Among the most common specialists on today’s marketing teams is the writer/content creator. According to a study by SEMrush, 52% of marketing teams have one. That is 16% higher than the next more common position, social media manager. This speaks to the importance of content creators in today’s marketing organizations.
Yet, most companies still don’t produce enough content to satisfy their voracious content marketing machines. According to the study, the top three challenges in marketing are all related to content creation:
There is one way organizations can generate more content to help overcome these challenges: repurpose existing content.
Repurposing content basically means reusing existing content in new ways. An example of repurposing would be turning the content produced for a webinar into blog posts or a whitepaper. In fact, webinars provide an ideal original source of content for repurposing because they are typically filled with information from experts in the field, and they are already organized into a storytelling format.
Repurposing content is not a new strategy. Marketing departments have been employing repurposing to gain several benefits, including:
Say you’ve just produced an excellent, well-received webinar. Now what? You can post it on your website for replays. But also the marketing potential of the recorded presentation provides the opportunity to create many other content marketing tools. Here are 10 ways to repurpose your webinar content — and maximize your content creation capabilities.
Transcripts of webinars are an easy and fast way to generate a lot of content fast. For one thing, all of that written content gives websites a significant SEO boost. This is ideal because Google’s video crawling capabilities are limited. “Google can crawl the video (if in a supported video encoding) and extract a thumbnail and preview. Google can also extract some limited meaning from the audio and video of the file.” What’s more, many people prefer to read or skim content, rather than watch a video. Either way, you’ll have both bases covered when you offer access to both the video recording and the transcript.
Transcript creation best practices:
Clocking in at 86%, blog posts are still the most popular form of content that companies are creating, according to SEMrush. Webinars provide an ideal resource for writing, not just a blog post or two, but an entire series. What’s more, they provide one of the elements that make blog posts stand out — expert quotes. Just look for interesting ways to restructure the webinar content into a series of blog posts. Examples include success stories, best practice tips, and questions and answers.
Blog post creation best practices:
A perfect way to distribute webinars is by publishing a series of emails that tease leads into clicking the link. Every email can include a snippet of the most compelling content to entice the readers into viewing the whole show. Add phrases like, “Sorry you missed our webcast,” and “Here’s what you missed!” In a world of texting and messaging, don’t underestimate the power of emails. Worldwide emailing is expected to be 306.4 billion emails a day in 2020.
Email creation best practices:
eBooks have become B2B marketing staples. These aren’t like the ones you read on your Kindle. They’re usually around 2,000 to 3,000 words, produced in landscape format, have less copy on the page than whitepapers, and include more artwork and graphical elements to be visually appealing and lighten the reading experience.
eBook creation best practices:
If your webinar shared a lot of facts, especially statistics, it might provide the perfect content to create an infographic. Infographics are a great way to convey complex information in a simple and concise way in B2B marketing. The best business infographics tell a story through images and design. Also, infographics provide a range of options for marketing. For example, they can be story- or statistics-based, comparative or narrative, and broad summaries or niche-focused.
Infographic creation best practices:
Due to time constraints, webinars often rush through the slides during live broadcasts. But your carefully created slides don’t have to be given short shrift. You can repurpose them into a standalone PowerPoint presentation to share on SlideShare. Exposure on SlideShare is often to a new and different audience than other channels typically used for inbound marketing. This will give your presentation additional momentum to inform new audiences and attract them to your messaging.
SlideShare creation best practices:
When it comes to social media content, think of your webinar as the mother lode. All of that content can be turned into a wide range of short, easily digestible posts. You can even create a campaign around the central theme — which will add extra mileage to your messaging. Supercharge the social content with short video clips from the webinar.
Social media creation best practices:
Both online and print trade publications are always in need of new content, so they are always on the hunt for articles written by professionals on topics that are interesting to their readers. If your webinar content lends itself to an article topic for one of your industry publications, it’s worth it to pitch the editors and see if they’re interested. If your expert speaker is not a writer, ghostwrite the article for them.
Trade publication article creation best practices:
Because webinars are by their very nature opportunities to take a deep dive into a subject led by experts in an industry, their content is analogous to ideal content for whitepapers. A follow-up whitepaper could be structured to capture the key concepts in compelling ways. Because the structure of each piece of content is different, additional information can be added to the whitepaper to make it a cohesive and comprehensive story that is meaningful to the target audience, who will be looking for new insights and solutions to their problems.
Whitepaper creation best practices:
Podcasts have taken the world by storm. That means podcast producers are in constant search for new material. Does your webinar fit the bill for any podcasts in your industry? If so, pitch it to the producer. You’re likely to get a positive reply. After all, a great webinar is informational, engaging, and full of actionable insights — just like a great podcast.
Podcast creation best practices:
If you’ve put in the hard work to create a high-quality webinar, it doesn’t have to be a one-and-done event. Leverage your quality content after the broadcast concludes. Naturally, you can make the webinar itself available for replay, but you can also repurpose the recording to create up to 10 more pieces of brand new content. This will spread your message further — and help you reach a wider audience. Repurposing webinar content will expand the ROI of the webinar itself, help boost other marketing efforts and save content creators time.
