Webinars; the Perfect way to Educate, Inform and Entertain

Podcasts and webinars are a low-cost and accessible way to educate, inform, entertain and put a human face to your business, allowing you to share your expertise and industry knowledge, to announce new services or to present research and thought leadership.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking webinars and podcasts are just for large businesses. With ‘in-person’ events off the agenda for the foreseeable future, they are an opportunity for businesses of any size to connect, engage and communicate with clients, customers and colleagues in real-time.

In fact, webinars open up new opportunities for companies to connect with their audience:

• Organisations with offices in different countries can come together to create events that showcase their multi-jurisdictional expertise
  Going digital means you can attract a wider audience
• Webinars can be filmed or made ‘on-demand’, giving you more content to distribute after the event for no extra cost
• The affordability of webinars means organisations can set up a series or a summit, which can be used to underpin a long-term, integrated marketing campaign

 

Tip: The content you already have prepared in blogs or white papers can easily be converted into a webinar or podcast; for many people, this is a more attractive and engaging format.

Interact with your audience

Making your webinars interactive by incorporating polls and taking and answering questions gives you immediate feedback. As well as being more engaging for your audience, this gives you instant market research, so you can better understand their needs and the challenges they are facing.

This interaction also enables you to direct the webinar, and change direction if required, giving you a positive way to promote your business, products or services.

Black Vanilla can act as the webinar host; at the beginning, we can introduce the webinar functionality – raising hands, Q&A etc, which helps to encourage interactivity. Our experience tells us that attendees like to know who else has joined – this encourages networking and
conversations after the webinar has finished.

Tip: Remember to use a social media hashtag for your webinar. Social media will help to create greater awareness of your event; you can also take questions via those channels and in turn create more content to share after the event.

Multiple marketing opportunities

The real-time element of your webinar is just your first hit.

Extend the shelf life of your webinar by recording it or making it ‘on-demand’ so you can replay it again on social media channels and have it available on your website.

• People who could not attend can watch it when convenient
• Attendees can revisit and share onwards

Having your webinar or podcast on your website extends the time your customers or clients spend on your site and allows you to direct them to specific product or service information, literature or articles.

Registration for your webinar allows you to capture data to build up a list of established and new leads. Follow up with those who attended the live webinar with more information and take the opportunity to send the webinar to those who didn’t attend the live event.

Tip: Edit and repackage the content in a fresh and engaging way to give you additional marketing content which can be distributed to an even wider audience, making your webinar even more cost-effective.

Think big: series and summits

The virtual nature of these events means you can think big.

Consider a series of webinars, linking the content under a single theme. In our experience, scheduling a webinar or podcast to take place at the same time each week or twice a month allows your audience to diarise it into their calendar and you will build a community.

Organisations can take this one step further with a webinar summit. This is a virtual conference with the content spread over a number of days or a week with a mix of webinars and podcasts – live and pre-recorded – in varying formats supported by papers, articles and features.

The beauty of a webinar is that you can have speakers located in multiple locations, bringing different perspectives together and giving the whole event a broader appeal.

If you are a multi-jurisdictional business, holding an event in this way means you can save on travel, time, venue hire, AV production and catering, leaving you more budget to create post-event content.

Tip: We recommend using branded backgrounds for speakers and can advise on the best microphones and cameras to improve production quality.

For many, an ‘in-person’ event and the ability to network can’t be replaced, but the new acceptance of webinars and virtual events is changing the way businesses can build their reputation, relationships and reach.