1996 was a big year for collaboration and video conferencing. For the first time, companies used NetMeeting and PlaceWare, the first digital conferencing platforms for interactive seminars.
Over two decades later, webinars still play an important role in business communication. Fuelled by faster internet connections and the booming mobile devices industry, webinars have become a communication standard across different industries, helping to build brands, capture leads, and boost engagement.
In fact, recent reports indicate that webinars have never been more popular. In a recent report by ClickMeeting, for instance, the number of webinars in 2017 went up by 7 percent from 2016, with attendees going up by 16 percent over the same period. And as their report-cum-infographic highlights below, webinars will be game-changers for B2B startups going forward.
That said, webinars are still among the most time-consuming marketing strategies. You can literally spend days preparing talking points, coordinating speakers, creating visuals, and promotion for a webinar that lasts a little over an hour.
Sure, you’d bag a few leads and gain points on engagement for a brief moment, but you surely wouldn’t want to waste all that time and effort on a fleeting marketing endeavor.
Content repurposing is exactly what you need to ensure your efforts aren’t wasted. Each webinar gives you a ton of information, most of which can be repackaged and used to engage existing clients and land new leads via other platforms.
Here are a few creative ways to go about content repurposing after a webinar.
1. Convert some of the content into infographics
Infographics are among the most effective tools for startups looking to make their presence felt in the digital world. As part of your content marketing strategy, infographics can help you drive traffic to your site, grab your audience’s attention, and boost SEO for your site.
That’s why converting some of your webinar content into infographics can give your content marketing campaign some serious mileage. You can use the slides from the webinar or notes from your research to create the infographic. Be sure to include all the interesting facts and punchy data from the webinar because these often make for great infographics.
2. Create an SEO-friendly transcript of the webinar
As awesome webinar will do little to help you increase your search rankings on search engines, no matter how much widely you share the video on the internet. Search engines won’t digest content on videos, which means your webinars risk being a one-hit, inefficient engagement strategy if you don’t make it digestible by search engines.
Making video transcripts is one of the best was to guarantee traffic to your site in the long run. There are many online transcription tools and services that can help you transcribe your webinars for a small fee. For startups on a budget, YouTube offers a great platform for transcription, thanks to the ability to add captions that can be indexed by search engines.
3. Break it up into smaller, sharable videos
Webinars can be excruciatingly long. With the average webinar lasting a little over an hour, keeping audiences engaged can be an uphill task. This is why breaking down a 60-minute video into smaller chunks is one of the best ways to repurpose your webinar. Shorter videos are more likely to capture the attention of your audience.
You can also share the shorter social/video-sharing sites like YouTube and Facebook, embed them on your website, or even use them as part of your email marketing strategy.
4. Use the material on a blog, guest post, newsletter, or eBook
Finally and perhaps most obviously, is to repurpose your webinar into smaller pieces of atomized, high-impact content that can be spread all over the internet. This includes everything from blog posts to eBooks to a guest posting on another blog.
Pick out the best portions of the webinar or ask one of your speakers, moderators, or audience members to write a post about your webinar topic. This improves the chances of cross-linking your startup with established businesses globally, helping establish your brand as an authoritative player in your industry.
Bottom Line
Smart entrepreneurs understand the value of saving every last coin, especially when the business is still in its infancy. Content repurposing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies out there, and one that your business ought to be using for all elements of your content marketing strategy.