Utilizing webinars in a VUCA world
The world we live in today is an uncertain, fickle-headed place. It’s the truth we’re all finding ways to come to terms with as the Corona story unfolds. And while the Corona issue is an obvious contributor, there are several other factors that make our world today rather VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous). To name a few – the diminishing line between business and political leaders, the maddening pace of technological changes, increasing need to access global talent, or the need for all things “instant” by customers & employees.
So, what do these uncertain times demand of modern-day businesses? How do businesses stay profitable in such an environment? By ensuring that their communication channels with employees, investors, and customers stay open – at all times and in spite of odds.
Enter Webinars. As a medium to establish real-time, face-to-face contact with stakeholders spread across the world; to utilize creative ways to build brands, generate leads, even sell. As a medium to build deep, meaningful relations.
Admittedly, the webinar is first a marketing tool. And a great one at that. While there are many marketing tools that could be used at a time like this (like pay per click or email marketing), webinars come in as the #1 choice because they allow you to demonstrate your product, service or idea to a live audience. The trick is, of course, to be able to do it right.
Read below to see what a webinar done well means, how that can be the instant answer to mitigating business uncertainties and branching away from a single business model.
Before we dive in, here is a quick statistic by ON24.
– 89% hosts agreed that the webinar is their platform of choice to showcase and grow their business
– 95% respondents agreed on webinars as a key to their lead generation and marketing efforts
– 75% reported that they use webinars to build their brand
– 76% achieved more leads by running webinars
– 69% respondents scaled up their market through webinars
IN THIS BLOG
1. Why do businesses need to adopt webinars today?
2. Types of webinars
3. Top 8 business goals you can achieve through a great webinar (with real life stories and best practices)
i. Lead Generation
ii. Sales
iii. Branding
iv. Creating value
v. Events
vi. Training
vii. Education
viii. Product Demo
4. In Conclusion
Why do businesses need to adopt webinars today?
Here are a few ways in which webinars impact the 3 big levers of your business.
Types of webinars
Classified simply on the basis of how you host a webinar, there are 2 variations.
Live
A live webinar is an online meeting or a presentation held in real time. The presenter or the host connects with numerous attendees from different locations. It’s big plus lies in giving its attendees the ability to interact, exchange body language cues, and therefore afford a real conversation.
On Demand
This is a recorded webinar used for viewing “on-demand” by new attendees whenever they want to. The big plus here is that the viewer can attend it at his/her convenience.
Top 8 business goals you can achieve through a great webinar
Lead Generation
A lead generation webinar is one of the most common types of webinars offered today. This webinar is chock-full of expert advice and attempts to solve a real problem for its viewers. It is important to understand that when you offer this type of a webinar, your advice should stand independent of your product or service, making it a largely non-selling webinar.
To achieve this, bridge the gap between knowledge and information. Do share knowledge about the industry, about best practices etc but not explicit and detailed information about your product. If the knowledge you share is relevant and presented well, it will establish your credibility with your prospects. That means they will come back for more.
When you share valuable knowledge through your content, not only do you get a new lead and a chance to sell, but you establish your brand much before the customer has consumed your product or service.
Content that establishes your expertise + Content that solves real problems + Content presented well
=
An effective lead generation webinar
In a lead gen webinar, providing valuable content directly contributes to your ability to collect valuable information from your customers
Take the example of Hubspot – an online marketing, sales and service software. Their website has a section dedicated to valuable on-demand webinars that solve business problems their current or potential customers may face. This gated content library is used to secure leads on an ongoing basis. Here is what their webinar library currently looks like.
At the same time, ensure you utilize your live as well as on-demand webinars to generate leads.
A study by Gotowebinar suggests that 73% of professionals prefer on demand videos over live videos. As long as you are delivering enough value via your content, you will keep increasing the lead flow into your business.
Here are some best practices to design a Lead Generation webinar that give an adrenalin boost to your marketing efforts.
