Webinars are a great marketing tool and should be used to drive leads and encourage inbound marketing. Most marketers have experience of, or have delivered webinars, as part of their marketing strategy – but how can you make sure that you’re delivering the best event possible?
The success of your webinar actually depends on a number of factors.
Get your branding right
Your brand is everything. You’ve worked for years to get it right, and let people know you’re out there. Why would you want to take a step back and use a tool that gives you a plain white workflow with just your logo available, or even worse, has somebody else’s branding slapped all over it?
You want a tool that allows you to create a branded workflow that looks just like your website, or however you want it to appear. That will let your attendees know immediately that they are watching a webinar from a brand they trust.
Decide whether you need support
More and more businesses are delivering webinars, so the chances are that you already have experience and can look after them yourself.
However, don’t suffer in silence if you don’t feel confident enough to run them yourself! We offer two levels of support, depending on your requirements. You want your event to go smoothly, and if you need a bit of hand-holding then that’s definitely something we can do for you.
Embed your webinar in your Marketing Automation tool
WorkCast can brand your workflow up, but you can also embed your webinars within your MA tool.
So, what’s the advantage of doing this? Well, your attendees are not going to be directed away from your website, further increasing the trust between them and your business.
Creating your registration pages through a MA system like HubSpot allows you to have ultimate flexibility with the creation of your registration pages and also means that any data is pushed straight in to your MA system.
The aim of delivering webinars is to generate useful data for your sales and marketing teams. Don’t make it more difficult for yourself by using software that makes your job harder. Reporting on the success of your webinar should be quick and easy!
Spend time marketing your event
It seems obvious, but you need people to actually attend your event. Even better if those people are your target audience. You’ve put a lot of effort in to the branding and content of your webinar, so make sure it’s not all last minute and you have at least 3 to 4 weeks to market it.
We recommend marketing your webinar using a mixture of social media like LinkedIn and Twitter, mail shots and supporting blogs. We’ve got a handy little referrer feature in the platform, where you can put a code on the end of your registration link and find out where your registrants have found your registration page. Not only does this give you an idea of where people have registered from for your current webinar, but it can help shape your marketing strategy for upcoming webinars. The aim of the game is to constantly better your strategy, and this little feature is a great way to do it!
Pre-record your webinar
This is a feature that isn’t always available on webinar platforms, but we think it’s really important to have the option to pre-record. Delivering a webinar can be a bit of a high stress situation if you’re new to it, or even just because you need to make sure your message is 100% right.
Don’t feel pressured to put yourself in a live situation where you might say or do something that doesn’t fit with your company message. Use WorkCast's Simulive Webinar solution instead.
You need a platform that will automatically record your content. You can then set a time for a scheduled replay of your event so it seems live to all of your attendees. You can even do a live Q&A at the end if you want to make the event even more engaging!
Think about engagement!
I’ve briefly touched on engagement already, but this is really about using all of the weapons in your arsenal.
Create an imaginative PowerPoint that will be engaging for your audience! Nobody likes static, bland presentations… but that’s OK because you can embed video within PowerPoint slides, and keep your engaging animated transitions and they will play out exactly as you want them to.
A Q&A at the end of your event, and using video, can really help your engagement figures. However, other features like a chat box, twitter feed, document downloads and polls can really push engagement through the roof and really make sure you’re seeing attendees stay until the very end of your event.
There’s all sorts happening on the web these days, and you have to fight to keep your audience’s attention. You really don’t want them wandering off to catch a Pokémon mid event.
Market the on demand
OK, so your webinar is over. You can relax now and forget about it, right? WRONG!
You’ve spent time and resources on creating this beautiful piece of content. Do not, under any circumstance, let it languish in your Marketing Manager’s download folder next to pictures of cute kittens and #motivationmonday GIFs.
Get the on demand created (this happens to be very easy), and host it on the webinar channel embedded on your website. The more webinars you create, the more traffic you will see on your website because people know you’ve got a valuable resource for them.
You can also remarket these events, or even create another scheduled replay and invite a different audience. Your webinars are a resource to be used again and again. Letting them drift into obscurity is a sin, and it makes me very sad!
