Webinars are a popular and easy tool for sharing your knowledge or passion. All you need is an audience, solid promotion, engaging content, and a camera – then you’re ready to broadcast your message live to viewers around the globe.
At a time when video content marketing is all the rage, you will also probably decide to publish a recording of your webinar online. Why? Because publishing a recording is a great way to extend the lifespan of your content, both gated and non-gated. And you can now offer your audience a chance to watch when and how it suits them.
However, just as you wouldn’t publish a blogpost without optimizing around keywords, it’s essential to optimize your recorded webinars. Here are five essential actions to take before uploading your webinar recording.
1. Before you do anything, choose your keywords
Find your primary, substitute, and alternative keywords around your topic. Research your long-tail keywords, too. You will use the keywords to optimize any workflow you might build around your webinar (such as landing pages, emails, or even a newsletter). This is essential work that needs to be done so your recording can be ranked and indexed, and if you plan to have language versions (see tip 5).
2. Write a summary, then put it at the beginning
You need to give viewers a compelling reason to keep watching past the initial 10–15 seconds by telling them what benefit they will get from watching. They will also want to hear a clear order for what you will cover in the webinar, which allows them to skip ahead to the parts that most interest them. Think of this as a Table of Contents for your recording. You can add it “live” as you record your webinar, or add it into the edited version later.
3. Add subtitles, because mobile is king
If you’re going to publish your webinar recording (or even a preview) on social media, you’ll need subtitles. The majority of video content is consumed on mobile devices, and the mobile versions of many popular social media platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook show videos in the user’s stream without any sound.
70% of people have the sound off when looking at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/captions-your-linkedin-videos-more-views-video-marketing-mulley/
And with so much online content competing for the user’s attention, you have about three seconds to catch their attention and explain why they should keep watching your video. This is why you need to use subtitles to add context to the few seconds of silent video they watch before deciding to continue.
Your webinar should already have a strong introduction that serves as a hook to catch their attention. And if it doesn’t, you can always record a new introduction before you publish.
4. Upload an Optimized transcript
If you are uploading your recording to YouTube, use a closed caption (CC) file format for the transcript of your recording, which you should optimize around your keywords. Google’s search algorithm will use words contained within the closed captions as an indexing and ranking tool.
YouTube has an automatic captioning service that uses speech recognition to caption a video, but that is only available for English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. You will also need to ensure that your speech is optimized around your keywords.
If you use a common CC file format such as .SRT files for example, you can edit your transcript to ensure it is optimized around your primary and long-tail keywords.
5. Make your captions multilingual
Another major advantage to using CCs is that you can easily extend both the lifespan and reach of your webinar recording by adding subtitles in languages other than your own.
For example, add Swedish and Danish for a recording in Finnish – now you’re doing multilingual content marketing!
You should also add language versions of your title and description, too! And if your recording is gated content, then utilize multilingual SEO (search engine optimization) to optimize for the keywords that you built your inbound content around.
If you want to learn how to get started with multilingual SEO, then download our free eBook. It's a practical guide to extending your marketing reach into other languages
SUMMARY
So, five ways to easily optimize your webinar recording before you publish online. If you are interested in multilingual content marketing to extend the reach of your webinar recordings into other language versions then contact us to find out more about our translation services for both video subtitles and marketing content?
You can choose a translator who specializes in producing translations for marketing content and who can optimize your content around the right keywords in many languages. They can even suggest keyword substitutes and alternatives, allowing you to A/B test to find the best match for your content. We’d be happy to tell you more about how it works.
Updated