Events are among the most essential topics in marketing activities. Especially in the B2B world, events are important to promote products and services and create new prospects. Since it is a direct promotional activity, the engagement effect is more powerful than the other channels.
Physical activities were at the forefront of the marketing world in the pre-internet era. With various activities such as fairs, congresses, symposiums, forums, and press launches, brands had the chance to come together with their target audience in physical spaces. They were also organizing brand-specific events and creating interaction. However, with the widespread use of the Internet, online activities began to come to the fore. Online events, which reduced the cost of the organization, also brought the chance to reach everyone with an Internet connection regardless of the location. It also offered the advantage of being watched on-demand for those who missed the activity. Due to its numerous advantages, online activities are among the most important activities in the business world. They also provided great benefits in the communication of brands with their masses, especially during the pandemic period. They successfully filled the space in absence of physical events.
What is the Webinar that will contribute to your promotional activities? How to use it?
When we think about online activities, the most preferred type is the webinar. We can explain the word webinar as a seminar organized on the Internet. The terminology used is also used for all promotional-based meeting activities that appeal to a certain audience on the web. In addition to providing useful information to the audience, product, and service promotions are also carried out through webinars. We can summarize the Webinar as an online gathering event for an invited audience via the Internet. Brands organize webinars for purposes such as promotion, increasing brand awareness, creating new leads, and product launches, and they meet with large audiences online. As an example of a different topic, we can give a topic such as an entrepreneurship webinar. By obtaining analytics on participation, they gain insightful data and significant experience for their future activities.
Who Should Use the Webinar?
Webinars are especially preferred in the B2B world, that is, in the field of marketing from company to company. According to a study in Marketingcharts.com, webinars are the type of content that B2B buyers find most valuable in the first step in the process of becoming a customer, with 57%. The reason for this is that the purchasing decision-makers of such products or services need detailed information. Webinars can offer satisfying information in this context. In the B2B world, choosing a new product or service can take a long time. In addition, since the budgets spent are very high compared to the purchase of a simple product or service, the processes progress slowly. At this point, webinars gain importance in demonstrating expertise about a product or service. They act as a stepping stone to influence and engage decision-makers. They provide an advantage in attracting decision-makers to the brand with an interesting headline.
What are the Benefits of Organizing Webinars?
The use of webinars has many benefits for companies. Among the webinar benefits, we can count the following items:
- Ease of Organization: They are easier to organize than physical activities. After making the necessary planning on the webinar platform, invitation and promotion activities can be started quickly.
- Cost Advantage: There is a great advantage in costs compared to physical activities. There are no costs such as venue rent and catering. Many webinars can be organized only with a subscription fee to a professional webinar platform.
- Unlimited Access: In the physical world, there are limits to reaching your activity. Unless there is a big event, participation from different cities or countries is almost zero. But the webinars are open to participation from anywhere in the world online. In this context, guests from many different regions can easily follow your event.
- Reporting and Analysis Advantage: One of the most challenging issues regarding events is performance tracking. Participation and engagement levels are hard to measure in physical activities. In this context, it becomes difficult to evaluate the return on investment. Webinars, on the other hand, create and present a lot of data about the participants and the event, as they use a completely digital infrastructure. These data clearly reveal the success of the event. It also offers improvement tips for future events.
What are the Features of a Webinar Known as Internet Seminar?
Among the main features of the webinar, first of all, it is done in a completely digital environment. For this, it is necessary to use an online platform where the audience will come together. In this regard, there are many online platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, Zoho, ON24. You can make your choice according to the size of your audience and your budget and proceed. Most of the online webinar platforms also have options where you can quickly create a participation form. Thus, you can share the form page with your target audience and create your participant list. You can spread this page to a wider audience with social media and e-mail marketing. You can also work to increase participation with digital advertisements. It’s important for a webinar to have an engaging title and include outside experts if possible. Thus, you gain an advantage in increasing participation.
A webinar example run by SmartMessage.
How to Prepare a Webinar?
