How SAS Got Scrappy With Its Webinar Marketing Plan

When it comes to crafting the right webinar marketing plan, there are a lot of ways to find success. The best way we’ve found, though, is by getting scrappy and experimenting with your program.

That’s exactly what SAS’ Erin Hathaway and her team of #webinerds did. They piloted, templatized and scaled their webinars. Now, the crew is getting scrappy and experimenting with their program.

We asked Erin a few questions about SAS is experimenting with its webinar marketing plan. Here’s what she had to say:

Okay, what kind of experiments have you been running?

First up, we’re experimenting with using ungated webinars to reach out to newer, top of funnel audiences. We’re trying an experiment to pair two webinars together – the first as a high-level overview of our offerings, the second as a gated, deeper dive immediately following the overview. We think the first will enable us to reach broader audiences and use it as an introduction to who our company is.

While we anticipate the leads we’ll gather from the second section will be lower than our traditional webinars, we think they’ll be way more invested in our company. As for folks who leave after the first ungated section, we were able to give them a high-level introduction to who we are without any form-fill anxiety. We came up with this idea from ON24 after I attended Webinar World. Stay tuned to see how it plays out.

Alright, we’ll keep an eye out. Can you tell us about a time you got “scrappy” to boost your webinar program?

I was part of our small implementation team in kicking off ON24 with our company. While we now have 40 producers worldwide, our US team of five people were the guinea pigs and kicked off our program. I love templates (and not having to reinvent the wheel every time) and communicating with internal stakeholders in our company can get time-consuming. So, we’ve set up a Microsoft Teams site with a webinar schedule, a wiki (which maps out our internal time tables for webinars) and a repository of host scripts, communication templates and ON24 templates that we can all share and easily disseminate to other producers in our organization.

Do you have any future scrappy webinar experiments that you’re thinking about?

We’re also experimenting with trying a more binge-able model of webinar series with pre-recording eight 15-minute webinar “episodes” to see how those play with our audiences. We’re also in the very early stages of looking into recurring webinars on a set schedule and trying to see how we can streamline the experience for the audience with having one registration for multiple webinars (with a recurring “Add to Calendar” option).