How to Turn Your Webinar Into a Podcast

This post is the latest in our series on scrappy marketing – an approach can help you achieve better results in less time.

Recently ON24 has been turning webinars into podcasts and other content for its CMO Confessions series.

Many ON24 customers have been asking what are the steps behind this process? Well we are happy to share these with you!

With podcast listening on the rise, repurposing your webinars is another scrappy marketing technique that can help you get more out of your marketing.

The steps below assume you already have a topic in mind – if not, read our checklist on running a content marketing brainstorm to surface some ideas.

Should B2B marketers bother making a podcast? Learn why you should (or shouldn’t) in this panel discussion. [Listen In]

Secure Guests

Guests are a critical element to many webinars and podcasts. Not only will they help create an engaging session, but they will also help promote your content more widely. To get guests onboard, follow these steps.

• Set some provisional dates. Your potential guests will have busy schedules, and you have a marketing calendar to fill. Before you reach out to them, have provisional dates in mind to make sure you can align calendars.
• Create a shortlist. With a topic and dates in mind, now you are in a position to figure out who might be a good fit. Get names and emails together so you can start reaching out.
• Conduct outreach. Get either one of your senior team members, the webinar host, or a co-worker who knows them to get in touch and see if they are interested. If you don’t get a reply first time round, send a reminder to get back to the top of your inbox.
• Get acceptance and their bio info. Once they’ve accepted, confirm details such as their exact title, bio and headshot. You can offer to take these from LinkedIn to save them time.

Agree on Talking Points

So your guests are comfortable on the day, run through these steps to get agreement on what you’ll discuss on the day.

• Schedule a pre-call. Get your guests on a call first to run through the session and what you’ll be discussing.
• Use a shared document for ideas. A good way to collaborate before the webinar is to use a shared document (such as Google Docs) that you can edit and work on while you’re having the call.
• Cover what the guests will be saying. Use your shared document to confirm questions and topics so your guests can prepare and won’t be asked questions they aren’t comfortable with.

Set Up Your Webinar Page

Now you have a date, topic, speakers and their bios, put together your webinar registration page as normal and carry out your promotion. If you need more guidance, read our post on driving webinar registrations at speed.

Do a Test Call

Before every webinar, it’s always good to do a test call on your webinar platform to ensure everything works and the audio quality is clear for all of your guests.

If audio could be improved during this test call, make suggestions on how your guests can make it better – for example, by using a separate microphone, or by finding a quieter meeting room.

Run and Record Your Webinar

With the date, time, topic and guests all lined up, all you need to do now is run and record your webinar.

While speaking, try and keep your distance to your microphone consistent to ensure the audio quality for the podcast will be as high as possible.

Download The Recording

After you’ve run your webinar (and followed up with those leads of course!), download your recording — or, in the case of the ON24 platform, Presenter Media — so you can get it ready to publish as a podcast.

Edit the Recording

Make any light edits as required to improve the audio quality of your session. In line with our other advice on scrappy marketing, keep this to a minimum to reduce the time it takes you to turn around your podcast.

Add Intro / Outro Music

Just as you should brand your webinar console, you should brand your podcast with intro and outro music. This will help add consistency to your sessions and let your listeners know when one episode has finished and another has started.

Make Creative for Podcast Channels

To help promote your podcast, put together creative (such as banners, icons, headshots) and your promo copy so those browsing for content will know what you are covering.

Upload Podcast Episode to Podcast Channels

With your podcast and creative ready, now you can upload it to your podcast channels to start gaining an audience.

ON24 uses Podbean, but there are other podcast hosting services that you can experiment with.

Transcribe Your Podcast as a Blog Post

To help your podcast work even further, consider getting it transcribed to use as a blog post.

This can be particularly useful for those who prefer not to listen or might otherwise not be able to do so.

Share the Podcast with Your Guests

Your guests will likely be delighted to be featured on a podcast! As such, they can help you market it.

Share the podcast link with them so they can promote it to their own networks.

Share the Podcast More Broadly

In line with our other scrappy marketing tips, you want to get better results for less.

Make sure you share your podcast on your other channels and get your coworkers to share it too.

Happy Podcasting!

Tune into our CMO Confession series to listen to tips from those at the forefront of the marketing industry.