Webinars: why you should be getting in on this trend

Have you heard about webinars? Chances are if you’re a business owner in 2019, this trend has come up in conversation. With the changing technological landscape, video marketing continues to grow as a concrete way that people consume information. Content marketing video output ranges from YouTube to Facebook, with businesses continuing to invest time and money into producing quality content.

Hosting a webinar is straightforward if you know what you’re getting yourself into. But, if you’ve never explored the world of webinars, look no further. We’re here to offer some concrete reasons why this trend is worth exploring!

Webinars: everything you need to know!

Webinars: where to start?

As we mentioned in our introduction, the way that people consume content continues to change. The webinar is growing and evolving to meet with these trends as an efficient way to generate leads. If you’re looking to create a successful webinar strategy, it will come down to the alignment between your sales and marketing. Essentially, you’re looking to drive in high-quality leads and turning them into sales. These results will come down to the content your marketing team is creating, and whether it's assisting in driving sales conversion.

With this in mind, it's important to start by creating content ideas that complement as well as assist sales conversion. When webinars were first conceived, their original lead process consisted of collecting as many names as possible. However, now you should be using engagement metrics to identify the right leads for your sales.

The success of your webinar will definitely come down to the quality of your leads. Work directly with your sales team and reach out to reps before planning the content of the webinar itself. For sales to follow, content topics must be relevant to those in attendance, and those in attendance must be perceptive to the topics you’ve chosen.

Length, time and date of your webinar

When it comes to the length of your webinar, it’s important to consider how long the attention span of your audience will be. For the most part, webinars should run somewhere between 30 to 40 minutes. It’s likely that anything longer than 40 minutes will have leads tapping out whereas anything shorter than 30 minutes may not feel informative enough.

If you find that you’re unable to fill 30 minutes of time with information surrounding your chosen topic, chances are you may need to rethink it. In the same regard, if you find that your topic needs an hour to cover, maybe consider dividing your presentation into two parts. You’ll want your chosen audience to be engaged for the entire time, and thus should try and keep your presentation within this ideal range.

Another point worth making is that it’s not really necessary to host more than one webinar per week. Bear this in mind when putting the presentation itself together as well as how one a week will relate to your competitors. You’ll need your webinar to stand out, especially when competing for such a limited amount of time. Further, consider the time of day when you host your webinar and what works best for your industry.

Based on statistics, we would argue that you should host your webinar in the morning, ideally before the lunch hour. Also, consider a mid-week webinar rather than one on a Monday or a Friday. As these tend to be the busiest days of the week, it’s recommended that you avoid them and look to host between Tuesday and Thursday.

Webinar specifics

Taking a customer-centric approach to your webinar creation is key. How can you make sure that your customer is engaged and interested in your subject? How can you drive a lead into a sale?

Consider creating webinar content as you would a popular binge-worthy documentary library, with a string of similar topics that inter-relate and can be viewed in succession. This strategy can help get your webinars shared, either by yourself or your customers. The more accessible you make your webinars, the more easily they’ll be sorted with similar content and skill level.

Another crucial component of your webinar is a Q&A. Not only is this an excellent way to further engage with your audience, but this can help clarify specific points with your audience. The time of your Q&A should be factored into your overall webinar time.

This may be tough at first, as anticipating questions can be quite difficult until you have a key understanding of your audience. Regardless, make sure you have a few questions planned from the get-go and this will definitely make the process a little bit easier.

Above all and regardless of the context, it’s important that your passion for your business comes across in all of your content as well as your presentations. Try experimenting with different webinar strategies, including your use of images and slides in place of talking heads.

Make sure that when you are present on screen, you are excited, presentable and engaged. Of course, it’s crucial that your content be relevant. There is no reason to host a webinar if you don’t plan on focusing on quality content. Make sure the relevance and importance are relayed through the title of your webinar. This will work to pull people in and lock them in attendance.