The Secret to Converting Webinars to White Papers
*This is a guest post from our Content Manager, Samantha Rosenfeld.
No doubt you’ve heard the commonly used phrase, “Content is King”, coined by the famous Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, back in 1996. In his essay, he described the future of the internet as a marketplace for content. And boy, was he right.
“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting,” he mused more than twenty-five years ago. Since then, content marketing has emerged in full-force, with 91% of B2B marketers utilizing this marketing vertical in order to reach their ideal audience.
But why is content so important?
There are a variety of reasons why content is an all-important part of a businesses’ overall marketing strategy.
It educates your target audience and helps them to become an educated buyer
It fuels SEO, driving more organic traffic to your website each and every day
It helps attract new leads via search engines like Google
It establishes trust with your audience, particularly through social media channels
And the benefits go on. But most companies run into the same issue when it comes to their content marketing: they don’t produce enough content to satisfy their customers.
In fact, the number one challenge for marketing departments continues to circulate around content creation, according to a recent study by SEMrush. That’s how important it continues to be, even in 2021.
After all, content marketing attracts more traffic to your website. It builds trust between a brand and its audience. And it can generate high-quality leads.
But to come up with new, authentic, unique, and useful content requires a ton of time and effort. People are voracious readers on the internet. Everything they need is just at their fingertips.
So, how can you as a business keep up?
The answer?
Repurposing already-developed content.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Your marketing team has put time and effort into creating content already - why not utilize it in new ways?
With most everything going virtual in 2020, we’ve seen a significant uptick in live and recorded webinars. This is a great opportunity to educate your audience in real-time. But what happens when the recording is over? All that time and effort goes to waste - unless you’re ready to package it up for another campaign!
Here’s why you should recycle valuable content like webinars into a lead magnet white paper:
✔ Research Process? Done.
The main purpose of white paper is to present objective research as the foundation for easy problem solving and expert decision making. That means it typically requires a more sophisticated research process, as well as utilizing industry studies and stats, interview tidbits, etc.
The research process that goes into creating a comprehensive webinar is similar. You have nearly all of the information you need to develop a strong white paper. Now it’s time to pull it together.
✔ Outline & Content? Already Formed.
Because of the nature of a webinar, the outline of your white paper is mostly put together before you even begin.
Most likely your presentation offered an introduction to the webinar - the reason why you’re presenting on this particular topic - before delving into the supporting material and finishing with a strong conclusion.
This already sets up a strong outline for the white paper, and the content is there - it just needs to be bulked up with other supporting information. But the hard part is done!
→ Next Page Tip: It’s important to remember that you speak very differently than you write - or read for that matter. Although you’re given the bones of the white paper, it’s still going to require quite a bit of work to clean up the language, add supporting details in areas that might be unclear without clarification, and be sure to answer any questions your reader might have. This process isn’t as easy as just transcribing a webinar talk: it requires a keen eye and attention to the paper as whole.
✔ New Medium for Audience to Easily Consume Information? Ready.
Once you’ve assembled the pieces, added in filler information, and had it reviewed by your internal team, the piece is ready to be finalized! Include any supporting graphs or images to break up the text, and be sure to include your design team to package the piece.
After all, this marketing collateral is going to be an attractive lead magnet that can help your sales funnel down the line! This process will allow you to strategically upcycle any content you have already produced in a new, fresh way.