When it comes to B2B marketing, nothing is more important than educating, informing and engaging your target audience. A webinar achieves all three goals at once, and has the added bonus of being a low-cost tool that can promote your brand's thought-leadership. Beyond devising a strategy to push registrations in the pre-webinar stage, promoting the event when it's actually occurring and breaking down the transcript into various type of content afterwards - are just as crucial.
Stage 1: Make Sure Nobody Misses Your Webinar
After you have a great topic, a compelling host and an engaging presentation, it's time to attract registrants! Make sure to set a registration goal, and use a program such as GoToWebinar to track this number daily. Keep in mind that webinars typically have a 30% attendance rate, so think ahead when you set your goal. Here are a few helpful tips for increasing registrations:
- Optimized Landing Page: Create an informative, visually appealing and clearly worded landing page that answers the 5 "Ws": Who is the presenter? What topics will be covered? When will it take place? Where can it be accessed? Why should I attend?
- Set Up an E-mail Campaign: The e-mail list should contain all existing customers as well as leads who have engaged with your product, but not yet signed up for it. Send out a thank-you e-mail to registrants with all of the info, as well as two reminders e-mails: the first should go out a day before the webinar, and the second one an hour before it starts.
- Social, Social, Social: Promote your webinar through social campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ using a B2B social media marketing platform. Write an interesting or humorous call to action, offer an incentive such as a free consultation or a discount to registrants, and don't forget to post several times a week leading up to the date.
- Run Paid Advertising Campaigns: To reach a broader audience, identify the websites your target audience visits most (popular blogs, news sources or social platforms) and launch a banner campaign with a strong call-to-action button that redirects to the landing page.
- Use Your Connections: Is your webinar being hosted by someone outside your company, such as a customer or partner? If so, ask that individual to market it on their side by reaching out to their social communities, e-mail lists and others industry contacts they have.
Here is a great example of Prava Media Group promoting our joint webinar on scaling markeing operations.Looking forward to the @pravdamg and @Oktopost webinar about how to scale your marketing operation http://t.co/O2emt4UXL0
- Kfir Pravda (@kfirpravda) January 7, 2014 - Don't Forget to Blog About It: If your company has its own blog, write a post about the webinar and the business value of the topics being covered, and then distribute it socially.
- Leverage Your Home Page: Another way to attract registrants is by including a prominent but non-intrusive promotion of the webinar directly on your homepage to capture attention.
Stage 2: How to Market Your Webinar, During the Webinar
Just because you've reached your registration goal, doesn't mean your marketing work is complete. On a side note, before your webinar takes place, perform a dry run to ensure that everything is working smoothly and all technical problems are resolved. In the heat of the action, continue promoting your brand by following some of these guidelines:
- If you only remember one thing: record your webinar (!!) It contains substantial valuable information that you can use later on to create an extensive range of helpful content.
- Right before the webinar begins, share your screen and have a slide up with your logo, a very short company description and a "Webinar to Begin Shortly" message to remind attendees who is hosting the event. Before the presenter begins speaking, you can also take a minute or two to introduce the company to everyone attending.
- If the presenter is speaking from your office, and your team is there to join, take a few photos of webinar in action, and then Tweet them or post them on your Facebook page.
- At the end of the presentation, remember to have a slide with your company logo, as well as your website and an e-mail address that attendees can contact for further information.
Stage 3: Leverage the Webinar for Your Content Marketing
As mentioned above, your work is not over yet! This final stage is just as important as the ones above it. This is your opportunity to reinforce a positive relationship with attendees, and turn this single webinar into a number of different content formats for your target audience to consume:
- Schedule a Thank You e-mail to be sent out to attendees. This e-mail, as well as one that goes to registrants who missed the event, should include a link to the webinar recording.
- Create a resource page on your website that includes all of the webinar recordings - but make sure that the content is gated so visitors must leave their contact details to watch it.
Cloudera has a great resources page that is definitaly worth checking out for ideas.
- Write a transcript of the full webinar recording, break it up in 3-4 topics, and then create a useful post on each one, to be published on your company blog and across the social web.
- If the webinar was hosted by a customer, who spoke about data generated from using your product or service, ask for him or her permission to turn these numbers into a case study.
- In cases where the webinar includes extensive research or information on an industry-relevant topic, it can be used as inspiration to write a white paper on the subject at large.
With so much content being promoted online, marketers need to make sure their content is being seen. These are just a few ways to make sure you properly marketing your own. Any other tips you can add?
The Infographic 'The Social Media War' first appeared on the Oktopost Blog.