It doesn’t take much work to repurpose presentations to get value beyond the stage. Marketing and communications teams spend a massive amount of time creating and finessing presentations. It’s a lot of effort for a moment, whether live or on-demand, keynote or conference session. And if you outsource presentation work, you can add hard dollars into the equation.
It’s especially true when it comes to keynote-level presentations. Cue the music, walk on stage, pray to the demo gods*, get the laughs and the applause, and then? More often than not, it’s little more than posting and promoting the video online. Then it’s lather, rinse, repeat for the next opportunity.
Repurpose, Recycle, Reuse, and Reap the Benefits
Increase your return on investment for the time and effort to build presentations by using them as the basis for a series of related assets. Not only are you creating the opportunity to reach beyond the original audience, but you can repurpose presentations to:
- Extend the shelf life of the content
- Help to build the reputation of the speaker and your brand
- Reinforce the messaging
- Provide different ways to consume the content
- Integrate with multiple content journeys
Depending on your content and audiences, your derivative assets may have different drive-to targets, such as product pages, solutions content, reports, and campaign landing pages.
All these new pieces also provide opportunities to support search optimization, internal linking strategies, and cross-promotion.
Mine Presentations for Valuable Stories
For instance, look at a script in the context of storylines. Not that keynotes tend to be formulaic (or do they? 😉), but you might have a sequence that starts with the state of the industry, follows with forward-looking predictions, and dives into product announcements or demos. Maybe there’s a Q&A with an analyst, customer, or peer. Whatever the chapters are, consider how you can use them as independent stories.
Take the opportunity to get beyond your own perspective. Take advantage of social media from attendees to see if people picked up on or reacted to any particular sections. You may be surprised at what resonated with people and sparked conversations. And you may get some great ideas for social based on anything that turned out to be particularly quote-worthy. And if the live presentation included a Q&A session, you have a potential goldmine of topics.
Explore Ways to Repurpose Presentations
- Blog Posts: Depending on the presentation length, you may have material for one post, but you’ll often find three or four. Use the original scripting as the basis for the post, then build in supporting messaging, hyperlinks, and calls to action. If you have multiple posts, create a cadence that supports the messages and audiences of the posts.
- Infographics: Grab those good data points shared on stage and incorporate them into scannable infographics to use as top-of-funnel content. Build a story around the data that encourages the audience to dig deeper to get more context. You can also extend the value of an infographic effort by using individual blocks as social cards or clickable graphics for web pages or blog posts.
- Social Posts: Consider posts and social graphics as unique assets vs. simply as promotional copy. (Yes, I’m saying this out loud.) The goal is to encourage click-through to an asset, but a lot of teams still focus on “we have a new white paper on chicken farming” rather than pulling a FOMO-inducing stat or quote from the asset itself.
- Short Videos: There’s a reason movie trailers work, even if the movie is meh. If you have the video files of the presentation, you can pick the clips that work for you. Look at the video in terms of moments as well as chapters. Use 20-second moments on social to lead to longer videos or other assets. Use the chapters as standalone videos or embed them on web pages or within blog posts. The more editing resources you have, the more ways you can use the content.
Creating content doesn’t always mean starting from a blank page. Turn all the effort your teams put into event content and get more value from presentations.
* Rowan Trollope, now CEO of Redis, was the first person I witnessed use this phrase. He did a live demo onstage during a Cisco keynote, much to the terror of the marketing and product dev teams accustomed to using recorded demo sequences. It worked. Everyone resumed breathing.