As most marketers can tell you, webinars have become the most important tool businesses have today to tell a story, generate demand and drive pipeline value. And when everything is done properly – from a top-notch registration page, to an integrated promotional strategy that drives optimal traffic, to speakers that are engaging and bring a ton of value to the audience – the end result is a great webinar and a lot of quality prospects for your sales force to follow up with. But why stop there?
In a recent webinar of ours – The Five Keys to a Pipeline Boosting Webinar Strategy – we discussed the five essential elements of any effective webinar plan. And perhaps the most overlooked by most marketers is having an actionable on-demand strategy that drives results. You’ve put all of this hard work into delivering a world-class webinar, and now you’re not going to do anything else with it? That thinking is for the birds. An on-demand webinar is content marketing gold, and there are a number of ways you can bend and stretch it so it can be leveraged as a lead generator for months to come. Here are just a few ideas around how to re-purpose your webinar content:
Build an Event: Marketers are always looking for ways to execute events that are more cost-effective, drive more traffic and offer more measurable results on the back-end. The problem is, they keep looking to the same places and aren’t getting the results they’re looking for. If you have a robust webinar strategy where you have a lot of on-demand webinars, using them as the foundation of a virtual event is a great way to re-purpose them and drive new leads. You can set them up against scheduled times so they could act as ‘live webinars’, and leverage other content you have (whitepapers, case studies, videos, blogs, etc.) to fill out the rest of the event. I can’t tell you how many marketers I’ve spoken to that tell me they want to execute an event, but they don’t feel they have the content. If they only knew that re-purposing existing content could be the solution they’re looking for
Create a New Whitepaper or Case Study: The norm is to write a case study, whitepaper, eBook, blog, etc. and leverage it as the foundation of a webinar or webinar series. Great approach…we do it too and love it. But what about the idea of leveraging a webinar as the foundation for a top-notch piece of literature? That’s exactly what we’re doing for our last webinar, The Seven Costly Sins of Lead Generation. We already have the content essentially built, so writing the whitepaper will be a cinch
Use it as the Foundation for your Outbound Efforts: As everyone knows, sales people like leads. And when they don’t have leads being handed to them on a silver platter, they like to be equipped with ammo to make their outbound efforts more fruitful. One way to do this is to tell them to promote the on-demand version of webinars that make sense to their prospects. Tell them to mention it in their voicemail, their conversations with prospects, and in their emails. Have them put a link to a recent webinar in their signature. The person on the other end of the line wants some value, and providing them some education in the form of an on-demand webinar could be just the thing to peak their interest
The Rise of Video: leveraging video is more realistic and cost-effective than it’s ever been. If you’re using the right webinar provider, you should be able to get an MP4 (complete media capture) of the webinar. Take that MP4 and upload it on your site, behind a registration form, so you can host it for perpetuity. Then upload it on your YouTube channel as well. But also be cognizant of the fact that on-demand webinars have shorter viewing times than live webinars, meaning it’s less likely your audience is going to watch the entire recording. With that in mind, turn your webinar into a 4-5 minute highlight reel. Post it on your website, through YouTube and other social channels. Chances are this will give you more traction in terms shares and likes than an entire webinar recording will.