ON24 Webinars

What is a Webinar?

A Webinar is an online meeting or presentation held via the Internet in real time. It is an online event, which connects individuals with viewers across the world.

The main feature of live webinars is interactivity, or the ability to discuss, send and receive information in real time. During an event, you can start polls, invite other participants to act as a presenter, communicate via online chat, share desktop and use a variety of digital materials.

Webinars are great because they are extremely effective, not only to the company giving the seminar, but as well to the listeners.

1. The company has the opportunity of reducing the costs of creating a conference.

2. More people can come and visit the webinars.

3. It also reduces the costs of the clients listening to the seminars given.

4. Watchers can also see it more than one time. it is not something that will disappear.

5. A lot of data is made after the releasing of a webinar.

Webinars can bring the most benefit to Marketing.

• First of all, an online meeting showcasing your product is likely to draw more attention, as video content generates on average two times more engagement.

• Secondly, such webinars help you build a long-term personal relationship with your customers. When you explain how the product works, answer questions and follow up with survey afterward, you show that you care.

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My experience with Webinars

This summer I did an internship in CONTEXT. A company which collects both sales and pricing data at every point in the supply chain. In this internship I worked in the Marketing department. That is why I want to talk about Webinars in this post. Before coming to this internship I had no idea about what a webinar was, but when I settled in the company, one of my first tasks was to do some research about webinars. They showed me what a webinar was and how important it is for an enterprise now a days.

Webinars right now are starting to be extremely important when communicating with consumers and clients. And as a consequence, the marketing department of almost every known company, like in the one I stayed this summer, are spending a lot of time creating good webinars. In CONTEXT it is extremely important to have a constant contact with clients and consumers in order to analyze their databases and give them all the information needed to succeed in their sells that is why they wanted me to help them make better webinars.

I would like to talk to you in this post about the things I learnt when doing all of this research. Some of the research I made was about how to increase the number of viewers, how to maintain customers watching the whole Webinar... basically how to be more engaging.

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ON24

CONTEXT used ON24 to deliver their webinars. It is said that it is the best webinar engaging marketing channel. A lot of important companies like Google, IBM.. use it.

ON24 has redefined how organizations engage with their audiences, powering interactive experiences that help people connect on a more human level, make smarter business decisions and provide measurable results to scale. It as well allows driving revenue, gaining insights, building your brand and efficiently scale.

Through the ON24 Engagement Platform, marketers can create live, on-demand and personalized digital content experiences that deliver actionable intelligence and integrate it across their operations. Informed by more than a billion engagement minutes, including 12 million polls, 1.3 million surveys, 1.5 million conversations, and conversion of over 17 million resources. Marketers drive more revenue from ON24 Engagement than any other marketing channel.

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Tips for creating a great Webinar

• Registration and Attendance

When doing a Webinar you can not only concentrate in the information you will give in it. There is a lot more things to take into consideration. Imagine you have an amazing webinar but because you did not care about reaching your consumers and making sure that they will be attending the day of the webinar no on sees the webinar. This could actually happen. Your clients will have so many things to do, you have to remind them that you will give a great webinar soon.

It is important to think about when will the costumer prefer to have your webinar. Everyone is so busy so think about when will be the best time of the day and the best day of the week for them.

In order to have registrations what most companies do is send emails. This emails are extremely important. They have to be carefully written and must be concise. Remember that companies receive promotional emails constantly and costumers might receive similar emails from your competitors. You have to make your emails as interesting, striking and creative as possible.

When writing the email make it personal. Use I and you and make the consumer feel important. Write more than one type, don´t send the same email all the time. If your consumer opens your email make every single possible thing clickable. Don´t miss the opportunity of this consumer attending to your webinar. Whatever the costumer touches should lead him to the registration page.

The first thing costumers will see when receiving an email about registering is the title and the subject line. In order for the client to click in the email sent:

1. The title has to be action oriented and has to demonstrate to the client that the seminar will be a problem solver. They have to see that they are going to learn something important for them.

