Unlock the Full Potential of Webinars: The Why and How of Reusing Online Event Recordings

Over a regular week, you receive dozens of invitations to register for a webinar or a whole series of digital events – panel discussions, Q&A sessions, lunch & learns, and so on. How many of those sessions do you register for, left alone attend? Looking at these numbers from the organizer’s perspective might be uninspiring, to say the least. While Zoom fatigue is no joke and live attendance for your company’s events might be dropping proportionally, there are still good reasons for holding webinars. Instead of ditching them, try considering webinars as a flexible and valuable resource. Let’s explore how you can reuse webinar recordings to increase sales, boost engagement, extract quotable snippets, and more! 

Benefits of Reusing Webinars  

Creating an engaging and informative webinar requires a great deal of effort from multiple members of your team. Of course, the desire to attract dozens or hundreds of live viewers is natural, but not everyone has the time, patience, or simply attention span to watch your 60-minute live webinars in full. That’s why repurposing webinars is a smart strategy to provide engaging content to your audience when and where they’ll need and appreciate it most. Here are some of the benefits of reusing webinars:   

  • Reaching your audience on various platforms. While you can’t post long videos on Twitter or Instagram (sharing links is a different story), you can break down webinar recordings into short, digestible, and shareable portions.  social media platforms
  • Creating effective content faster. With webinar recordings, you already have a fantastic starting point to create content. Modify it, rearrange, add a little bit of spice (like information), and a new content piece is ready!  
  • Drive new leads and increase the quality of current ones. By reusing webinar recordings, you give your leads a chance to learn about your service or product wherever and whenever it’s convenient for them. Besides, webinar recordings can be used as fantastic sales collateral, but more on that later.   

5 Ways to Effectively Reuse Webinar Recordings 

The best way to extend the life of the informative and in-depth webinar you just held is by upcycling it into other forms of content. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of possible ways to use all the valuable information from your webinar to the maximum. 

1. Create social posts with tips.  

Whether your webinar is about organizing and automating specific processes, introducing new products, digital tools training, there’s always something to extract and turn into a tips and tricks series. For example, a webinar called “Improve Construction Workflows Using Visual Documentation” can be used to create several social media posts, each describing one workflow or one benefit at a time. This way to reuse a webinar recording can also be helpful if your business is undergoing rebranding or you want to introduce a new User Interface. While some of your current clients may have the time to attend webinars or watch the recording, others would appreciate seeing “what’s new” across social media platforms. You can also use these tips for newsletters to reach a broader audience.   

2. Share webinar highlights on social media. 

Another way to give a webinar a second life on social platforms is to break it down into several short videos or squeezing the essence of what you covered into a 5-minute reel. For instance, if you hosted a Q&A session with an industry expert, you can use each question and answer section to create separate social posts. If the webinar structure is hard to break down and cannot be posted separately, then a little bit more editing will be necessary to make a short video capturing the essence of your message or idea. But impossible is nothing, right?   

3. Post on video hosting with subtitles.   

Adding subtitles to your webinar recordings can not only boost SEO but also support users who are hard of hearing follow and understand your content. Here, at Flawless Inbound, we use Vidyard – a platform allowing you to create, host, and analyze videos. Every time we host a webinar or another digital event, we upload it to Vidyard and create captions right in there; no additional software is required. Then, we use smooth sharing and integration capabilities to send the recording to those who signed up for the webinar or share it with our sales team, who often use webinar recordings as a sales tool. Check out our library of video resources here.   

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4. Write a blog.  

An informative and captivating webinar can be easily turned into a conversion key piece – a blog post. Webinars are always packed with valuable information – oftentimes straight from the expert source; that’s why it would be quite shortsighted not to turn them into blogs. One webinar can provide you with a long-read, a series of more detailed blogs, or even a whole whitepaper or eBook! 

Pro Tip: Include quotes, slides screenshots, or short video clips from the webinar to make a blog more interactive, visually appealing, and engaging.   

5. Spice up sales emails.  

Remember cutting down the recording into short videos for social media? You can go further and use these short chunks of information in your sales emails. Every sales email your reps send can include a small snippet from the recording (attention: it should address the pain point or the problem your prospects are facing), encouraging recipients to click on the link and watch (part of) the webinar. Besides, when a sales rep can share webinar recordings covering specific processes and issues, it also serves as a trust-building tool because prospects get a chance to learn more about your company’s team, products, services, and ideas.   

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All in all, while we all know that videos are the future of sales and marketing (if not already the present), we often miss out on using the full capabilities of videos in terms of content creation. Next time, before holding a webinar, build a list of at least three ways how you’re going to use the recording. This will help you stay focused and inspired even if only a handful of people show up for the live event.   

Do you have ideas on recycling webinar recordings that we didn’t cover here? We’d love to hear them!