Marketers (and anybody else involved with producing webinars) have a number of challenges and questions they’re faced with when executing webinars:
- Is the platform I’m using actually going to work the way it should, or is it going to be a technical pain in my @#$?
- Who will my presenters be? Will they be any good? Do I have enough bandwidth to execute my webinars the right way?
- How are we going to promote it and will our promotional efforts drive the traffic and leads we’re hoping for?
All of these, of course, are legitimate questions and ones that have to be addressed. One of the most common challenges we’re hearing from companies these days is that they simply don’t have the content to execute a webinar strategy the right way. Little do they know that great webinar content is staring them right in the face. Here are a few places to look to get your creative webinar juices flowing:
Blogs – too many companies blog just to blog, but great blog content can be repurposed into so much more, including webinars. We probably execute two webinars/quarter that are based off of a blog we’ve written. It’s also a great way to create more readers for your blog, because you can promote your blog within the webinar environment
Whitepapers, eBooks, Research Studies – literature is obviously effective, but how much interaction and audience engagement do you get out of it? Let’s be honest, not a whole lot other than getting their contact info. But you can make your literature much more engaging when you use it as the foundation of a webinar campaign. So you can go from just collecting somebody’s contact info when they download a piece of content, to using that same content to get more visibility into their engagement through a webinar (did they attend, how long did they attend, what questions did they ask, how did they respond to polls/surveys, did they download content within the environment, did they share it socially, etc.). In terms of content marketing, webinars are the ultimate tool because they enable you to touch your audience a number of different ways and measure/score end-user interest more effectively. And think of it this way – somebody that takes 50 minutes out of their day to hear what you have to say via a webinar is probably a hotter lead than somebody that just downloads a whitepaper
Videos – If you’re using the right tool for the job, you should be able to leverage video in your webinars. Some of the most successful webinars that have been executed on our platform entailed a client leveraging existing video content to be the foundation of their webinars. Ask your provider if they can roll in on-demand videos into a live webinar, or if you can run simu-live webinars (pre-recorded and broadcasted as a ‘live’ event) with existing video content. Webinars are all about creating an engaging experience for your target audience that makes them keep coming back for more, and video drives engagement as well as any tool in your marketing stack
Existing Webinars – if a webinar worked once, why not use it again? On our platform specifically, webinar ‘re-casts’ are becoming increasingly popular. This is where we take an existing webinar and re-broadcast it as a ‘live’ event with new live features. The presentation is the same, but other live elements – Q&A, group chat, content downloads, polls, surveys, social sharing, etc. – are unique to the re-cast. This allows you to create more content, get brand new attendee analytics and drive more leads into the pipeline. Because at the end of the day, marketers should be judging their webinar campaigns on the amount of pipeline they generate for their business