Shifting from In-Person to Online Events – Getting Started with Webinars
Even before COVID-19 rocked our way of life, online education and communication software was becoming an increasingly popular tool for marketers. While live events will likely continue to be a component of your marketing strategy in the future, we all recognize the importance of web-based education to get us through this difficult time and our need to adapt as digital channels become an essential part of our new norm.
For businesses who have historically relied on in-person demonstrations, tradeshows, and live seminars, this digital shift may seem daunting. But the transition to online interaction isn’t as difficult as it may seem, and you can get started by using a simple and well-established tool called a “webinar”.
What is a webinar?
The term “webinar” is a portmanteau derived from the words “web” and “seminar”. In use for over a decade, webinars are a well-established way to “allow large groups of participants to engage in online discussions or training events and share audio, documents or slides – even when they’re not in the same place as the meeting host or in the same room where the event or presentation is taking place.”1
There are now countless online software platforms available for hosting webinars (like Zoom, GoToWebinar, and ON24, just to name a few), and the user-friendliness and flexibility they afford has improved substantially over the past few years.
For instance, you can broadcast to a few dozen, or a few thousand people. You can also allow as much or as little audience participation as you’d like, with a simple live broadcast that has optional Q&A at the end, to a maximally engaging broadcast with real-time polls and downloadable handouts. For those of us who dislike public speaking, you can even prerecord a webinar and schedule it so it appears live to the audience but allows for the flexibility to edit the recording prior to the broadcast to make sure it’s perfect. This is also a great tactic for regulated industries where content must go through a legal review prior to public airing.
With all of these powerful webinar tools readily available, we no longer need to worry about the tactics of how to offer webinars. Instead, we should be focusing on is how to use them for maximum benefit.
How do I make a webinar work for my needs?
Anyone can host a webinar, but not everyone knows how to fully leverage one. To do that, you need to position and build your webinar within the framework of a larger inbound marketing strategy. While we more fully explain what inbound marketing is and why it is important in a separate post, the key pieces that are important for our discussion here are knowing your audience, tailoring content to suit their needs, and developing an appropriate follow-up strategy.
Knowing Your Audience
Understanding who you are targeting is a crucial piece to having a successful webinar. This includes not only knowing who your audience is, but even more importantly, knowing what they want.
Tailoring Content
Once you know who your audience is, and what their needs are, you can tailor your presentation to accommodate them. From determining appropriate topic to length, your audience insights should serve as a blueprint for constructing your webinar.
Following Up
It’s not just the webinar content that determines your success – your follow-up strategy with webinar attendees is equally, if not more important. A webinar alone is typically not enough to convert leads into customers and using a lead nurturing campaign after the webinar can help to greatly increase your conversions.
To better understand this, let’s take a look at someone who is making webinars work well for them: HubSpot. According to a case study from ON24 (a leading webinar platform provider), HubSpot revamped their webinar strategy to generate, “6 times as many MQL’s (marketing qualified leads)” as their previous webinars had been generating.2
How did HubSpot accomplish this? They took an audience insight and used it create a series of webinars that suited their audiences needs. As ON24 states in the case study, “After analyzing data, the marketing team realized many MQL’s were coming from its free inbound marketing assessments which offered prospects feedback on how to improve their websites. The marketing team wanted to provide a similar experience on a larger scale, so they decided to use webinars as a forum for website reviews.”2
Since HubSpot is also a marketing automation software company, it’s safe to assume that they also used a lead nurturing campaign after the webinar to help convert any leads that didn’t commit to purchase during the webinar.
Where do I start?
Creating an account with a webinar provider is not difficult, but it can be costly depending on the plan you decide to go with. It’s best to start with a basic monthly plan, try it out, and re-evaluate as necessary.
If you don’t want to commit to a monthly plan just yet and would like some assistance getting your first webinar set up, you can work with a marketing agency like Red Brick Partners. We can not only help you run a successful webinar but can help you promote it and develop a post-webinar lead nurturing campaign to increase your conversions too. To get started, just schedule your free consultation here.
But remember, whether you decide to do it yourself or partner with a marketing agency, you need to start embracing online communication (if you haven’t already) and learning how to leverage it for maximum benefit. Webinars are a great tool to get you started - they will jump start your lead generation now and better position you for long-term marketing success.
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References:
“What Is A Webinar?” GoToWebinar, https://www.gotomeeting.com/webinar/what-is-a-webinar
“Case Study: How Hubspot Generates 6 Times as Many MQLs with Webinars”, ON24, https://www.on24.com/resources/?D2C=1881631