2. The subject line must include the promotion of the Webinar. You should make the first line a grabber by making it professional, attractive, short, concise, personal and phonetically interesting.

What is important is to see your data after sending your emails and make sure that your work is being effective. What I mean with this is that after sending an email to all of your consumers see how many people have registered, try sending different types of emails using other structures in order to see if you are doing things correctly and if your emails are being opened.

You can not just send one email. You have to remind your consumers about the webinar that will be taking place. Even if they have already registered they mustn't forget about the webinar. Send an email for registering, confirmation, thanking and as a reminder. 

Obviously don´t forget about announcing your next webinar when doing one. Tease a little bit, give some small information about it and tell them where to register. You should as well make an announcement in your company´s blog.

• Create Webinar Content

The most important part of creating content for a Webinar is the previous planification. You have to make your self some questions before deciding the topic you will be talking about. What are the goals you wan to reach when doing this webinar? What do you think costumers will want to see and hear from you?

When doing the Webinar you have to make sure that you are not only benefiting yourself but as well your costumers. A good idea would be to create different webinars for every stage of the costumer journey.

When you are looking for inspiration It would be interesting to talk about hot topics at the moment, the industry trends and react to what is happening around. I f you have no idea on what will consumer prefer to hear about it is as easy as to review your written content: white papers, data sheets, guide books, survey, benchmark, analyst data, third party studies, research data, costumer surveys, prospect surveys, industry reports. See what your consumers download more or maybe think about doing a webinar of one of this things to make it more easy for costumers to follow.

An other interesting way of finding what your consumers would like to hear from you in the next webinar is by asking them in the previous webinars, or in emails. Using webinars to crowd source content ideas is a very good idea because it makes webinars more engaging. It allows consumers participate in your webinars. Invite customers to speak in your webinar, let them ask you questions. Don´t forget to ask for feedback.

In terms of what topic you choose don't boil the ocean. What I mean by saying this is that it is better to be clear and concise. Don´t get boring or otherwise customers will leave your webinars. And don´t pretend that they will give you an other opportunity to hear you again. Make the storyline simple and easy to follow by just using one single premisse. 

Furthermore, a good recommendation would be to not let the story end. Give the audience the possibility of knowing what to do next. You have the opportunity of having them in your webinar account. Let them click on other webinars or show them your blog, webpage, social networks...

• Create Pipeline

Before companies only measured webinar success by looking at the number of registrations and the attendance scores. Nowadays there is much more than that. Results are measured by the quality leads, appointments, and pipeline generated.

As I mentioned before, it is recommended that companies give different types of Webinars depending on what stage is the audience stablished in the customer journey. Webinars for each stage of the buying cycle will help you better qualify and accelerate leads purchases.

1. Awareness

2. Consideration

3. Purchase

4. Retention

5. Advocacy

An other advice would be to increase content touches per webinar by making a self-directed journey and a multi touch content experience. Don't forget to turn engagement into revenue. The more engagement, the more data. The more data, the more qualifies prospects.

Moreover, you could measure and convert the standard lead process by leveraging engagement data. Try to find potential clients through behavioural lead scoring.

Time in webinar + questions asked + polls answered + surveys submitted + resources viewed = Engagement score. This engagement score is an indicator about how active are costumers. Using this engagement score create a more effective lead follow up: tier 1, 2, 3.

• How To Make It More Engaging

In order to be more engaging, convey who you are as a brand by using graphs, logo, cool messages and nice photography in your presentations. A good idea could be to create a video intro and maybe use it for most of the Webinar the company makes. It has to be interesting to look at, pleasing, and easy to draw the eyes in.

Get creative, not boring. Don't use just one single color in the background. Make sure your Webinar looks like your brand using your corporate colors in your presentations and in your widgets. If you have to stare at a photograph give a great photograph with movement, depth, colouring, with graphical elements related with the company. It has to be clean and professional.

If you have boring content make it fun. Get people active by maybe asking for a trivial question, making social media contests or a round of Q&A. The most important part of all, Have Fun! The more fun you have, the more fun the audience will have.

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