Maximize Your Webinar’s Impact: A Guide To Content Repurposing

We’ve all heard that repurposing content is a game changer, somehow responsible for freeing up time, driving engagement, and increasing leads, while delivering new and exciting content. But that’s too good to be true, right? 

Wrong. Repurposing content does, in fact, do all of this and more. If B2B marketers haven’t gotten on board the content repurposing train yet, it’s still not too late to try.  This is especially true when strategically using content that can easily be repurposed into additional content, like webinars. For those new to this approach, a content marketing guide can provide essential insights on leveraging each piece of content fully. 

Mark Bornstein, Vice President of marketing and Chief Evangelist at ON24, explains how it’s done. Let’s take a look. 

The Power of Webinars in Content Generation

According to Bornstein, many marketers are mentally stuck in how they value the content they use. So, how do we get unstuck if webinars are typically a single use, a one-time event?

The idea that webinars are one-and-done activities is … dated and fundamentally wrong. The content in your webinars has a lot of potential. With the right tools, you can:

• • Create transcripts that, along with generative AI, can create blogs, summaries, and e-books.
  • Point to highly engaged moments of a webinar for video clipping.
  • Provide marketing teams with first-party data. This data can then be used to create personalized experiences and content for B2B marketers’ intended audiences.

Why Webinars Are Underutilized 

Why is it that even with all this star potential, webinars have been historically underutilized? Here are some potential stuck points:

1. 1. Some B2B marketers are still stuck in their ways, including a ” one-and-done” mentality. While that mentality may have worked in the past and may have been the only option, new capabilities have allowed for so much more.
   2. Teams are short-staffed. Most webinar teams are small, and marketers struggle to keep up. This makes scaling post-webinar content difficult and, in some cases, nearly impossible.
   3. Lack of actionable data. B2B marketers aren’t collecting and using the data from their webinars to target audiences or to provide value to segments.

“What I’m going to be talking about today, none of it could have been done a year ago.  I really think it’s completely realigning our brains in terms of what a webinar can be and, and the value that a webinar has.” –Mark Bornstein

Understandably, many B2B marketing content teams have yet to catch up. Generative AI marketing is a fairly recent development, yet it can help address many of the above pain points. 

Bornstein recognizes the fact that adjusting to the potential of AI is going to require some refocusing on the part of B2B marketers. “What I’m going to be talking about today, none of it could have been done a year ago. I really think it’s completely realigning our brains in terms of what a webinar can be and, and the value that a webinar has.”

Four Building Blocks of Webinar Content Repurposing

Now that we have identified what may be holding webinars back, how exactly do we elevate our repurposing strategy? There are four key components that B2B marketers should keep in mind when it comes to repurposing their webinar:

1. 1. Goals
   2. Audience
   3. Content Types
   4. Channel

Setting Goals

One of the first steps in creating a strategy is identifying your goal. What do you want to happen as a result of hosting a webinar and repurposing the content? (Think increased engagement, increased bottom line, etc.)

Goals can be grouped into two separate categories—tactical and strategic.

Tactical goals may include:

• • Capturing new perspectives and content for future use (Think: evergreen content)
  • Building a library of actionable content 
  • Saving (or reducing) time, money, and other resources
  • Increasing the value of content teams

Strategic goals may include:

• • Increasing the reach of original content
  • Integrating content into additional channels 
  • Turning webinars into broader campaigns 
  • Leveraging webinar content in unique ways for target audiences
  • Informing future campaigns 

Identifying Audiences

How can you repurpose your webinar to best communicate with your audience?

B2B marketers can use their webinar data to identify audience persona, industry, customer and use case. 

Marketers can use this information to create content strategies for the future. For example, you can circulate polls during your webinar that will capture audience responses, offering valuable digital customer engagement insights. 

With ON24 Key Moments, you can also pick out the parts of the webinar that resonate with your audience the most. Those moments can be your north star when putting content calendars together. Insights such as these can help you realize what topics your audience is most hungry for.

Determining Content Types

When determining what content to spend your team’s resources on, it’s best to consider your team’s goal(s) and audience data. Once the goals and target audience have been identified, it’s easier to narrow the direction of the content topic. 

Audience and goal data also help determine your team’s content type. Content types can include on-demand webinars, blog posts, video clips, summaries, e-books, or research data in the form of reports.

Determining Channels

Now that you’ve identified your goal, audience, and content type, it’s time to determine the ideal content channel. Ask yourself: What channel works best to reach your audience and meet your goals? 

For example, some channels are better suited for short form than long form. Channels can include everything from organic activities like social media, blogs, emails, or webinars to paid activities like ads, trade show booths, or direct mail.

The Role of AI In Content Repurposing

Throughout the entire process of identifying your goal, audience, content and channels, AI is here to help. Think of AI as doing the grunt work while content creators refine the content before it’s ready to publish. Here’s how AI can help with the four Rs of content repurposing: 

• • Reuse. Example: Host a webinar on-demand and replay it for audiences on their own terms. 
  • Reformat. Example: Turn a webinar into an e-book.
  • Remake. Example: Create short videos from webinar clips.
  • Refine. Example: Use a webinar poll to create new content based on audience feedback.

Let’s look at a “remake” example. According to Bornstein, “When the webinar is over, we can heatmap the entire experience.” This means that AI can search your webinar to see when audience members have strong reactions. 

If the webinar speaker says something that identifies with the audience so much so that it garners lots of emojis and comments, AI can help alert content marketers to that moment. This moment can then be remade into a short video. This process saves B2B marketers from having to scour the entire webinar, manually searching for those key moments. 

“When the webinar is over, we can heatmap the entire experience.” – Mark Bornstein