3 Pieces of Content You Need to Improve Your Webinars
The tech industry relies heavily on webinars as a marketing medium. They have the potential of engaging far more than a blog or a webpage, and, if done properly, should demonstrate the value of a product far better than just reading about it.
But, should a should a webinar be more than just a webinar? A webinar is really nothing more than another piece of marketing content in a particular medium - albeit a central piece of content, given the amount of time, energy and resources put into hosting one. So, shouldn't you have a content strategy around the webinar?
A webinar strategy needs to consist of more than just "we're holding a webinar on the 5th of July, so lets build a deck and get some attendees". The webinar funnel I experienced over the 10 years or so as a Marketing VP was something very close to this for a 100-person funnel:
100 register > 42 attend > 20 pay attention > 4 are genuinely interested
And, if you apply the "strategy" I mentioned previously, you're going to generate a very small number of real leads with interest to hand to sales. So a real strategy needs to take into consideration those that drop off within the funnel above and use additional related content to (re-)engage, educate or evangelize those that showed various levels of interest in the webinar and it's message. Here are some content suggestions for each part of the funnel:
Registrants - The goal of marketing is to make it a predictable business. That means lots and lots of people pushed through the funnel. So you need more registrants. There's always your own email database and a few partner publications, but you need fresh blood. The Content You Need: Create some 3-5 minute "mini webinars" on similar topics with the same presenters of the webinar so potential registrants can get a sense of what they're in for - the technical depth, how entertaining the speakers are, etc. Promote these on social media, your blog, via the partner publications and even your own email database prior to the webinar to increase registrations.
The "Unattended" - 58% of registrants never showed up in my 10 years. So, you need to re-engage them. Most of you are already thinking "Send them a link to the recording." I used to as well. Then I watched and saw the average watch time was less than 7 minutes into an hour long webinar recording. So, even those that do "watch" the recording aren't on long enough to get any real value. The Content You Need: Plan a whitepaper version of each webinar to be written so you can re-engage those that did not attend with the same education using a different medium.
The Unfocused - Those that are half paying attention during the webinar heard bits and pieces of the webinar on their speakers and may have even gotten some of the message. So, sending them the whitepaper won't make sense - they think they've hear it. The Content You Need: Ideally, break the webinar message into 3 distinct subtopics and write a blog article about each. This way, you can re-engage the prospective buyer with one of three topics that they didn't hear about.
Webinars, like any campaign to promote your product, are subject to a marketing funnel with diminishing numbers as you progress through the funnel. The answer is to re-engage with additional content designed to pick up where the prospect dropped off.
So when you plan your next webinar, think of the webinar itself as just one piece of content in a much larger campaign around engaging, educating and evangelizing the prospect about the value of your solution.
-N.
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