Get More Bang for Your Buck: How to Repurpose Webinar Content

For all the work that goes into pulling off a webinar, they tend to go by quite quickly. Coordinating speakers, polishing presentations, promoting the event -- all that work and then it's done in a flash. 

Given all that effort, running a webinar shouldn’t be a fleeting way to generate a few leads. Done right, a repurposed webinar can be among the best content assets you have for long-term lead generation.

With the help of my team at Citrix, we create about 150 blog posts, ebooks, and videos each quarter. That may sound like a lot of work (and I won’t tell you that it’s not), but one best practice has helped us immensely as our content marketing grew: We centralized our content marketing on webinars.

When you wrap up your webinar, you’ll be walking away with a lot more than just the leads your initial event generated. For example, knowing what questions webinar attendees asked in a live event tells us more about them than if they downloaded an ebook on the same topic.

And because webinars allow us to engage our prospects and customers through all stages of the buying cycle, they're an excellent opportunity to learn more about our existing leads through progressive profiling.

5 Ways You Can Repurpose Webinars

Because webinars leave you with so much new material and data in so many different forms, they're easily to spin off into other content types, like videos, blog posts, and reference sheets.

Here are five ways we’re using webinars to grow our content marketing library at Citrix that we think could work well for you too.

1) Truncate webinar recordings into short videos.

Let’s get real: Few people have the time or wherewithal to consume a 60-minute webinar recording, but that doesn’t mean the content has to go to waste.

Turning your webinar into a 3- to 5-minute highlight reel and posting the video to your YouTube channel and website will likely garner more attention and social shares than your untouched webinar recording will.

2) Turn leftover Q&A into a blog.

If you’re hosting webinars on cutting-edge topics and featuring reputable and engaging speakers, you’ve likely had to cut short the Q&A at the end of the session. If getting too many questions and not having enough time is your problem, be thankful! It’s a great problem to have, as you can use these questions to your advantage.

After the webinar, send your speaker the unanswered questions and have them respond through email with their answers. Then, pair the written Q&A with a short introduction to the webinar topic (and a link to your truncated webinar recording), and you’ve got yourself a blog post.

3) Ask for access to your speaker’s slides.

The speaker likely put quite a bit of time into creating slides that were both informative and (hopefully) nice to look at. Many speakers like their slides to be shared, since it’s good exposure for them and will further solidify their place as a thought leader in their industry.

So, ask your webinar speakers for permission to disseminate their slides as follow-up material. Then, you can post them to SlideShare or add them to your content library on your website.

4) Create a search-optimized transcript of your webinar.

One shortcoming of offering up a recorded video of your webinar is that all the content is locked up in audio format that isn’t digestible by search engines. Creating a transcript of your webinar and making some minor tweaks to include longtail keywords, though, is a great way to generate search engine traffic over the long term.

There are inexpensive services that will transcribe your event for you. You can also go the free route by uploading your video to YouTube and adding captions. Just be sure to proofread your transcripts to ensure they're clear when captioned.

5) Syndicate a full recording of your webinar.

If your webinar is a valuable piece of thought leadership, it’s worth doing some footwork to see if any of your co-marketing partners are interested in syndicating the content for lead generation.

Host a full video of the event behind a lead form on a co-branded landing page, agree to a window during which you’ll both promote it, and share in the leads it generates. It’s a low-effort, high-return method to gain access to a new audience and build your co-marketing relationships in the process.

Being a good content marketer comes down to constantly looking for new places to get content and formats that can help you streamline your content creation process. Webinars are the jackpot for content repurposing, so they're a more-than-ideal place to start.