworked into a handful of short, digestible video clips. Slice up the webinar recording into shorter video clips that can accompany blog posts or be shared on social and email.
You'll want to pin this for later - here's a post-webinar checklist of content assets that can be created from your live-event.
This is all to say: Take time to plan for post-event. Don't just send the webinar recording in an email, post it on your website, and call it a day. Take a strategic approach to each webinar and pull as much content as possible from it.
After all, a well-produced webinar has already been researched and organized. So, you don’t have to track down an expert or commit to extensive planning time. At the end of the day, repurposing webinar content is both valuable and relatively simple to create or build on.