And evidently, they have seen a massive increase in popularity, almost to a point of fatigue. Sadly.
This being the case, how can you continue to host webinars that convert? Are there any strategies that one could employ to continue winning at webinar marketing, despite the saturation that seems to have settled in?
We believe you can, and in this blog, we present you with ten strategies that you need to start focussing on to continue seeing success in your webinar marketing efforts. Read on to find out what these strategies are that are just as simple and practical, as they are effective.
Strategies To Make Your Webinar Stand Out From The Crowd
1. Make Audience Segmentation your Superpower
While this may seem a bit obvious, you will be surprised by how often marketers are tempted to take audience segmentation for granted. Your outcome will only be as good as your preparation, and a detailed segmentation acts as the foundation of your webinar’s overall impact.
To have the desired effect on your target audience, it is paramount to gather a deep and thorough understanding of who they are, the industry they belong to, their job profile, their unique needs, their exact pain points, and their motivations, among other things.
Based on these attributes, segment your audience so you can appeal to each bucket with a personalized approach, strategically.
It will help you ascertain what your audiences may already be aware of, and what they look forward to learning. This insight also plays a role in helping you pick the right webinar topic and with the webinar content strategy overall.
The code to leveraging audience segmentation as a valid strategy to deliver stellar webinars lies in how you approach it. A basic version would involve industry, company size etc. But to capture the attention of your ideal audience, you might want to tap into the insights that their job personas provide. Walk the extra mile to understand the pain points and interests of that particular profile. This will empower you with enough insights to craft a topic that instantly appeals to them.
Sure, depending on your webinar goals, you may come up with the topic, but what if you could have the cake and eat it too! Getting a granular understanding of your target persona gives you that advantage. “
2. Finalize the Speaker First, and then the Webinar Topic
This is another factor that most webinar organizers do not give enough importance to.
The idea behind bringing in an expert speaker is to leverage their knowledge or skills to deliver value to the webinar attendees. By finalizing the topic and then informing the speaker about it, you tend to miss out on maximizing the potential that they promise.
By switching it up, and deciding on the speaker first and then the topic, you can now involve the speaker in the process, understand from them their strengths or their preferred subjects, and craft your webinar topic such that you tap into their expertise while also catering to the needs of your target audience.
Not just that, the right speaker will also bring in the right audiences. So it is crucial that you involve them in your process, for your webinar to reach a wider audience and have more of an impact.
For instance, if you are inviting a well-known expert from the healthcare industry to join your webinar as the speaker – they may be able to convince their peers in the industry to also try your brand or check out your offerings. When someone of influence from a certain industry vouches for a product or service, others in the same industry are also inspired to get onboard.
3. Tap into the Potential of Strong Branding & Visuals
In a saturated webinar market, effective visuals and branding can play a definitive role in making your webinar stand out.
While most webinar branding efforts follow a certain template, and perhaps for the right reasons, it could be wise to play around with visuals and branding more proactively. After all, if there were 10 different events that are all taking place simultaneously, wouldn’t you be tempted to explore the one that has the strongest visual appeal and beat branding?
The more detail-obsessed you are with visuals, the higher your chances of grabbing eyeballs. Think about every aspect that contributes to the look and feel of your webinar branding. For the more important ones, conduct A/B testing to find out which one works better and then make your choice.
Should we include stats in our graphics? Should we use a speaker image in the event branding material? If yes, which one creates the impact we desire? Should we include quotes?
The possibilities are endless, and are only limited by your creativity. The better you understand your audiences and your webinar goals, the higher the chances of achieving a visual appeal that works.
All of these influence your prospects’ and registrants’ expectations and will play a crucial role in building credibility. Branding is often overlooked and when leveraged cleverly, it can do wonders to boost webinar registrations, engagement levels and more!
4. Establish Thought Leadership with a Webinar Series
To stand out from the rest and position yourself as an authority in your niche, consider kickstarting a webinar series, instead of hosting a single webinar. This presents a multitude of advantages.
It allows you to explore a topic in detail – something that webinars generally don’t permit due to their time-restricted format. Investing your efforts in putting together a webinar series allows you to dive into the nuances of your topic of choice and give your attendees a learning experience that they may otherwise not have access to.
That aside, it also creates the perception of the webinar series being a comprehensive experience, which will attract high-quality leads, giving you the opportunity to maximize conversions.
However, there are some things to take into consideration while planning a webinar series.
- In an already saturated market, hosting a webinar series could be disastrous unless you are targeting a topic that has not been discussed enough, or has not been discussed as comprehensively.
