Webinar use skyrocketed during the early days of pandemic lockdowns and work from home. With limited competition from other events and activities, many organizations reported live webinar attendance ranging from 60 to 70 percent.
But as in-person events have been returning and attendee calendars are filled, live webinar attendance has been returning to pre-pandemic levels. Current research shows a majority of attendees don’t watch webinars live.
Today, an average of 35 percent of registrants convert into live webinar attendees.Given planning and producing a quality webinar is a significant undertaking, repurposing your webinar content and giving it a longer life is critical to event and content marketing strategies.
Read on for three ways to design and deliver webinars to give your webinar content an afterlife:
1. Select meaty topics
Webinars can fulfill various event objectives, whether attracting leads, engaging with existing customers, or creating brand awareness and positioning your company.
Types of popular webinar topics:
- Awareness: educational, interview-style thought leadership
- Consideration: case studies and demonstrations
- Preference/purchase: technical training and support
But too often, organizations try to do too much with a single webinar. To improve your webinar content afterlife, rather than selecting a broad topic that achieves multiple objectives, go narrow instead of wide. Choose a specific, meaty topic based on what your prospects and customers need to know, and go deep into the details during the discussion.
Try these ideas to identify a narrow topic that will improve your content afterlife:
- Review successful past webinars and look for additional related content areas that can be a follow-up to the original.
- Ask internal teams to share the most common questions they receive. Frequently asked questions make great webinar topics because your audience is telling you this is something they want to learn about.
- Take a look at your blog’s analytics or social media insights to identify post topics that received the most views, shares, and comments. Consider repurposing content from the most popular posts into webinars or expanding on the idea for a more in-depth presentation.
2. Repurpose content in ways that put it in front of new audiences
When a live webinar is over, often it’s never seen again. Considering the time and effort to plan and produce a great webinar event, it makes sense to repurpose the content into other valuable assets – which can help catch the eyes of new audiences.
If you aren’t already repurposing webinar content, create new evergreen content with these seven easy ideas.
Don’t just limit repurposing content for current audiences, though. Instead, think about reaching new contacts who may have different ways they prefer to consume content. For example, are there other new mediums to leverage, like audio/podcasts or emerging social media platforms?
To reach expanded audiences, add these ideas to the content mix:
- Pull a webinar segment and transform it into an audiogram. An audiogram is a file that combines visual art, a sound wave, an audio track, and a dialogue transcription. Think of it as a short teaser that is more interesting than a gif but requires less production than a video.
- Tap into a paid promotional network. Tools like Outbrain and Taboola require an investment of a few extra dollars but can help place interesting webinar content in front of new audiences, such as suggested stories on popular websites.
- Turn webinar content into a drip email marketing campaign. Drip marketing is simply sending a set number of emails to an audience, automatically at specific times, based on actions they take or status changes. Break content from webinars into short, digestible emails and string them into a helpful, educational sequence targeted to a segment of prospects or customers.
- Share any new assets created with the original webinar interviewee, panel members, or speakers so they can also post and distribute to their channels. Just as you’d ask them to share and promote their participation pre-event, give them the tools to continue promoting after the webinar.
- Create additional video assets using a tool like Clipr as a simplified way to create a helpful library of webinar content.
3. Design content that keeps on giving
When selecting speakers, keep the end goal in mind of repurposing webinar content. For example, a well-known or influential speaker with impressive credentials or a large following naturally makes content repurpose-worthy.
Here are several ways to specifically create content that keeps on giving:
- Host a follow-up podcast with the webinar’s speakers expanding on the original webinar topic.
- Splice key takeaways from the speaker into short segments – less than 3 mins – and post on YouTube.
- Create visual graphics with speaker quotes, statistics, or examples from your webinar to post on social media (and tag the original speakers too).
- Turn the webinar Q&A into a blog post, ala FAQs with the speaker.
- Compile the best speaker quotes into a takeaway/roundup for an email or article.
- Design an infographic based on a speaker’s shared processes or list outline.
And to streamline the process of repurposing speaker content, follow these production tips:
- Ask questions in different ways to hear other answers – giving you the flexibility to have multiple takes to select the best option.
- Be a little provocative when interviewing – which can make for attention-grabbing teaser tweets.
- Give a clear pause between the interviewer’s questions and the interviewee’s answers – don’t talk over the interviewee, so it’s easier to extract sound bytes and video clips from the transcript.
- Ask the speaker for references to other content – and make a suggested reading list.
- Fill every minute with relevant discussion or content delivery – don’t waste time on introductions, chit-chat, or getting-to-know-you exercises.
- Test that the file format recordings from the platform can be easily converted into other form factors.
While there are many ways to repurpose webinar content, you don’t have to do all or even most of them. Start with one or two that are easy to tackle and expand into creating other repurposed content. Even a few simple extensions will give the webinar an afterlife beyond the original broadcast date.
Read the latest on our blog to discover other best practices and tips to transform your webinars and events – from pre-planning to execution to post-event.
