So you’ve run your virtual event, and it was (yay!) a resounding success. You’ve created your post-event summary, added your attendees’ emails to your mailing list, and you’re happy with your event results. Time to close the chapter on this event and start planning the next one, right?

Wrong.

“The potential to use virtual events to raise brand profiles and engage with prospects and customers shouldn’t end once the event is over,” says Sanina Kaur, director of SK Copy Co. “From a content marketing perspective, it’s only just the start in relation to generating increased return on investment (ROI), nurturing leads, and turning customers into brand ambassadors.”

Virtual events offer marketers an unparalleled opportunity to repurpose event content to boost brand awareness, grow their communities, and drive registrations for future events. Below, 13 marketing pros share their top tips for repurposing your virtual event for maximum impact and engagement.

Plan your repurposing strategy before your event

While your exact repurposing plans will largely depend on the content your event generates, you should still be creating a general plan of attack long before your event kicks off.

Rachel Heller, Sr. Event Content Manager at GitHub, recommends bringing your demand generation and content marketing teams together ahead of time to brainstorm ideas based on your event’s run of show.

“Sit down with your content marketing team in advance of the event and walk through the agenda with them. This will enable them to come up with the post-event content plan that they can act on quickly vs. letting the content sit and get stale,” Heller recommends. She continues:

“Before the event, sit down with your Demand Gen team and map each session to a stage in the buyer’s journey, then put attendees of those sessions to specific nurture campaigns based on their lead score from attending that session and other actions they took at the event (such as having a meeting, attending a demo, etc.).”

Rachel Heller, Sr. Event Content Manager at GitHub

Some virtual event platforms — like Vimeo — will let you automatically sync your event analytics to marketing platforms like Marketo, Hubspot, and Mailchimp. This makes it easier than ever to use these analytics and attendee actions to send individuals relevant and targeted follow-up content.

Creating a repurposing strategy before your event will also help you ensure you have a plan to capture all of the recordings, polls, and conversations you need during the event.

“We’ve started to reformat some of our webinars specifically to make repurposing easier,” says Joe Michalowski, Director of Content at Mosaic. “We run Q&A-style sessions now where we bring together a panel of experts. That way, we get perfect sound bites to repurpose into video clips that we share on LinkedIn and drive more awareness for our brand.”

Map the content type to the right repurposing channel

Below, you’ll find countless ways to repurpose your content — but make sure that when you’re doing so, you’re not trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Map the type of content to the marketing and sales channels you have available to you.

“All you have to do is think about the audience’s intention behind why they consume content from a particular channel, and you’ll be surprised to learn of the ways you can repurpose a video to serve that channel well,” says Laura Kluz, Director of Content at ProductLed. As an example, she shares:

“We host a ProductLed Summit twice a year that brings in thousands of registrations and features 20 to 30 videos from experts on every topic related to product-led growth. We take those videos and repurpose them in countless ways. Interview-style videos are added to our podcast lineup. Other videos are turned into blog posts. We upload all of these videos to YouTube, and are sure to link back to each other if they are related.”

Share access to session recordings

One of the very first things Nick Gaudio, Director of Content at Rattle, does after an event is get session recordings transcribed and captioned ASAP. This makes it easy to upload accessible recordings to your website or landing page, which can then be shared with attendees as well as registrants who didn’t make it to the event.

“Repost the recording on your website. This is great for anyone who might’ve missed the event and for your future visitors,” says Jen Weber, Director of Digital Marketing at Bright Funds. “You can choose to gate this page so that you can capture their information and include them in emails about any future events!”

Looking for inspiration? Jillian Wood, a B2B content and brand strategist, points out Loopio’s Loopicon 2022 on-demand portal as an example to emulate.

Within their Loopicon 2022 page, Loopio doesn’t just share recordings of their sessions — they also link out to any slides and resources discussed in each talk. Talk about a value-add.

Share video snippets on social media

Sharing short clips from your virtual event on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn might be one of the most common ways to repurpose virtual event content, and for good reason: it’s effective.

“This is a stellar way to create more interactive content, and lots of tools make creating engaging social video templates fast and easy,” says Wood. If you’re new to creating social media videos, she recommends getting started with Canva, Lumen5, or Milk Video. She continues:

“Consider using recordings to create shorter, informational videos on specific topics. Cut out insightful parts of the recordings and use titles or talking-head footage in between to tie clips together into a cohesive story. These can be how-to videos, news-style recaps, presentation teasers, or SEO-focused.”

For a successful example, Ilija Sekulov of Mailbutler says to look no further than TED, whose Instagram account shares short clips of TED Talks daily to over 6.6 million followers — sparking interest in both the longer-form videos and TED’s events themselves.

Don’t be scared to get creative with the snippets you share, either. As long as you have permission, sharing specific moments from speakers and attendees can be a great way to foster a sense of community among those who attended, and often, will prompt those featured in your video to share it with their own networks.

Feature key takeaways in an email

While video recordings are an obvious way to repurpose your virtual event content, keep in mind that not everyone consumes content the same way. While some people prefer video, others prefer to read content.

Make sure you’re serving that audience, too, by sending a recap email after your event. This can be sent to not just attendees, but all registrants, customers, and others on your mailing list. (Ideally, this will spark their interest in future events!)