Do’s:
– Choose a topic that your target audience identifies with
– Focus on adding value and building credibility. Your goal, at this stage, is to ensure that you become the preferred point of contact for anyone seeking a solution within your industry
– Invite an industry expert as a guest speaker – it helps establish credibility
– Invite a guest speaker who is an expert – it adds credibility
– Use interactive tools. Involve your audience, allow them to ask and share opinions. Keep a slot for Q& A in live webinar and an option to fire-off questions via forms/emails in on-demand ones
– Respond. Always and on the promised turn around time
– Send follow up emails/newsletters with more valuable content on an ongoing basis
– Finally, attach contact forms. That’s a great way to narrow down leads. Ask relevant questions but don’t make it too long. We’re yet to meet anybody who loves filling long forms!
Don’ts:
– Target audience without looking at their specific interests and problems
– Drone on about yourself and your company in the very beginning of the webinar (at least not for very long)
– Focus on selling in the start or the middle of the webinar. If you must, throw it in towards the end
Sales
A sales webinar’s primary objective is to sell. And most experts will agree that you can sell anything on a webinar. In a study, ON24 analyzed the conversion rates for webinars with a minimum of 100 attendees. The study concluded that:
– Webinars related to communication got 67.05% conversions
– Training webinars got 44.79% conversions
– Marketing webinars achieved 39.10%
– And education webinars got 30.79%
With our experience in helping businesses market online, we can honestly say that it is never easy making a sale when the potential customer first comes in contact with your service or product. There needs to be enough trust in the mind of your potential customer to buy from you. And that building of trust doesn’t happen overnight. It’s got to be built. So, the only way a webinar with sales as its objective succeeds is when the host strives to build a strong connection with attendees. On a human and emotional level.
There are some businesses that have a proven track record of sales success on webinars.
Our research confirms that knowledge-based services or products that allow users to continue learning in the medium that’s similar to the webinar itself are ideal for selling.
An example is a webinar that sells online coaching to students. The webinar talks about the coach’s credentials, coaching methodology and fees. The user then goes to the page, fills up the subscription form and starts attending the online coaching class. It is a seamless process.
Lewis Howes went from being broke to earning $6300 per hour from his first webinar series! Today, he is a lifestyle entrepreneur, high performance business coach and keynote speaker. And it all started with a book he wrote and an invitation to be a guest speaker on his friend’s webinar. The story of how Lewis structured that webinar is very interesting too. He had a 1-hour slot in which to speak about LinkedIn in this free promotional webinar. He offered very valuable advice for the better part of the webinar and then threw in a free LinkedIn training for 50 minutes towards the end. And just before ending the webinar, he opened up 10 exclusive spots for advanced LinkedIn training for a completely customised approach at a 50% discount for a limited number of hours. He walked away with $6300 in his Paypal account.
So, what is that you can really sell well over a webinar?
– Digital products
– Real products
– Services
– Workshops and seminars
– Online & offline memberships
– Private & group coaching
Branding
Some of the best webinars out there today are hosted by people who have established their authority in their field of work. People attend seminars, courses and undergo coaching when they are interested in a particular subject and want to learn from an expert. Similarly, hosting a webinar on specialised topics positions you as an expert, increases your credibility and ultimately helps you create your own brand.
The question that could be asked is, does one really need to be an established name or brand to host a webinar and expect people to attend? The answer to that is a big NO.
Webinars offer a perfect platform for you to build your own brand from scratch. You don’t need a finished product, a mailing list or even a social following, you can literally build your business with webinars. If you can establish authority in your area of expertise by offering solutions to problems that a majority of your target audience might be facing, you can set up your business using only webinars and scale from there.
If you are interested in increasing your brand value, get in your industry experts and have them share content designed exclusively for your webinars. This is a great way to co-market as well as introduce yourself to new audiences!
These best practices will make sure your brand building webinar gives you the perfect bang for your buck.
