Repurpose Presentations to Generate Value

A lemon juicer and some half lemons, ripe for the squeezing.

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:

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

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.


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