Marketing your business requires you to constantly make difficult decisions on the budget and resources needed to successfully promote your product or service. Sponsoring a webinar is a highly effective way of balancing these factors and achieving your goals.
What is a sponsored webinar?
The concept of webinar sponsorship no different from any other form of sponsorship. Effectively you are paying a third party to organize and market an online seminar or series of webinars and your business name and brand will be associated with it.
Webinars are particularly successful in delivering lots of sophisticated information in an engaging and interactive way to your target audience.
Here are three compelling reasons why sponsoring a webinar is good for business:
1) Lead Generation Webinars
An example of using a sponsored webinar for lead generation would be if a scientific research company regularly publishes content in a particular journal. The journal offers the chance to sponsor a webinar they are running and the journal’s publishing house has a ready-made and extensive database of possible attendees - all of whom are interested in their scientific field.
This means that the journal can open their subscription base up to the sponsor and their name will be carried in any material that goes out to them. If the publisher uses a webinar hosting service like WorkCast, they can manage the attendee list and provide metrics on who registered for the webinar, who attended live and how long they attended for.
The beauty of sponsoring a webinar is that it can generate leads and interest long after the live event has taken place in a very cost-effective way. This is because a webinar can be recorded and distributed time and time again, if required - particularly if you are looking to reach out to people in different time zones.
2) Thought Leadership Webinars
Your company name will be associated with a gathering of industry experts who are presenting new and exciting ideas in your field in the webinar. And, as a sponsor, you will normally be asked to present at the webinar.
This gives you the ideal forum to talk about your business and be seen as a leading voice in your area. It also gives you a chance to introduce new products and gather feedback from a panel of prospective clients. Webinars are an excellent way to deliver detailed audio and visual information, while also encouraging audience engagement with features such as Q&A, polling and chat.
Sponsored webinars, in particular, work well because they are chaired and moderated by the organizer. This should guarantee that the conversation will remain on track and interesting to the attendees.
3) Less Stress & Resource
Sponsoring a hosted webinar rather than running it yourself takes away any of the organisational stress of running an event and enables the professionals to do what they do best.
To run and host your own webinar requires technical staff who understand and have the back-up to stream a live event - which may have viewer numbers in their hundreds or thousands - in a professional way.
Using a hosted webinar service guarantees that you will not drop off mid-sentence, that the sound and visual quality will be excellent and that the webinar is on-brand throughout.
‘Ok, Sophie, this sounds great, but how do I find a webinar host?’
Once you have made the decision to sponsor a webinar, finding the right partners to host and run the webinar is essential.
Publishers of industry journals are a good place to start. Trade associations and Business Chambers are often regularly running events and will be looking for sponsors.
In essence, the host needs to be someone who can connect you with people who will be interested in your business. Making sure that they can put you in touch with your target audience is the key to a successful webinar.
Sponsoring a webinar should feel like a stress-free way to promote your business and leave you with the energy, resources and budget to follow up on the results.
