Webinars are a powerful and affordable way all “solopreneurs” can leverage their time to share a powerful message with their audience.
One reason is that webinars provide an opportunity to speak directly with your audience and clients worldwide in real time. Another is the great opportunity they provide to spotlight your expertise, informally pitch and promote your product or service and potentially gain new clients.
Webinars are also fairly easy to mount, given the variety of platforms out there, like the popular applications GoToWebinar, WebinarJam and SpreeCast. With all the bottom-line business and sales implications of a webinar, the marketing potential a well-produced webinar offers might be missed.
One more thing: You probably already know to record your webinar for playback to any registrants unable to attend the live version. But are you leveraging the goldmine of content marketing creation you can garner from the video?
Here are seven simple ways every solopreneur can turn a one-time webinar into a content goldmine.
1. Consider gate-keeping.
Before you automatically provide a recorded video link of your webinar to registrants who missed it, consider a few alternatives. First, think carefully before allowing and advertising a free recap link ahead of time; if you do this, there’s less incentive for people to attend the live event.
Some critics will argue that you’ve already gotten what you want — viewers’ registration info — and that with everyone’s busy schedule, it’s hard for people to attend webinars live. But while, yes, you now have them as prospects in your database, your real leads will make the time to attend live. So, by seeing who attended live and who did not, you’ll distinguish who is a prospect vs. a warm lead.
Utilizing CRM platforms like Infusionsoft or Marketo that offer common webinar service plugins, you can segment and follow up with your leads for the chance at a better sales conversion opportunity without offering anyone the video recap. You could alternately offer the video recap on a landing page for those who missed it, but only after they register to download it or exchange their contact information for it.
That’s a gate-keeping method that, again, will allow you to find out who is a prospect and who is a warmer lead. Utilizing your webinar for content marketing and contact segmentation will help you get the most from your efforts. To find out if your content is valuable enough to work with a gate-keeping strategy, check out this helpful infographic from HubSpot.
2. Make your recordings available for your membership.
Another option for your webinar recordings is to make them available only to your membership base, behind a login dashboard. If your business or site supports membership programs, offering recordings can be a great “members-only” perk you can advertise and utilize. Members will still be required to register, but by doing so will be guaranteed access to the video posted after the webinar event and have the convenience of viewing the content afterward.
The only caveat here is to ensure that your webinar is packed with the right kind of valuable content to truly enhance a member’s experience. Your webinars should never be straight sales pitches; this rule becomes particularly critical if you’re offering video recaps only to members, who won’t appreciate or find value in a membership program that offers only sales-pitch videos.
3. Utilize SlideShare.
You can quickly and easily curate the slides of your webinar presentation into a simple, elegant SlideShare presentation. By offering a cohesive sample of your webinar content to the SlideShare audience, you can share your expertise without giving away the entire presentation, create residual traffic and views to your site through the SlideShare platform and leverage the time you spent creating a valuable presentation.
Again, the name of the game here is value. Even as you scale down your full presentation from the webinar into a SlideShare presentation draft, the content still needs to be meaningful, valuable and well presented. Don’t think of this as a receptacle for your old sales-pitch decks or you’ll find a backlash against, or outright ban of, your presentations.
4. Segment for socials.
Whether you have video-editing skills, or you hire a freelancer, for a relatively cheap and easy investment you can break out your webinar into content-packed short segments, give them individual title pages and provide them to your social media followers in short, action-packed video chunks that get the most traction out of your video.
Obviously, if you choose this tactic, you won’t be able to gate-keep your video as explained in Step one, but this can be a great opportunity to segment your large webinar into bite-size content with distinct titles and calls to action that will play well on social media.
5. Transcribe to transform.
White papers are an important part of a healthy content-marketing mix, but they can take a substantial amount of time to create if you aren’t careful. One great trick with a webinar is to have the video transcribed by a professional service, then move in to quickly and efficiently parse that transcription down to a great source of content for a white paper.
Services like Speechpad will transcribe your video for as little as one dollar a minute. Once you have your white paper outline, you can find and hire a graphic designer for a baseline price of just $5 on Fivrr, to add visual design to your transcribed outline of content. Then, voila! You have yourself a great white paper for an affordable cost.
6. Create brilliant Q&A graphics
Don’t leave question-and-answer segments off the list of content sources. Utilize your video transcript’s Q&A session to create some simple and effective graphics you can use as blog post images or social media posts. Take a question and distill the answer from the webinar recording into a single sentence, or simple, short takeaway. You can then provide that copy to a graphic designer, like the one you found on Fivrr, to make a single image.
For example, a “buy local” nonprofit program in Alaska transformed a question about why it was important to buy local into a simple image that shared key stats and demos about the impact of local purchasing decisions. You can use this same tactic for highlighting a great quote from the transcription. Quotes, questions and answers that are presented in a visual way are much more compelling to view and much more sharable, helping you to create a viral aspect to your webinar, too.
7. Make questions into topics.
Now that you have segmented all your questions and answers from the transcript, you can turn that content into blog posts or article topics. Utilize the question itself to be the topic or to formulate a related topic title. Then lean on the great content already in the answer from the transcripts, to formulate the basis of a response that you can add to for a unique piece of content.
By having already extracted the outline and bones of a great article from your webinar transcript, you’ll only have to add a minimum amount of time and effort to fill in some additional information, to round out a great piece of content.
Do this for the majority of your questions generated during the Q&A session, and you should have anywhere from three to five solid posts at your fingertips.
