With much of the world going online after in person events all but disappeared during the height of the pandemic, webinars have increased hugely in popularity. But how many organisations that have hosted webinars have taken the next step and provided webinar transcripts…?
If not, why not?!
The benefits of webinar transcripts
In our last blog we talked about content repurposing and getting a better “bang for your buck” from an event. Webinars fit very neatly into this context. Having a transcript of the event helps maximise the investment you’ve made in the event.
- it’ll help you reach a wider audience – this is particularly relevant for those with hearing difficulties who will now be able to access the content
- search engines will “know” your content is there – search engines love text. Fact. They are quite simply unable to index recordings. That means that unless your webinar recording is transcribed and indexed as text, it doesn’t exist to Google or any other search engine
- it’ll give you a greater geographic reach – the barriers of borders and restrictions on travel are immediately dealt with by going online. Go international with your webinar!
- it makes the content searchable – it’s much easier to extract specific content by being able to search for the topic you need, rather than having to listen to the whole webinar
- it’s highly interactive – enabling comments and audience participation leads to better engagement
We always recommend using a professional transcription service like Fiona Shipley for your transcript.
Why?!
We’ve no doubt you’ll find the end product is cleaner with excellent accuracy levels, is produced more speedily, all of which will save you a vast amount of time and effort.
Our top tips for maximising the impact of your webinar
There are some practical, simple steps to improve the value and investment in hosting a webinar:
- divide the full recording into sections – for example, if you have 3 main topics of conversation or 3 main speakers, section each one individually. This makes it easier for people to cherry pick the topics they are most interested in, and means you can create lots of content on your website, with lots of opportunities to create internal links… all of which boosts your SEO.
- great content is too good to limit to a webinar alone – this is where repurposing comes in…. we talked about this at length in our last blog. But don’t just limit yourself to the webinar alone. If you found that certain elements of the website gained some real traction and were very popular with your audience, could this form some new content on your website? Be used for individual blogs?
- have your audience front of mind at all times – if you remember throughout the planning and execution of a webinar that providing an enhanced user experience is the main aim, then focus on doing just that. Your transcript can tick a number of boxes to achieve this, catering for those people that don’t have time to watch a full video, may be limited because of where they are streaming the video from in terms of data consumption, or may be hearing impaired – to name just a few.
Here at Fiona Shipley we’ve noticed an increase in the number of requests for webinar transcripts from our clients. We have all the skills you need to get an end result that delivers all the benefits of a quality webinar transcript that will indeed help you maximise your investment.