The meticulousness in the preparation of the webinar is also a factor that brings success. Many details should be prepared carefully, from the choice of topic to the title, from the speakers to the duration.
Choose the Topic and Research
When choosing a topic, make sure that it is an interesting and informative one. Stay away from a topic that only targets product and service promotion. This will reduce the participation of the audience as it will give an excessive advertisement image. Instead, aim to tell practical and functional information your audience can use in business life. While creating the title of the webinar, make sure it is interesting. You can think of this header as the subject of the email. The more attractive the title, the more interested the participant will be. Webinar content is the most important factor for the success of a webinar.
Determine Webinar Format and Tools
Choose a known and successful platform for broadcasting the webinar. When planning after choosing the platform, be careful to choose the day and time when your audience is most suitable. Set a short or a long time as the format. Also, decide whether to present live or playback. Especially since there are so many webinars during the pandemic period, there is a bit of exhaustion among the viewers. Therefore, if you are only going to host your own brand webinar, we recommend a maximum of 30 minutes of activity. Here, after a 20-minute presentation/interview, a 10-minute Q&A session will be functional. If you have any doubts about presenting your event live, you can pre-record it and share it during the event. After the recorded presentation, you can complete your webinar with a live Q&A session.
Gather Your Equipment
Having a nice studio environment, good lighting and sound isolation are important for a quality webinar. If your conditions are not suitable in this regard, you can broadcast a certain level of webinars even at home conditions. Again, especially during the pandemic period, a large number of webinars were held in non-professional environments. In this regard, the tolerance of the audience has improved. Although broadcasting in the best conditions is the main goal, do not delay your webinars for the perfect studio environment.
Create Content for Your Webinar
Good content is the biggest key to webinar success. You can create the most interesting titles by brainstorming with the relevant units. You can create new content and make it available with beautiful designs. We recommend that you always consider the benefit of the viewer while developing content. It would be advantageous to elaborate on the subject by putting yourself in their shoes.
Promote Your Webinar
After planning your webinar, the promotion phase comes. This stage is very important in terms of the number of people to attend. In addition to organic channels such as social media and e-mail marketing, you can promote your audience with digital ads. The more effective you promote, the more participants you will have. You can also get support from your sales and customer management departments in this regard. Direct personal invitations are also effective in webinar participation.
Rehearse Before the Event
If you are going to have a live webinar, rehearsal is extremely important. In this way, you will test very important details from technical problems to the fluency of the content and the use of time. You also observe the personal performance of the presenters. You can take action on the points that need to be corrected before the actual publication.
Run Your Webinar
After all the preparation stages for your webinar, now comes the realization phase. When the relevant day and time comes, you will broadcast your webinar from your preferred platform. When the webinar is live, it is important to be in high energy throughout the event. Having a positive approach also positively affects your audience. Using a dose of humor keeps your audience in the air. You should also be prepared for negative comments and questions that may come. At this point, staying calm and providing answers with appropriate language will show your professionalism. If you encounter a technical problem, do not panic, due to the nature of the Internet, these situations can be encountered. However, the status of the computer to be broadcast and the Internet infrastructure should be carefully checked before the webinar day. It is also very important that no application other than the webinar platform is open (especially instant messaging programs) in the vehicle to be broadcast.
What is the Future of Webinar Marketing?
The pandemic was a period when webinars became very common. Even though physical activities are back again, the webinars are still effective. In this context, we can foresee that webinars will continue in the business world. In addition, it is spoken in the marketing world that online events and webinars will become widespread in the Meta environment. Webinars will continue their lives as an add-on to face-to-face events as they eliminate physical boundaries. Hybrid events are popular right now. In addition to bringing the nearby audience together face-to-face, they do not deprive audiences all over the world. We can easily say that the impact of webinars will continue, especially in the B2B field.
You can use the omnichannel marketing strategy to better promote your webinars, and you can implement marketing automation setups through channels such as e-mail, SMS, push notifications, and chatbots. Contact us to get support from SmartMessage.
