Webinars take time and money. Here’s how to get the most of each out of yours, and get search engine clout in the bargain.

Webinars, videos, customer interviews, conference proceedings, panel discussions . . . marketing managers expend a lot of sweat in setting these events up, and they deserve to reap sweat equity from all that effort.

How can you make these vehicles work harder for you? How can get more mileage out of them? Most important, how can you get real SEO juice out of them?

One of our technology clients has events of this type first transcribed, with the transcripts then edited and converted into full-blown case studies. The resulting text is SEO-rich in customer names, industry terminology, product names and references to their wins in the market.

Using webinars for fun and profit

The procedure we follow on these webinar-to-case-study conversions is simple, and I outline it here:

1. Product managers, field engineers, marketing managers and just about all employees in the field are empowered to record at these events. They use an audio recorder app on their phone, or sometimes professional video equipment to capture the event. They then make the recording available as an audio or video file.
2. Marketing quickly reviews the footage and vets it for worthiness as a case study. (Sometimes you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you get to the fairy princess.)
3. Every month or so, they point us to the online repository of the audio and video files. They may store them at dropbox.com or on video sharing sites on the web. We cherry-pick the best parts and coordinate priorities in an editorial calendar using a Google Sheets spreadsheet.
4. We have the audio and video transcribed, usually with AI, then conduct first-pass editing and review in a Google Docs file.
5. We send the transcript back to Marketing for review and approval by the customer who gave the presentation.
6. Once the customer has approved, we edit and massage the transcript from its rough, oral form into a more polished, written form. We introduce subheadings to correspond to slide changes in the presentations and questions in the panel discussions. We also add customer logos, pull-out quotations and other tidbits of metadata that go into the finished product.
7. The client reviews the case study and pours it into their branded template. The finished product lives as a PDF on their website, which they promote through their sales team and social media.

The result is easier to follow than the rough transcript, and it tells the client’s story more effectively. It’s not always perfect prose, but we make sure that it is good English, free of the uh’s and um’s of extemporaneous speech. It is finished enough to be valuable marketing content, yet spontaneous enough to fit our client’s marketing style and strategy very well.

And, of course, the search engines love it.

How do you recycle your webinars?

photo credit: cogdogblog