So, make sure that you don’t make the mistake of creating a webinar series on a topic that has already been done to death, because not only will this make you blend into the crowd, but also not bring you the outcomes that it potentially could. - Establish authority in your space and niche by partnering with a speaker who commands respect. This is crucial because otherwise it wouldn’t motivate audiences to keep coming back.
- Another important factor that will determine the success of your webinar series is the format and the duration of each session. Bringing in audiences for a single webinar is challenging enough! Now to inspire them to keep coming back for a series requires the right format and duration.
A 20-minute session with a 10-minute Q&A towards the end could work, as could a 40-minute webinar that is purely centered around learning. Make your decision based on your audiences, speaker, topic, and other factors. - For webinar series to work, it would be ideal to also indicate the agenda with the duration specified against each item, before the webinar begins. This allows participants to either join in for the entire session, or join in for a particular topic that they wish to learn more about. This flexibility can do wonders to the attendance rate, and also prevents drop-offs, which is always avoidable!
5. Tailoring Webinar Content for Funnel Stages
Once you have finalized the speaker and the webinar topic, it is time to tweak the webinar content strategy to stand out from the crowd, and maximize returns.
Taking a funnel-stage based approach to design your webinar content helps tailor it such that it instantly connects with the audiences.
For webinars that target top-of-the-funnel audiences, it is ideal to focus on the basics and on delivering the most information, quickly. That’s not to say that you keep it generic and bland. The content should be designed in a way that it attracts beginners and laymen, without intimidating them with too many details.
For slightly more mature audiences who may fall under the middle-of-the-funnel stage, the focus should be on your product. These are people who are familiar with the basics, so you don’t want to walk them through content that they may already know. Details are important here because they have the potential to move further along the funnel and convert into customers, eventually.
For webinars targeting the bottom-of-the-funnel stage audiences, it is crucial to establish credibility and trust. These are people who are not only familiar with your brand, but also with your product or service. The differentiator here could be effective trust building. This can be done by incorporating customer success stories into the webinar content, case studies of exceptional or unique use cases, client testimonials that address their specific pain points, etc.
6. Leverage Pre-Webinar Engagement to Provide Value
While most marketers understand that pre-webinar engagement is important, not many of them know how to go about it effectively.
Pre-event engagement does not just mean sending out frequent emails to registrants, reminding them about the event every few days. It can be so much more powerful than that, if you invest the time to put together a strategy that aims to provide value to registrants.
While it is crucial that you deliver value to attendees during the webinar, the pre-webinar engagement stage need not be very different. You could provide registrants with relevant resources that they can refer to before attending the webinar, grant them access to exclusive content so they feel values, or even send out instruction guides on how to use the webinar platform effectively so they are prepared for it on the day of the event.
Thoughtfully crafted pre-webinar engagement can also determine the success of your webinar, as it inspires registrants to actively participate during the webinar and also sets the right expectations for them.
This approach keeps them interested and informed, enhancing their overall event experience. Effective pre-event communication should go beyond simple reminders to include valuable content that sparks their interest but at the same time builds an excitement in them.
7. Boosting Webinars with Networking Opportunities
Sure, webinars serve as great learning platforms connecting people from across the globe, providing them access to speakers that they would otherwise never be able to learn from. But what if you could host a webinar that allowed attendees to do more than that?
To truly set your webinar apart, and make an impact on your attendees, you need to provide them with the opportunity to connect, interact and network with their peers, from around the world.
Webinars make for excellent networking opportunities, and this is something that few marketers have tapped into. So getting ahead of the competition and enabling your participants to network remotely, exchange ideas, thoughts, opinions and build connections virtually is a sure shot way to win their long-term loyalty.
A solid webinar platform is a must, though, for you to be able to make this happen. Airmeet’s features allow for post-webinar speed networking, where attendees can interact with each other and build valuable connections. Incorporate a short networking session into your webinar agenda to enhance engagement. Tailor networking options based on your audience, such as high-value prospects or general attendees, using breakout rooms or networking tables as needed.
Conclusion
Webinars may have become a bit too popular, but that is not to say that they are no longer effective lead generation weapons. In fact, now more than ever, it is crucial to leverage webinars strategically because you can truly make a mark for your brand by offering audiences something that they cannot expect anywhere else.
This article aims to equip you with simple but powerful strategies that will help you stand out from the crowd. If you’ve been struggling to make your webinars a success, try these strategies listed here, and see for yourself how simple it is to win your audiences over!
