How to Up Your Webinar Game
Webinars have long been a staple of an effective demand-generation engine. They facilitate live communication with your ideal customer persona at scale—as well as the opportunity to engage directly with your prospects and existing customers.
In fact, 73% of marketers and sales leaders find webinars to be one of the most reliable ways of generating high-quality leads.
However, the past two years have seen the webinar landscape turned on its head. Marketers have had to quickly pivot away from in-person events and move their budgets into digital channels. Not only is it hard to capture an online audience, but screen fatigue, mounting distractions, and increasing audience expectations also mean it’s harder than ever to keep attendees engaged.
Webinars have followed the same format for many years. Reimagining webinars can help your organization elevate productions and drive more engagement, leads, and revenue.
Before the digital deluge of the pandemic, meeting the status quo may have seemed sufficient for your webinars. Today, you may actually erode your audience engagement if:
- Your presentations run for the average 45 to 60 minutes.
- The overwhelming majority of your attendees join from their desktops.
- Your webinars feature prerecorded content.
- You present one or two hosts talking over slides.
- Your speakers don’t have their video cameras turned on.
- Your webinar features a single attendee poll to drive engagement.
Why do so many webinars feel so similar and stale? Because their user experiences are antiquated, with limited capabilities beyond simple presentations, or polling or reporting beyond how many people attended and how long they stayed.
Getting past the status quo requires tools that can help you facilitate more and better interaction and help you capture audience data that gives you insights you can act on.
New Content, New Formats
With webinars and digital events, your content is your event. Be sure to curate and customize high-quality content that truly speaks to your audience. You may want to consider a series approach for your webinars by focusing on one core webinar theme and offering multiple webinars on related subtopics. By doing so, you will extend the attention and time spent with your brand through more content—and spend less time promoting your webinars.
The Power of Personalization
Webinars often are static experiences that deliver one experience for all attendees. But your organization can break free from that model, personalizing your webinar experience to each attendee’s role, interests, needs, and learning objectives, by using an online attendee-registration and-management system.
If your webinar audience can register for all relevant sessions in a series, that means your organization can lock in multiple registrations, and your audience can save time and get helpful reminders—and those who miss live presentations can view the recordings on demand at your webinar hub.
Using tools and tactics like these, your organization can send personalized promotions to specific audience segments with customized messages and dynamic registrations that will deliver content recommendations that resonate only with them. Being flexible with your webinar timing and duration can also help. (It’s OK to break from the traditional 60-minute time bound.)
From Boring to Buzzworthy
The human attention span has been measured at eight seconds. Catering to that limit means reimagining your role not as a presentation deliverer but as the executive producer of a TV broadcast, heightening your audience’s visual engagement by using more graphics and images than most webinars do. By boosting your webinar production game and keeping a quick pace, you can bring the content to life, hold attendees’ interest, and elevate the overall experience of the webinar. New webinar production tools allow you to control how you present your content in a much more visual, compelling way than the traditional styles, with more cross-cutting, more switching of layouts, and more dynamic visual coordination of your panelists so that the speaker at any given time always has the dominant on-screen presence.
Enhancing Attendee Interactivity
Encouraging attendee interactivity may improve the webinar experience and keep viewers engaged. Enhancing attendee interactivity will create a more comprehensive webinar experience and make attendees feel they are part of the session and a bigger community, as opposed to being simply external observers as they traditionally have been. Consider using a webinar platform that allows attendees to type in live Q&A and to upvote questions to prioritize speaker responses. Offering live polls throughout the webinar will also engage attendees, with the added bonus of collecting additional attendee data.
The Big Picture
By using the latest webinar tools to raise the bar for your standards, your organization can better captivate your audience and draw them into engaging more fully with you—and that gives you valuable data to help you develop a clearer picture of your prospects and customers and what’s important to them.
With a better plan for webinar engagement and deepening of the insights, reimagining your webinars will help you build a clearer picture of interest, accelerate more intelligent follow-ups, and ultimately prove a bigger business impact.
To learn even more about reimagining your webinars, don’t miss Cvent’s eBook Next Level Webinars