The rise of generative AI in marketing has presented both unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges. Marketers are grappling with how to leverage these powerful tools effectively without falling prey to the “garbage in, garbage out” phenomenon.
The key, it turns out, lies in the quality and volume of the raw material we feed these intelligent models. And for many businesses, that goldmine of high-quality input is already sitting in their content archives: their webinars.
Read on to see why webinars have so much potential for AI-powered content repurposing that can fuel entire campaigns.
The Building Blocks of AI: Why Input Quality Matters More Than Ever
Think of a renowned Scandinavian toy manufacturer known for its modular building bricks — I’m avoiding the name, but I’m sure you know which one I mean.
B2B marketing campaigns need building blocks
The more blocks you have, the greater the potential for creation – from countless small structures to one magnificent, complex edifice.
This analogy holds true for generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs).
LLMs thrive on vast amounts of text input. Their capabilities are directly tied to the number of “tokens” (essentially words or word fragments) they ingest during their development and, crucially, during your day-to-day use. A model that can process more input can understand context more clearly, produce higher-quality outputs, and answer more nuanced questions. For marketers, this means that to generate truly impactful content with AI, we need to provide it with as much rich, raw material as possible.
Generative AI allows easy creation of webinar content.
Consider the simple act of generating a blog post. If you attempt to create a high-quality post with just a single-sentence prompt, the results will likely be generic. However, imagine if you could provide 10,000 words of input – a detailed prompt outlining target audience, key discussion points, data, examples, and desired tone. The resulting output would be far superior, perfectly tailored to your needs. The challenge, then, is how to efficiently gather such a substantial volume of high-quality input without consuming more time than we save.
The Unsung Hero: Your Average Webinar
Here’s where the secret lies: the average webinar.
How can a webinar provide 10,000 words of content? It’s simpler than you might think. According to Dom Barnard, today’s average English speaker presents at around 200 words per minute. As ON24 benchmark data from thousands of events shows that the average webinar lasts about 50 minutes, this means a typical webinar delivers approximately 10,000 words of spoken content.
This isn’t just any 10,000 words. For most organizations, a significant amount of effort goes into producing a webinar. Presenters meticulously plan their talk tracks, structure their arguments, and refine their messaging. This means that your webinars are not just a collection of random words; they are a rich source of well-structured, detailed, and thoughtfully formatted content. This pre-existing quality is precisely what’s needed to avoid the pitfalls of AI generation.
Avoiding “Garbage In, Garbage Out” with High-Quality Webinar Content
The adage “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) predates the AI era but has never been more relevant. When users express disappointment with AI-generated content, it often stems from insufficient context, poorly formatted input, or feeding the AI with other low-quality, AI-generated “slop.” The machine, by necessity, produces output based on its input.
Webinars, by their very nature, counteract the GIGO problem. They are typically the culmination of considerable thought, energy, and data-backed proof points. This inherent quality is evident in their engagement and conversion rates. When marketers leverage the rich content from their webinars as input for AI, the results are strikingly different from the “AI junk” often discussed in the broader media.
At ON24, we’ve observed a compelling trend: content produced from our webinars using AI is driving significantly higher engagement rates. In fact, the consumption of this AI-generated content is growing much faster than the rate at which marketers are even creating it. This widening gap is powerful evidence that starting with high-quality material leads directly to high-quality engagement.
Source: ON24 Digital Engagement Benchmarks Report
The Three Keys to the Webinar Multiplier Effect
Engagement is the bedrock of B2B marketing technology. Lead scoring models, for instance, are built on the premise that increased engagement signals buyer readiness. Our own internal data at ON24 strongly supports this. We’ve seen that prospects who ultimately become closed deals have significantly more touchpoints with content as a whole.
From this, we can infer that increasing content and content touches will increase pipeline. As fuel for AI-powered content, webinars can be used to multiply content assets, which in turn can multiply reach and total touches.
But for webinars, we can go deeper into specific interactions within a single session — from questions asked, to resources downloaded. We can track audience engagement and then see how that propels pipeline. Here too we see the impact, as our own data shows that webinars with higher levels of engagement generate more pipeline.
Therefore, B2B marketers can increase pipeline by using webinars to multiply engagement.
Lastly, as webinars provide a rich source of first-party data, we can use that data to segment, target and personalize our outreach to key personas. Personalization leads to higher conversion rates, meaning webinars can multiply audience size and add more prospects to our funnel.
The 10,000 Reasons Why Webinars Drive Revenue
The “10,000 reasons” isn’t just a catchy phrase; it represents the average word count of a webinar, as a foundational source of high-quality content. This content, when strategically fed into generative AI, transforms into a powerful engine for multiplying revenue.
In this context, webinars can be far more than just another channel or format. Instead, they should be used as a foundational asset that can power entire campaigns.
By understanding their inherent value as high-quality input for AI, marketers can unlock far more value than previously. Each engaging webinar becomes the genesis for an entire campaign, building the crucial touchpoints that nurture the buyer’s journey and ultimately convert prospects into won revenue.
In the age of AI, your webinars are not just delivering insights; they are delivering the raw material for your next wave of growth.