Put Your Content to Work Long After You Hit “Stop Recording”
A webinar’s real success is measured by more than just attendance. In a previous post, we talked about promoting your accounting firm’s webinar, attracting leads, and converting your audience with continued marketing outreach. Even if you experience some attrition in live attendance (everyone does), you will accomplish a meaningful boost in awareness for your firm, speaker, content, and brand when you launch a webinar. But what happens after you end the show? In this post, we will show you how to repurpose your webinar to attain ROI beyond the event.
First, let’s distinguish between time-sensitive (or “hot” topics) and “evergreen” topics. Hot topics are usually driven by current events and immediate changes in the business environment. An evergreen topic is always fresh (like an evergreen plant). When you produce a webinar around a topic with long-lasting interest, you can use this content to:
- Build thought leadership
- Prompt new conversations
- Promote your timeline of shared knowledge
- Boost backlinks and crosslinks
The urgency of hot topics will likely increase web traffic and other immediate responses since you are addressing immediate pain points for your audience. However, the goal of long-term marketing is to have content with a long shelf life that drives ongoing traffic to your site. To accomplish a steady return rate, you need to include evergreen content AND know how to make it work for you.
Whether you’ve been recording webinars since March and now have a healthy library of videos, or you are thinking of new ideas to add to your marketing plan, the next few steps will help set you up for success.
Once you’ve designed your webinar, promoted, hosted, and recorded it, the next step is post-production. First, decide if you need to trim the video. The good news is that many web platforms let you trim and edit your recording without leaving the platform If your platform doesn’t allow editing, programs like QuickTime are good alternatives for simple editing. From here, you have three options.
Incorporate your webinar into a marketing campaign
Does your topic relate well to other lead-generating content? Can you integrate the recorded video into existing marketing automation? Can you package it into proposal content?
Re-promote the webinar using on-demand registration
Zoom allows users to set up previously recorded webinars for on-demand viewing. The benefit of this feature is that you can continue to collect registrations when you re-promote the webinar. This isn’t a long-term plan, but rather a logical short-term plan for collecting lead information while the iron is still hot.
Prepare the webinar recording for your website
If you want to enhance your webinar recording with intros, music, or banners, you can use paid or free software. You then have the choice of offering your recording through a “gated” page – that is a landing page with a form that collects visitor information in exchange for access to the video (lead capture) – or simply as a posted link on your website. Gating your content is a great way to add people into your marketing funnel. Whether you choose gated or ungated, you will want to embed the video on your site. You don’t want your visitors to leave your site, open Vimeo, and never return. Finally, you want to make viewing and interacting with your recording and other content easy. Consider adding a pop-up to a related service, a carousel of links to related firm articles, and a contact form to reach out if they want to speak to someone about what they just watched.
Bonus: Microsoft’s new Transcribe feature makes it *super simple* to upload an .mp4 and transcribe it within minutes. Once your recorded content is in written form, you can use the transcriptions to produce blogs, social media posts, proposals, or staff training. You can even provide the transcriptions along with the recording to clients as a value-added service.
To keep your evergreen content from getting stale, be sure to build in quarterly or more frequent reviews to refresh it as needed. Sometimes content will need to be updated slightly for relevance or removed if it has become irrelevant. If you create new services or write blogs that would complement your webinar recordings, be sure to review and update your cross-links.
Your accounting firm’s webinar can grow as part of your overall content and provide value long after you stop recording. If you have any questions about how to draft, design, and leverage content in your accounting firm, please let us know, and we will contact you with some practical ideas for growth.