The Lean Webinar: Three Steps To Improving Your Webinars Over Time

This post is the final post in our series on scrappy marketing – an approach can help you achieve better results in less time.

One of the most talked about business books in recent times has been The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. The book looks to address a key problem for young companies and new initiatives – that too much time is spent on ideas and products before they get feedback from customers:

Too many startups begin with an idea for a product that they think people want. They then spend months, sometimes years, perfecting that product without ever showing the product, even in a very rudimentary form, to the prospective customer. When they fail to reach broad uptake from customers, it is often because they never spoke to prospective customers and determined whether or not the product was interesting.

The same could be said for marketing. Too often in the past, teams have spent hours or days arguing over the copy, finessing messages and creative, cycling through a process of revisions and feedback that makes campaigns take too long to get to market.

But today, change happens too quickly. Instead, marketers should be taking an iterative approach, putting more value on getting results and feedback over making things ‘perfect.’

This is one of the key benefits of scrappy marketing. By getting more done in less time, you’ll get more data on what works and what doesn’t. This can then be fed back into future campaigns and activity. Over time, each cycle of your marketing activity will become better.

So, as you go forward with your scrappy marketing journey, we’d like to make the case for The Lean Webinar. It’s what many ON24 customers have been doing instinctively over time and feeds into how they progress through four stages – from webi-newbie, to webi-basic, to webi-pro and webinerd.

Summing up our earlier posts from the scrappy marketing series, here are the three steps you should follow to progress your journey.

1. Build Your Lean Webinars Fast

Earlier we covered how you can get quick campaign ideas, accelerate your marketing and webinar formats that are quick and easy.

You should put these steps together to make sure you can get lean webinars out to your audience at pace. If you’re still struggling for time, see if there are any old webinars you can repurpose. Delegate more to your team and give them the freedom to experiment.

To get attendees, revisit tactics to drive webinar registrations at speed, and make sure to use third-party sites and syndication partners.

2. Measure Your Results

Once you’ve run your lean webinars, look at their performance to find out how you performed against your goals. Our checklist for content marketing brainstorming has guidance here, along with our post on how to measure webinar success.

The good thing about running lean webinars is that they will collect a range of metrics that you can use to assess your performance.

3. Learn and Apply

Once you have your results, review the figures and ask where there may be opportunities to drive further performance. This should become a regular marketing habit.

Taking a scrappy approach means that you don’t have to look to overhaul your entire campaign if it’s performing in certain areas. Instead, look for quick tweaks where you can improve performance.

Some ideas you might want to explore include tips to improve webinar engagement, turning your webinar into a podcast, or driving always-on webinar viewing. You can also look to make your lean webinars better by building an improvised webinar studio.

In isolation, each of these changes might not initially add up to much. But put together, these incremental steps will help build results over time.

Good luck with your journey to becoming a scrappy webinerd!