Behind every good webinar is weeks of planning and promoting—only for it to be over in an hour. Then it's on to the next one.

Webinars can offer timeless value, but they're easy for participants to miss because of a cluttered inbox or calendar conflict.

Repurposing your webinars gives these events a second, third, or even fourteenth life as written content, video clips, infographics, and other formats.

But with so much on your plate, is the juice really worth the squeeze? If you're still doing it like it's 2015, maybe not. But if you’re making the most of AI in your repurposing workflow, it's definitely worthwhile.

“Will this webinar be recorded?” and other reasons to repurpose

The average webinar attendance rate is around 40%, according to industry benchmarks. That means less than half of the people who sign up for a webinar will actually attend it live.

From my own experience hosting webinars (as well as signing up for them and not attending), that sounds about right. It also explains why a common question you'll get is, "Will this webinar be recorded?"

Webinars are way too valuable to only be available live.

There are many good reasons to repurpose your webinar content into more lasting formats:

• 🤩 Giving your audience more options to consume the content at their own pace
• 🤩 Creating content where most of the work’s already done for you
• 🤩 Making your guests' insights more accessible instead of gatekeeping it behind a virtual event
• 🤩 Continuing the conversation from a webinar across your social media platforms

There are also just as many valid excuses not to invest the time:

• 😮‍💨 Ordering a transcript through a manual transcription service, which can take 24-48+ hours to turn around
• 😮‍💨 Manually scanning the recording and transcript for good soundbites and repurposing opportunities
• 😮‍💨 Figuring out an angle for an article based on the webinar and finding time to write one
• 😮‍💨 Hiring a freelance video editor to produce polished video content

But now that you have AI in your corner, there’s a new reason to repurpose that blows those excuses away.

7 ways to save hours on webinar repurposing with AI

Using AI, you can now squeeze a lot more value from your webinars with a lot less effort.

AI is great at many creative tasks, but it still needs a human touch. That’s probably a good thing or we'd be out of a job.

To show you how, I’ll be repurposing a recent 1-hour webinar from Descript about—what else?—repurposing, parts of which I've even repurposed for this article.

‎Note: Many of these time-saving repurposing tips can be done using Underlord, Descript’s built-in creative AI assistant.

1. Generate and format your webinar transcript

A clean webinar transcript will be the starting point for a lot of your repurposed content. It’s easier to scan text and turn it into other text-based formats, after all.

Without AI: You’d either spend the afternoon transcribing it yourself, or wait 24+ hours for a transcription service to turn it around.

With AI: You can just upload your webinar recording, assign names to each voice, and generate an accurate transcript that includes time codes and speaker labels in just a few minutes.

2. Cut the fluff for cleaner webinar recordings

Raw webinar recordings often have minutes of dead air and filler where not much happens, especially at the start when you’re waiting for your audience to trickle in.

It’s just the reality of live streaming. But it’s harder to forgive in fast-paced social media feeds and polished YouTube channels. Even lightly trimming your webinar recording before publishing it can give it a stronger start and keep viewers watching until the end.

Without AI: You’d either have to hire a video editor to do this for you or just upload your webinar recording as is.

With AI: You can quickly identify and trim long silences, wait times, retakes, technical difficulties, filler words, and other fluff in minutes.

Using Underlord’s Edit for clarity action in Descript, I shaved 10 minutes off an hour-long webinar recording without losing any of the actual content.

3. Generate webinar recaps and overviews in different formats

A written summary can be used to tee up recap emails, social media threads, video descriptions, or blog posts that accompany your webinar recording and clips, enticing people to click play.

Without AI: You’d have to re-watch your webinar and craft tailored summaries for each format you need.

With AI: You can draft a summary based on the transcript and follow up with guidelines like using bullet points. You can even specify specific formats, like a newsletter email, to apply best practices for that channel.

In Descript, you can use Underlord’s Summarize action to get a general purpose summary, or pick a specific publishing format like YouTube description for time stamps and chapter names, or Social media post for a multi-post thread.

4. Pull out soundbites worth sharing

In the span of an hour-long webinar, there are probably a dozen great snippets you can turn into social media clips, expert quotes in future articles, or even customer testimonials for your website.

Without AI: It can be a slog to sift through the recording to find those nuggets of gold worth pulling out. A transcript makes things easier but not easy.

With AI: You can just tell the tool the duration, quantity, and concepts to focus on, and let it find most of these moments for you in the webinar.

5. Create a highlight reel curating all the best moments

While individual soundbites are plenty useful, editing them together into a highlight reel of the best moments from your webinar lets you pack an hour’s worth of value into a short-form video perfect for social media audiences.

These highlight videos can even curate moments from multiple webinars to create a trailer that shows off the caliber of your guests and builds hype for your brand’s webinars as a whole.

Without AI: You’d likely have to tap a video editor to produce these assets and tell them which moments to include.

With AI: You can choose from an automatically curated selection of these moments, then trim and rearrange them in the transcript to edit your video like a doc.

6. Cut up your webinar into clips for all your social channels

Turning long-form videos into short-form clips is easier said than done. You just cut up a video into smaller pieces, right? Except that every platform and placement has its own aspect ratio, duration, dimensions, and audience.

Want to post your webinar as a 10-minute vertical video on TikTok? Great. But it probably won't fit Instagram's 90-second limit on reels.

Without AI: You’d likely have to compromise on tailoring your repurposed content for each channel or it would just take way too much time.

With AI: You can find and create clips, adapt your layout for different aspect ratios, and generate supporting social media copy optimized for each platform without cutting corners.

In Descript, you can highlight clips within your webinar and pull them out into separate compositions to apply layouts and templates tailored for each format.

This makes it easier to create landscape variations for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and portrait variations for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Stories & Reels.

Tip: If you record your webinar with split tracks for each speaker, you can use Descript's automatic multi-cam to switch to the active speaker, saving you hours of video editing.

7. Publish articles for every webinar

Do all your webinars have a home? If the answer is your webinar hosting platform or YouTube channel, consider how you can also publish them on your website or blog to better integrate with the rest of your marketing efforts.

This lets more people discover your archive of past webinars as they browse your content, and lets you link out to your own website instead of third-party platforms whenever you direct your audience to a webinar.

Publish an article based on your webinar to go with the embedded recording and you can appeal to people who would rather skim an article than watch a video.

Without AI: You’d have to find a writer to tackle the supporting article or settle for pasting in a transcript below your embedded webinar recording.

With AI: You just can ask the tool to generate a blog post based on your webinar’s transcript, providing a writing sample in your brand’s voice and tone so there’s less you’ll have to rewrite.

Tip: If you have the slide deck from the webinar, you can repurpose individual slides as in-line visuals throughout your blog post for a more engaging read.

Repurpose with purpose

Repurposing webinars, or any content for that matter, without wasting a lot of time means developing a playbook you can follow every time a new one goes out.

Which of your channels are worth repurposing for? Where will your webinar live? What formats will it exist in? How will you record and transcribe it? What are your goals for repurposed content on each channel?

Answering these questions will help you flesh out an intentional repurposing strategy to go with your webinar marketing strategy.

And embracing AI will help you execute it.