Four Tips for Providing Great Webinars in 2020

Because so many of us are working remotely, and with social distance orders limiting physical activities, traditional marketing methods have had to change. We need to adapt and go to where customers and clients are now spending time: online. That’s why in mid-June, Mark Bornstein, Chief Webinerd here at ON24, sat down to discuss how marketers can easily go digital in 2020 and how you can still have a full pipeline without the traditional marketing efforts that are no longer available to us.

Below are the highlights of what Mark discussed in the webinar. To watch the entire presentation, click here.

A Host with the Most

At ON24, we spend a lot of time talking about webinar best practices and tips and tricks you can employ in your own webinars. But sometimes, reading about how to run a quality webinar just isn’t the same as seeing an example — and the best way to show something off is to have a killer host on your virtual event.

A recent APAC report on marketing strategies for webinars even found the presenter is the leading element in how attendees rate the webinar engagement. An enthusiastic presenter is so essential to attendees that it outranks content and platform features in terms of importance.

Webinar After Party

Sometimes there are so many attendees — and questions — in a webinar that hosts don’t really have enough time in an hour to respond and engage with everyone. So, to make time and to extract the most engagement you can from an event, it pays to get creative. For this edition of WBPS, Mark decided to run a webinar after-party!

“After the Webinar” was designed to be a live chat where Mark answered all the questions that came in during the webinar, but he and the ON24 team also imbued the event with some fun treats with swag contests and other goodies.

If you find your webinars have more questions than you have time to answer, find a way to follow up after your event so you can answer all the questions. Questions are a great indicator of interest and engagement so don’t let them fall through the cracks if you don’t have time to answer all during your presentation. Starting conversations with potential customers is huge for sales so don’t waste the opportunity to have a solid reason for reaching out.

Abolish the Resource Center

Resources Centers are stale and ubiquitous. Your customers don’t want to spend their valuable time sifting through dozens of on-demand webinars, case studies, white papers and ebooks trying to find something relevant to them.

Instead, replace resource centers with curated content experiences specific to your customer’s industries or interests. These content hubs do not have to be limited to webinars, but can include anything relevant to that customer or industry: case studies, video clips of specific information, blog posts, etc.

Think Evergreen

Old school marketing had content that was created for one purpose and used one time. Modern marketing finds a way to reuse content. You spend a lot of time and effort to create quality, relevant, engaging content so why limit it to one use? Get more out of your work by looking for ways to recycle what you produce.

Content can be reused and remixed in any way that works for you. Move past the idea that you need to keep content whole. Webinars in particular are great for breaking down into short topic-specific videos.

Shorter videos are easier for consumers to digest and by making them about a single topic, viewers are sure to get only the information that matters to them. It’s also a great way to entice some viewers to watch the longer webinar which helps your attendance and on-demand viewership.

Busting the On-Demand Myth

Get this: on-demand webinars can be just as interactive as a live event! Mind blown? You’re not alone. Many people think on-demand webinars don’t engage, which is why they don’t use them in their webinar strategy.

This is false and those who think this way are missing an opportunity to increase webinar attendance and engage customers. ON24’s Webinar Benchmarks Report found 38% of webinar viewers attend on-demand only. Modern marketing means having content experiences that are everywhere and at any time.

When you set up a webinar that ran live or simulive and is then available on-demand, all of the elements in the webinar console are still available to on-demand viewers. If a host pushes out a poll during a live webinar, on-demand viewers can still participate in that poll and those results are tracked in the host analytics. Participants can still ask questions and use all of the widgets that were available during the live or simulive presentation.

A good webinar host even has the questions submitted during on-demand viewing routed to someone who will follow up with an answer. On-demand webinars can be just as interactive and engaging as live and simulive webinars.

As Mark said: “Content needs to be always-on. People need to be able to always find the exact content at the right time at the right moment.”

Don’t miss the opportunity to engage more than a third of potential viewers by not offering an always-on viewing option.

For more webinar tips and tricks check out other episodes of our WBPS featuring Mark here.