“One less video-focused thing we do to repurpose webinar content is create a follow-up email full of callbacks to the event,” says Michalowski. He continues:

“Instead of ‘Thanks for registering, here’s a recording,’ we’ll reference specific comments people left in the chat, highlight great questions that came from the audience, and provide some key highlights from the event — all in an effort to create more of a community feel to our webinars.”
Joe Michalowski, Director of Content at Mosaic.

Create blog posts

Often, a single, hour-long virtual event can provide you with enough content to generate multiple SEO-focused or thought leadership-style blog posts. A longer event can provide you with content ideas for weeks, if not months.

To get the ball rolling on ideas, Heller recommends having a content marketer sit in on each session to take notes and generate blog post ideas. This works especially well for panels or discussion-based sessions.

You might be surprised at just how well this approach works: Kluz shares that in 2020, the then-VP of Product at Netflix spoke at the ProductLed Summit. Kluz and her team then packaged that talk into a popular blog post that is still paying dividends today.

“[His talk] was repurposed into a blog post and the video is packaged within the blog post as well,” Kluz says. “It’s consistently the top blog post on our site and ranks #1 for a huge number of keywords.”

Make your blog posts as rich as possible by adding in any useful slides, graphics, video snippets, and resources (with the speaker’s permission, of course).

“Share frameworks, processes, and playbooks for actionable takeaways,” recommends Tyler Wade, a content marketing manager who has previously worked with companies like Superside and Ratehub. “Use the blogs in persona-based email nurture sequences. Ideally, you have more middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content you can use to fill out the gaps as a customer moves through the flow. ”

Use event audio in your podcast

Podcasts have only grown more popular over the last few years — making them an excellent avenue for repurposing your virtual event content.

“For our recent virtual events, we’ve turned recorded roundtables and panels into podcast episodes — with the guest’s consent, of course,” says Allie Decker, co-founder of Omniscient Digital.

This channel works especially well for fireside chats, panels, and other discussion-based sessions. You can also pull audio snippets from across a number of different sessions to feature on podcast episodes that center on specific topics. This lets you add a greater variety of voices and perspectives to your podcast episodes without having to schedule new interviews.

Repackage event graphics

One often-overlooked content source during virtual events is visual graphics, in the form of presentation slides, data, and event photos.

“Repackaging presentation slides and visuals from virtual events into easily digestible infographics or visual summaries is another highly effective tactic,” says Sekulov. “Sharing these visuals on social media or incorporating them into email campaigns can catch the attention of new prospects and drive interest in your upcoming events.” 

And don’t stop there. Keep an eye out for any memorable moments and think of how you can share them in creative ways later on. 

“Make memes out of anything that gets a laugh from the attendees,” says Wade. “If they feel that pain, there’s a story worth being told. They’re great for social and sales enablement.”

Take advantage of user-generated content

Hosting an interactive virtual event isn’t just great for keeping attendees engaged — it can also provide you with a mountain of user-generated questions, discussions, and statistics that you can then use in future pieces of content.

“Run polls during the webinar and use that to create unique statistics,” Aman Ghataura, Head of Growth at NuOptima. “For example, we ran a poll [during an event] and found that 76% of our attendees had never heard of keyword clustering. This became a unique statistic that we can push in point-of-view pieces.”

Allie Beazell, Marketing Chief of Staff at Census, also recommends combing through your event’s discussions for additional content ideas for future workshops, webinars, panels, and blog posts.

“Use the questions asked as jumping off points for additional follow-up events or written content,” she says. “You can post the questions one by one (or as a thread) to social networks, give the ‘too long; didn’t read’ answer, and then link to your long-form answers or the gateway to your follow-up event if it was a meaty question.”

Create courses or webinars

After NuOptima ran an event teaching 500+ attendees how to increase their organic traffic, Ghataura saw a unique opportunity to repurpose the resulting content into a free course.

“Create a gated course and promote it post-webinar to a cold audience,” Ghataura recommends. “They’ll sign up with their email, and you can promote the next webinar to them.”

Alanna Gerton, founder of LANA, points to another (wildly) successful example of this approach: HubSpot. 

“HubSpot repurposes their event content into courses, which attendees can use to learn more about specific topics that were discussed during the conference,” she says. “This not only adds value to the attendees but also allows HubSpot to extend the value of the conference content throughout the entire year.”

Create case studies and testimonials

If any of your customers present at your event, turn their stories into written case studies and video snippets to share on social media. That way, they can impact far more potential customers than just those who attended your one-time event.

Wade describes doing just this — with great results — when a customer spoke at a Superside event. “I took a case study interview, added some narrative, and created a 60-second clip to be shared on social that made the sales team jump for joy,” he says.

The result? A case study and short video that the Superside sales and marketing teams can leverage for years to come.

Get everything you need to run (and repurpose) your next event

Every virtual event you host serves as a potential gold mine of content. Make it even easier to repurpose that content by hosting your event on Vimeo: with its intuitive accessibility features, in-depth analytics, and marketing superpowers, our virtual event platform will let you extend your events’ reach long after the show is over.

Check out how Vimeo can support your next virtual event.