How to Get Long-Lasting Results from Live Webinars

Live Webinars are important for your business growth

Webinars can be one of the more effective forms of content for nurturing and converting high-quality leads. The live component that appeals to already-warm leads, the interactivity that mimics real-life interactions, the in-depth nature that overcomes objections, and more all contribute to their conversion power.

Unfortunately, they also have sadly short lifespans.

While webinar content may take days to put together, it’s all over within an hour. Even if you do make a recording available, it probably won’t get much attention after the first week. BrightTALK found that in 2017, the half-life of a webinar was around 10 days. And by the one-month mark, it’s already received most of the views that it ever will.

On-demand webinar benchmarks
Live Webinar Benchmarks – Additional audience gained within # days after the live event.

Image source: BrightTalk Webinar Benchmarks

Why are such valuable pieces of content getting ignored?

It has nothing to do with the content, it’s a simple lack of strategy. Because the live nature is so baked into how webinars work, most content marketers are content to let them simply sit in the archives once they’ve been performed and the replay sent to attendees once or twice.

It’s time to rethink that approach and look at how webinars can fuel the rest of your content marketing. Here is how you can get started by recycling and repurposing your best performing webinars:

Promote as an evergreen lead magnet

While many businesses publish their webinar replays publicly or keep the opt-in page live so people can watch the recording after the fact, few make good use of these assets over time. They’re usually buried at the bottom of a resources page or found only through links in your blog archives and old social posts.

But if you already have a landing page for your webinar replay built, you can very easily continue to promote it far into the future. It can even ultimately end up driving more leads as on-demand video training than as a live webinar.

In a culture that’s become accustomed to watching what we want, when we want it, providing long-form video like this can help mimic your audience’s existing video experiences.

Use an ongoing marketing campaign to make sure your audiences everywhere know about it through tactics like monthly posts on social media, featuring it prominently on your website, paid advertising, and more.

Publish a short-form video series

In addition to continuing to use the webinar recording in full, you can also pull out any key points and sections into their own short-form videos. This will help fuel your other marketing channels with video content.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram have all been placing huge focus on video content in recent years, but creating separate video content for each is likely unsustainable for most teams.

For example, Instagram videos can only be 15 seconds in stories and one minute in the feed (although the newer IGTV does allow longer content). Shorter videos tends to draw better engagement on other social platforms like YouTube and Facebook as well. Could your company create three separate social videos per week from scratch?

Instead of trying, cut and edit your webinar recordings into new videos optimized for different platforms. A short but intensely powerful statement can be pulled out into a motivational Instagram story.

A deeper explanation of a strategy can become a YouTube video that helps your discoverability in search. Diversifying your content opens up the information in your webinar to entirely new audiences.

Create in-depth blog posts repurposing slides

Finally, another popular tactic you can turn on its head is the post-webinar blog post. Most companies that publish one write a short summary of the webinar driving people to it, with little value outside of the replay itself. However, this type of scrappy little blog post is hard to drive long-term traffic with.

Instead of making your webinar replay video the focus of a brief blog post, create one that’s just as in-depth as the webinar itself. Using your slide deck as a guide, create a written version of your webinar that will appeal to those who prefer to read their information over watching it. You can even use the visuals from your webinar slides as blog post visuals as well.

This type of resource can stand on its own and open up your content to a new audience with different preferences, plus it’s easier to optimize a more in-depth blog post for long-term SEO gains.

Keep your webinar funnels alive

Webinars are large pieces of content that you put a lot of work into. With so much value packed inside, you’re doing both your marketing strategy and your audience a disservice by not leveraging it once the presentation is over.

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