A lot of work goes into creating a great webinar: you dig up relevant data, create appealing visuals, and develop an engaging script. So, don’t just archive it on your website or in a directory, get extra ROI out of all that work.
Your webinar content could be made into many other forms of content, e.g., articles, blog posts, infographics, social media posts, podcasts, videos, or SlideShares. I’m going to focus on repurposing for blog posts or articles.
Transcribe the webinar
The first thing you’re going to need is a written record of the webinar content, either the presenter’s notes or a transcript. If you’re the presenter or their detailed notes are available, then you’re in luck. If that’s not the case, don’t try to rely on any notes you take during the webinar. You could miss valuable information; some speakers talk quickly and transcribing is a specialized skill.
Instead, use a transcription service to turn the webinar into a document. As an added bonus, the transcript can be stored with the actual webinar as another way for people to access that original content.
Rework selected material
Once you have the webinar text, read through and determine how many articles and/or blog posts you’ll be able to get out of it. Some transcripts will have so much information that you’ll easily be able to get multiple blog posts or articles out of one webinar transcript.
The next step is to paste the transcript text that you’ve selected for a particular project into a separate file. As you’re tweaking the text so that the flow accommodates readers rather than listeners, expect to have to winnow it down extensively. I once worked on a webinar transcript that had had four presenters and, as a result was about 8,600 words long! My client just wanted two short pieces, so I produced a 900-word article and an 882-word op-ed out of all that.
If the resulting piece is a blog post or will be going to an online publication, provide support for any included statistics or little-known facts by linking them to online sources. Usually, the presenter won’t have cited sources during the webinar, so you will either have to request them or hunt them down yourself. If you’re looking up sources and aren’t sure where to start, try copying keywords from a statement in the transcript into Google.
For example, in one webinar, the presenter stated that girls begin to decide whether math suits them in the fourth and fifth grades. I did some online research on that statement and found a 2016 TechCrunch article that I was able to use as a link.
Additionally, provide links to any research, online tools, or resources mentioned in the piece. It’s an easy way for to be a resource to your readers. One of those links should be to the webinar itself. You can either mention the webinar within the body of the text and link to it, or you can include it in the author’s blurb by using text such as: For more information on [subject], visit [Author]’s [Title] webinar and add the link.
Since you’re working with webinar material, you’re likely to have a supply of visuals that can accompany your new text. See if they work with your new piece(s) or if they need to be edited or modified in any way.
Submissions
When it’s time to send out the article or guest blog post, make sure the editor or blog owner that you’re targeting understands its origins. Editors generally want original content for their publications; many will be fine with the piece since this is a new (and unpublished) format. However, a few may demur. One of my clients gets article requests from editors in advance by emailing them a media alert about the webinar to pique their interest. That way, there’s no doubt that the editor knows of the submission’s the origin and that they’re fine with it.
Conclusion
You may think that since the content is already provided in the form of the webinar transcript, creating the article or blog post will be easy-peasy. The truth is, it depends.
In those latter cases, creating the new piece may take longer than expected. But content ideation is one of the big challenges of content marketing, so if your webinar resonated with your audience, don’t miss this opportunity to get that valuable content in front of a wider segment of your prospects and clients/customers.
Some webinars will have a cohesive structure that makes it easy to repurpose them into written pieces. In other cases, reading the transcript will be like reading notes from an interview, and it will feel as if you’re basically writing the article from scratch. Maybe the presenter keeps going off on tangents. Maybe they treat the webinar like an informative but informal chat, so there is no clear structure. Maybe it’s a panel discussion, and you’ll have to rearrange individual presenters’ anecdotes and insights into a more coherent flow of ideas for a written piece.
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Kellé Campbell has two decades of experience writing content for the software and educational technology industries. To learn more about her, visit https://kc-communications.com/kelle.
