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Category: Marketing
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Written by Ken Quigley
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February 02 2020
Creating and delivering digestible content will fuel your marketing campaigns by providing material that can be repurposed for numerous channels and tactics. Recent data shows that webinars have become an integral part of
most B2B organization’s go-to-market initiatives. Currently, 77% of marketing teams use webinars as part of their marketing strategy.
Suggestions for promoting your webinar:
- Start promoting early and push promotions until the last day. Roughly 15% of people will sign up three weeks or more out
- Email is the number one driver for webinar sign-ups, unless your business is primarily social media based/marketing driven so email your webinar invitation to your entire professional network
- “Like, Connect and Follow” each of the Act! Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages so you can see (and share) our posts on your behalf.
- Motivate your employees, friends and family to do all of the above in social to support you – they can also share your event and posts so that their networks see your event
- Share the custom posts for your webinar on your own business page from each of your social channels
- Consider offering a slot of free consulting time with any purchase of your product to show what a difference it could make to work with you. Just ensure you limit it to a certain amount of time to redeem the offer (like only within 2 weeks after the webinar)
- Consider publishing a monthly newsletter to your customers and include your webinar information there
- Add your webinar info to your business website
- Encourage all internal employees/associates to “Like” and “Share” your webinar related posts
- Forward webinar related posts to your entire professional (and personal, if applicable) social media networks (i.e. all Facebook Friends and Followers, etc.)
- Place a copy of Swiftpage’s creative post on your website with a link to your registration form
- Consider boosting your post on Facebook with an investment of $50-100
- Forward postings to affiliate organizations to which you belong, i.e. Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club, etc.
Webinar Insights and Statistics
- 48% marketing teams polled said webinars provide better quality leads
- Roughly 36% of people sign up for a webinar so they can watch the recording after
- About 30% of people register within the last 24 hours before an event
- In the United States (assuming you have customers spread “evenly” across different time zones), Mornings, specifically 10 AM & 11AM Pacific Time are usually the best times to host
- Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday are the best days to host.
- For B2B webinars, the number one thing people look for is “help me do my job better.” For B2C, they are more interested in being entertained.
- 41% of attendees prefer attending 30 minute-long webinars and 44% of attendees prefer webinars to last 45 minutes
- 66% of consumers say they prefer webinars as their mode of purchase and product information
Webinar-Related Best Practices
- Define your goals for hosting a webinar. Common goals may include:
- Thought Leadership
- Lead Generation
- Address Specific Industry Issues (i.e. GDPR)
- Create a Brand Experience
- Share Content
- Reach Specific Targets
- Choose visuals for the console of your webinar that represent your brand and are pleasing for viewers.
- Provide related materials to your participants during the webinar via a clickable Resource List
- Include links to all salient pages of your website
- Limit polls or surveys within webinars to 2-3/hour
- Look for ways to integrate videos and interactions/engagement to minimize presentations
- Deploy a follow-up Survey at the webinar’s conclusion – Sample questions might include:
- What did you think of today’s webinar (scale 1-10)
- Has today’s webinar helped improve your knowledge of ?? (scale 1-10)
- What topics would you like to see covered in future webinars?
- How relevant was today’s webcast to your business?
- For which areas of interest would you like a sales representative to contact you with more information? Check all that apply. (List your key focal points).
- If you could improve one aspect of the webinar, which would it be? (List key webinar components)
- Do you have any other feedback?
- Always include Q&A at the end of your webinar
Consider the Benefits of On-Demand Webinars
On-demand webinars enable audiences to consume content on their own timelines. 66% of consumers say they prefer webinars to any other touchpoint, and 36% of audiences prefer to consume on-demand webinars. (source: DemandGen Report)
Today’s audiences want:
- To learn
- Solutions
- To be entertained
- Approachable, authentic, human experience.
- Always on – easy to find, relevant content
Three states of webinars include:
- Live
- Pre-recorded and run as live (simulive)
- On-demand (once live, perhaps)
Best practices for delivering On-Demand Webinars
- After hosting a webinar, summarize it and:
- Send the on-demand link to all registrants (regardless of whether or not they attend)
- Send link to your sales team so the webinar can be used as a sales tool
- Place it on website, include transcripts for SEO
- Consider running it again, at a later time, to reach global audiences (i.e. once in the morning and once in evening - live state and simulive state)
- Chapterize it – break it into smaller chapters and send those portions to targeted leads
- Keep your content fresh! Review webinars every six months for:
- Relevance
- Accuracy
- Priorities
- Examples
- Approved content
- Usage
- Value
Creative ways to promote your on-demand webinars
- During live webinars – point viewers to your on-demand library so they can binge watch them
- If you use polls or Q&A during your webinars, pull those stats and results and promote them on social media to promote your on-demand webinar. (You can also use them as data content for research reports, media pitches, press releases, white papers and blog content as responses are usually greater on a webinar than a generally administered survey).
- Promote interesting parts of your pre-recorded webinar in a blog and provide a link to it
- Use interesting excerpts as promotional video clips on YouTube, vimeo, or your website or as teasers on registration landing pages
- Create on-demand webinar hubs (Netflix effect)
- Organize by content, use-case, vertical product etc.
- Gate once, view all
- Embed in website/partner sites
- Drive traffic to gateway
- Link from live webinars
Benefits of On-Demand Webinars
- Webinars drive nurtures
- Invite prospects to attend webinars instead of downloading whitepapers etc.
- Industry specific webinars can be added to industry specific landing pages
- Account specific webinars can be added to account specific landing pages, marketing collateral
- Webinars allow for more engaging:
- Customer testimonials and case studies (Ask experts and/or customers to do a quick interview for your product)
- Product demos (Run videos and simulations through the webinar)
- On boarding resources
- Content for new releases and add-on products