How to repurpose your webinar as a blog

Intro

Hosting webinars with subject matter experts, thought leaders, and product advocates is a great marketing tactic. Webinars help generate authority in an industry and they provide shareable content for many platforms and channels.

A webinar is also a very good piece of cornerstone content that can be used to peel off social media posts, SEO articles, and much more.

However, they are very time consuming to plan, execute, and prepare for distribution. You’ll likely spend a lot of time planning the topics for discussion, dealing with scheduling conflicts, designing the presentation, editing the video, and distributing it across your various channels. With all this work, it’s important to maximize the value of every webinar if it’s a part of your core marketing strategy in 2022.

With this in mind, having a solid repurposing framework in place for every piece of marketing content including webinars makes sure your marketing assets aren’t created and left for dead on your website. There is a huge amount of value to be extracted from content like webinars and a repeatable content repurposing framework that converts video into blog posts is one way to extract it.

What is content repurposing?

Content repurposing, or content recycling, is when you repackage and reformat existing marketing material for another channel, in another format, or for a new audience.

Many companies create excellent content that performs well, but that’s the end of the story. By repurposing every piece of content, you’re able to greatly increase the volume of content output while retaining the value of the original research.

There are many reasons to repurpose your content. For example,

• Content repurposing increases the efficiency of your content creation process. You’re able to publish more content without going through all the steps to research and create the original piece.
• Cater to your audience who learn differently. Some learn better by reading, some learn better by listening, some learn better by viewing a video. By converting every piece of content into multiple formats, you’ll reach more of your target audience.
• Content repurposing facilitates content distribution. Content distribution is a painful but necessary part of your content marketing pipeline. By creating content across multiple formats from existing content, content distribution is a breeze.

Why is content repurposing important?

Content repurposing lets marketers publish more content that is on brand with consistent messaging without having to go through the entire content creation pipeline every time. By using the research, structure, and optimization from previous marketing material, you can extract new pieces of marketing content with your content repurposing strategy.

Content repurposing supports multiple areas of your marketing strategy including content distribution, content planning, and SEO strategy, and link building.

The most obvious benefit of a content repurposing strategy is the ability to scale. You don’t need to create every piece of content from scratch.

How to repurpose a webinar as a blog

The steps to repurpose a webinar into a blog are a bit more complex than converting a blog into a post for social media or a headline for a landing page. A webinar is inherently a bit messy since it can involve multiple participants, may not have clearly defined sections, and can often have incorrect translations due to video quality and the abilities of video transcription software.

However, there are a number of steps you can take to start converting all of your old and new webinars into blog posts.

Converting video to text

The first step whenever repurposing video, whether it’s a promotional video, an interview, or a webinar into any text-based format is to get a transcription of the video. This can be done manually, but most opt for a productized transcription service.

Productized transcription services can either be automated or manual where humans are translating the video as a service. The latter will inherently be more accurate, however the time it takes for someone to transcribe a video is much greater than the automated transcription platforms.

If there are multiple speakers in the webinar, this becomes very tricky and the manual transcription might be the best option, whether you use a service or do it yourself. Issues like people having similar voices and overlapping speaking cause issues when transcribing video and audio. However, since it may not be critical to have an exact transcription, these issues might not cause a problem when converting a webinar into a blog.

Understanding the structure of a webinar

Every webinar is different, but it’s important to understand the basic structure of the webinar to decide what type of blog post is best suited for repurposing.

• If the webinar is a conversation between multiple people, you might want to structure the blog post around the main topics that are covered.
• If the webinar is an interview between two people, this might lend itself to having questions as subheadings and answers as the body of the section.
• If the webinar is a presentation by an individual, make sure you grab key visuals from the slide to include in the blog post and use the main points (several tl;dr’s) as the sub-headers.

Include a tl;dr

Webinars are often very long. Unless you have a very engaged audience that really needs to understand the content of the webinar, most people will not consume the entire thing. This is also the case for your blog post. It’s a good idea to have a few summaries of the sections and the webinar as a whole so readers can understand the key takeaways of the webinar.

Structure sections around quotes

Extracting important quotes from the webinar is a great way to structure your blog. If there is an influential subject matter expert speaking in the webinar, you can grab 5-10 quotes from this person, use these quotes in place of subheaders, and expand upon these quotes for the body of the section.

Structure sections around questions and answers

Interviews work great as blog posts because very little post-processing needs to be done. Simply transcribe the questions and answers on paper and your blog post is pretty much complete. The questions act as logical subheaders and the answers are generally great as the main body of the sections.

Create multiple blog posts

Webinars often contain enough topics and subtopics to generate more than one blog post. By extracting multiple points of view, whether it is from multiple participants or sections of the conversation, make sure to analyze the entire video to identify natural breaking points that can serve as the basis for an entirely new piece of content.

Focus on Evergreen content

You can repurpose every piece of content in your archive, but the best approach is to focus on evergreen content. Evergreen content will provide value to your users beyond the current day, week, and month. It gives insights into what they care about that will be valuable years from now. This is the best type of content to repurpose because your repurposed content will be evergreen as well.

For example, repurposing a webinar about a new product release or a new hire at your company is probably not the best choice. However, choosing to repurpose a weinbar about industry tactics or ways to use your product to improve your audience’s business are great ways to add more evergreen content to your archive.

Tools to help repurpose video as text

Using the right tools can make a huge difference in how successful a webinar-to-blog repurposing framework is. There are plenty of advanced AI-powered tools that can help analyze video, transcribe audio, and help write your blog post for you.

Transcription Tools

There are a number of platforms that can help transcribe your videos and prep them to be converted into blog posts.

Descript offers both automatic and human powered video transcription to get you started. They claim, “Near-instant turnaround, and costs just pennies per minute.”

Otter.ai offers AI-powered meeting transcriptions if your webinar is a conversation between one or more participants.

Repurposing Tools

Chopcast.io does not directly help convert video into text, but it converts long video into shorter video clips to be shared on social. However, smaller clips are a great way to add context within the article as well. It’s been shown blogs that include video have increased engagement and SEO benefits.

Automata transcribes and analyzes video and text and converts it into multiple content formats for social, blog, and email.

Key takeaways

Webinars take a lot of time and effort to produce by people with multiple skill sets. The process typically involves deciding the topic of the webinar, sourcing subject matter experts, deciding when and how to record the video, professionally editing the final version, and finally distributing across social, email, and elsewhere. For this reason, webinars should (and can easily) be repurposed for other formats to be published on a variety of channels.

One great channel for webinar repurposing is your blog. By uncovering the natural structure of the webinar, a blog structure can be decided. Whether it’s a single presentation, a multi-person conversation, or a two-person interview, there are well-defined webinar repurposing approaches that will make sure you get the most value out of every webinar you produce.