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Repurposing Webcast Content—Life After the Live Event

Technology, healthcare, and financial services companies increasingly use webcasts to introduce new products, demonstrate thought leadership, and promote new offerings to customers and prospects. A recent Google search of ‘webcast’ yielded 211 million hits! (1)

Webcasts are presentations conducted over the Internet. Virtual attendees connect to a server and the webcast content—PowerPoint slides, movies, images, and other multimedia—is displayed using a web browser. Communication generally occurs in one direction, from the presenter to the audience. Sometimes attendees can ask questions by sending email or short messages to the server.

Creating a compelling webcast requires a significant investment in time and resources. It takes hours to craft a quality narrative for the presentation, develop compelling visuals that convey the message, practice the presentation ahead of time, and synchronize the timing between the voiceover and the content. With so much effort expended to identify, invite, and confirm the participation of potential viewers, it’s easy to think of the initial presentation of the webcast as an end in itself.

Nonetheless, before you prepare the webcast content, it’s important to ask yourself these questions:

• What can I do with the webcast content and source materials once the live event has taken place?
  
  
• How can I repurpose the webcast content into other deliverables to reach new or broader audiences and/or support other marketing campaigns?
  
  
• What can I offer prospective attendees who can’t attend the webcast but are interested in its content?

According to a recent survey of nearly 1,400 technology researchers conducted by KnowledgeStorm and the CMO Council, only 4% of respondents downloaded, read, or passed on archived event transcripts to their associates. Conversely, 58.3% performed the same tasks for vendor white papers, followed by product reviews at 53.8% and analyst research reports at 52.2%. (2) Clearly, just posting a webcast archive on your site is likely to limit the reach of its message.

Instead, you need to find creative ways to repurpose webcast content so you are not investing in one-time events. For example, TechTarget, the online media giant, turns webcasts into easy-to-follow IT Briefings aimed at senior-level IT executives and managers. The BlackBerry Enterprise Resource Center at Research in Motion (RIM) includes Reference Documents based on past webcasts which have been specifically developed for IT professionals, as well as Executive Briefs aimed at line-of-business managers. Unless and until your marketing messages change, you can reuse much of the webcast material to meet a variety of sales and marketing needs.

Consider these best practices for repurposing webcast content:

• Explore ways to integrate your next webcast into other campaigns in your overall marketing program. Identify ways in which you can reuse the webcast content before you hit the next deadline.
  
  
• Take the extra step to produce a written transcript of the webcast presentation by sending out the recording to a professional transcription service. You can use this as “raw material” for any number of reference documents, white papers, or byline articles.
  
  
• Make sure the tone of the webcast presentation is formal and not “chatty”. Not only does this increase the level of overall professionalism, but it ensures that the material will be suited for re-purposing.
  
  
• Reuse “value-added” slides—the ones that have graphical information as opposed to just bulleted lists of text—in white papers, datasheets, brochures, or product documentation. They also help keep your webcast engaging; people prefer to hear an explanation of something new rather than listening to someone read text on the screen.
  
  
• Include a link to the recorded webcast in your on-line marketing documents so readers can listen to it again or for the first time. Being able to listen to important messages can clarify key points of differentiation and reinforce understanding of your unique value proposition.
  
  
• Rely on the webcast presenter as a future Subject Matter Expert in creating repurposed documents. By doing this, the SME’s time and expertise benefits from work on future deliverables.

Webcasts are a great way to deliver your message to audiences of all kinds, regardless of location, day, or time. As such, they’ve become major elements to many marketing plans. Developing and repurposing high-quality webcast content takes time, expertise, and resources. By implementing best practices like these, you can make the most of your webcast investment, start follow-on projects at the same time, and save money. How often do you come across opportunities like that?

At Tim Rosa Associates, we work with our clients every day to find creative and relevant ways to repurpose webcast content and other collateral. In fact, re-purposing and reuse are in our mind from the start of every engagement, which means we can start working as soon as your next webcast wraps up.

¹ Search performed on March 21, 2006.
² Define What’s Valued Online, A CMO Council Survey Report, September 23, 2005, page 15.

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Copyright © 2006 Tim Rosa Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.