Now is the time to stop viewing webinar and webcasts as stand alone events or pieces of content. There is a strong argument that content like webinars is now key to any content marketing strategy.
By our very nature we as human’s learn more from visual stimulation and interaction than we do from words in a book or on a webpage. The result of this is that marketing strategies now have to strive to take advantage of visual and interactive content.
Content Marketing
We all know that Content marketing is the driving force in marketing and communication. As the world moves further and further online, potential customers are using search engines to look for original content to help inform their decisions.
For a long time content marketing focussed on the written word, blog posts, case studies and eBooks. However even these pieces on content rely heavily on the visual, colorful images or arty photographs both feature heavily in most online content you will read today. Therefore it is logical that online events would have a place in any content marketing strategy.
Webinars in marketing
But why webinars? Well to put it simply, webinars are a cost effective way of getting your message to a huge audience, who can all access the content from the comfort of their home or office. People in Asia, America and Europe can all watch the same content at the same time (different times for them obviously).
Webinars eliminate travel costs, no need to ask a presenter to stay in a hotel and travel to the venue, and no stress ensuring that your venue is the correct capacity, or offers the right acoustics, if you typically go to these lengths.
Looking more at business goals webinars can be highly effective lead generating tools, as they will often require an attendee to register ahead of time. This gives you a potential pool of hundreds of contacts, and you have a reason to contact all of them!
To put it simply webinars have typically been used to generate leads, educate an audience or engage with employees, they can be so much more.
Where do platforms fit in?
The real opportunity in today’s market is to leverage the technology that exists, to deliver live presentations and build engaging content portals. This is where webinar platforms come in.
Webinar platforms give marketers the opportunity to help engage audiences and deliver manageable content, however for many years, webinars and webcasts have been delivered and consumed as one-off, point in time sessions or presentations.
By using a webinar platform you can access all of your content past, present and future all in one place. Should you wish you can also host this all in one place. So while an attendee may want to register for a future event, they may find a previous event that is of interest to them.
Always choose a searchable title for your webinars. Nobody needs reminding that SEO should always be in mind when conducting content marketing. You should use an array of content marketing tools and concepts to help promote your webinar also, have these tools in mind at the start of promotion so they all push the same message.
Finally it is very important to remind your attendees that they signed up to the event. When you sign up for a physical event this takes a lot of commitment and you are unlikely to forget, however an online event, while given a specific date, is not quite such a commitment, so remind people to attend.
What about Integration?
Organisations not only need the ability to create and deliver these online events whether live, replay or on-demand, they also need a way to integrate them into websites. By doing so, they leverage search engines or create communities around brands, topics or presenters.
Visitors don’t want to be taken to new sites or register multiple times for events. They want to be able to access all content whether it is articles, downloads, videos, webinars or webcasts from a common site or portal.
This has meant that webinar platforms have had to evolve. They not only need to provide the best of event management, presentation, video and engagement features that are now available, they need to be able to interact or create environments that enhance or promote existing websites, portals or micro-sites.
So, as content curation, creation and distribution requires greater automation, webcasting and webinar platforms can start to fill this gap.
