How to Repurpose Presentations
Stretch your marketing dollars by transforming existing presentations into high-impact collateral.
Lisa B. Marshall
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How to Repurpose Presentations
Have you ever converted a presentation into a video for your website/blog? Do you convert webinars to podcasts to promote your business? Do you use rolling presentations in your reception area, cafeteria, or at a trade show? Well, you should! Today I’ll cover ways to get more mileage out of your marking budget by repurposing your presentations.
When is the last time that great presentation you created saw the light of day? For most of us, presentations sit lost on our hard drives waiting for a new audience to wow. But quality content it what builds your brand. It showcases your expertise and, perhaps most importantly, it can generate targeted leads for your business. By repurposing proven presentations you’ll get more bang for your buck…especially in these times of tight budgets.
It’s cheaper, faster, and easier to extend the life of your presentations by repurposing them for high-impact online and offline collateral. I like to think of presentations as just the first step in the content marketing optimization process.
Here are 6 Quick and Dirty steps for content repurposing:
Step #1 – Create Goals for Your Presentation
Before you work on a presentation, ask yourself: What do you want your audience to say, know, or do differently as a result of hearing you speak? The answer to that question will help keep you focused on your main message.
A few years ago, I had a client, Dr. Abidi. She had just joined a hospital-based women’s internal medicine practice and she was invited to speak at a conference. When I asked for her goals she told me “I’d like women to understand typical health screenings. They are so important and we often just don’t have the time during office visits to adequately explain the importance of routine health screenings.”
So here’s how we defined the goals for Dr. Abidi’s presentation:
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to educate women about typical health screenings and issues
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to attract new patients to her practice
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to create good will in the community
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to refine her public speaking skills
In this case, her ultimate goal was lead generation. She purposefully chose a broad topic, something that was beyond the specific services of her practice, so that she would attract a larger audience. Typically by focusing on industry trends, informational how to’s and tips, or discussing a relevant case study, you’ll attract larger audiences. And these types of presentations have a much longer shelf-life than product-specific presentations.
Step #2 – Create Content to Meet Your Presentation Goals
By starting with your goals, you can then plan the best way to meet those goals with your content. In Dr. Abidi’s case, we transformed academic facts and statistics into an “infotainment” presentation — a combination of information and entertainment.
Since her goal was to appeal to the emotions of her audience, we created a highly visual presentation that focused on real patient stories to highlight the importance of typical health screenings. We chose emotional stories, ones that showcased the dire consequences of failing to get regular screenings as well as ones that were uplifting tales of prevention. We made sure to sprinkle a dose of humor throughout to keep the audience interested.
Step #3 – Organize Content Into Mini-Presentations
Effective organization of your content is critical for repurposing. I always suggest thinking of longer presentations as several mini-presentations delivered on the same day. Like chapters in a book, each segment needs to have an entertaining opening, and organized middle, and creative a finish. Here’s a good guideline: every 5 minutes of content should be a mini-segment that is strong enough to stand alone as a presentation.
Step #4 – Plan Ahead
In order to repurpose your work in the future, you need to plan ahead by capturing as many forms of the content the first time around. I encouraged Dr. Abidi to make a high quality audio recording during the live event by wearing a portable recording device. I also encouraged her to record the questions she was asked throughout the day. She assumed the recordings were to help improve her speaking skills, but that’s not all they would do. See step 5.
Step #5 – Create a Variety of Content Formats
After the live event, the hospital divided the presentation slides (and the audio recording) into 6 short (4-5 minutes each) segments.
The slides and audio were then imported into video software to create 12 short podcasts. The recordings of the presentation and of the questions that were asked during the event were sent for transcription. From the transcription several documents emerged: short articles, a series of blog posts, and a Frequently Asked Questions Guide in interactive PDF format. By creating the FAQ from attendee questions, the answers were guaranteed to focus on the real concerns of the target audience.
So just by planning ahead and recording the presentation, Dr. Abidi and her colleagues were able to repurpose the content into numerous useful formats. This allowed the presentation to work for the medical practice long after the conference ended.
Step #6: Optimize for Search so Your Content is Found
All of the video and audio segments, plus the articles, blog posts, and the FAQ Guide were then posted to the hospital website. The web-based articles and blog posts were keyword and search optimized to ensure that they would be easily found with a simple web search. In this way, the content continues to meet the goals Dr. Abidi identified at the beginning of the process.
So there you have it, 6 steps to repurposing your content. First, create goals for your presentation. Next, create content that will best meet those goals, organize the content into mini-presentations, make sure you plan ahead so that you can create a variety of formats, and finally, optimize for search so that your content will be easily found.
This is Lisa B. Marshall, The Public Speaker. Passionate about communication, your success is my business.
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About the Author
Lisa B. Marshall Lisa holds masters with duel degrees in interpersonal/intercultural communication and organizational communication. She’s the author of Smart Talk: The Public Speaker’s Guide to Success in Every Situation, as well as Ace Your Interview, Powerful Presenter, and Expert Presenter. Her work has been featured in CBS Money Watch, Ragan.com, Woman’s Day, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and many others. Her institutional clients include Johns Hopkins Medicine, Harvard University, NY Academy of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Genentech, and Roche.