– Ensure your topics are really well researched and tie in with whatever is most current. Take cues from topics covered by SEMrush
– When choosing the industry experts, examine their existing social branding. It is important, if not mandatory, that your expert have a decent following online
– Brand all material and content you share before and after
– Market your webinars well in advance; 7-10 days prior to the event is ideal
– Record and create an on-demand library and make them available on your website
Creating value
Until now we’ve seen how webinars can be an effective marketing tool at the top of your marketing funnel. However, webinars can also be used to create value for your existing customers. Value creating webinars are a bit different from lead generation or sales webinars in the sense that they do not necessarily “always” talk about your product or service. The idea here is to provide value to your existing customers by focusing on relieving audience’s pain or enhancing quality instead of self-promotion. These webinars offer such good value content that consumers can’t help but share through word of mouth or social media shares and likes.
Trello has a great on-demand webinar hub. Even a cursory glance will tell you that this hub isn’t all about what Trello does. They’ve thrown in a great mix of webinars which aim at general business and productivity content. All these webinars create value for their existing user base and are a great way for Trello to also collect valuable potential customer data.
If you have a business, you’re certainly in a place that impacts an aspect of your consumer’s lives. Pull out your expertise, connect with your industry experts, and craft webinars that improve your customer’s lives.
Events
A “webinar-based” or “virtual” event is where you hold conferences, meeting, trade shows over the webinar. These can be of 2 kinds – (i) a “pure bred” webinar event where you’re only engaging with audiences virtually; (ii) a “cross” or a hybrid event where you engage with a live “in-person” audience as well as with a virtual one simultaneously. In either case, a well-planned, successful webinar-based event ensures you reach a wider audience, improve event ROI, and get access to valuable data points you may not get otherwise.
In the year 2020, choosing to host a web-based event also means you do not have to cancel or push your event to another year or to a different planet.
Yellow co., amongst many others, has converted its annual Yellow Conference into a virtual format.
There are several creative ways in which you can host a web-based event. Take your cue from Apple Special Events with Tim Cook announcing the launch of the next Apple gadget to his live & virtual audience. Or, Social Media Examiner, which sells virtual tickets to its annual Social Media Marketing World conference – the biggest live event in the social media world. The virtual attendees get access to the recorded conference as well as to a private networking group to meet and communicate with peers. Organizations like Moz and Content Marketing World record their annual conferences to curate a compelling on-demand library. These are then made available post the event free of cost or at a price.
If a large event involving your internal and/or external stakeholders is what you had in mind for 2020, we suggest you don’t let the Corona monster derail your plans. Choose a webinar-based path and start planning now. Do ensure:
– hosting virtual events requires the same care & attention as hosting physical events
– to not drop the ball on your planning and preparation during the complete event cycle
– to bring strong facilitation – virtual emceeing is done at a slower pace than face to face emceeing
Cycle of a successful event
Training
You have most undoubtedly witnessed the webinar in its avatar as a learning tool in last few weeks of the world dealing with the COVID19 menace.
A business objective that the webinar is perfectly tailor-made to achieve is that of training far-flung, dispersed learners. From employees to customers, from niche or complex application trainings, to the fuzzy & nebulous ones on behaviour and performance. The webinar offers a great solution.
A 2019 study funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany attempted to understand how webinars performed in comparison to online and face-to-face instruction in promoting learning and satisfaction. The study concluded that with regard to learning effects, webinars appeared to be equal to face-to-face learning. This was attributed to its built-in capability to promote interaction.
What’s more? Converting your training sessions into webinars does not require you to reinvent the wheel. You can utilize your existing presentations, handouts, and other collaterals. Just keep in mind different learning styles while synthesizing the content into 50-60 minutes cohesive chunks.
Very early on in this journey with webinar trainings, you will appreciate how you’re able to expand your reach, augment e-learning – if any, and build engagement. All this while saving time and cost!
Multinational software organization Citrix Systems, Inc. until recently spent over $600,000 per year to conduct in-person trainings for its new employees in every new region it expanded to. The last 2 years, however, have seen Citrix build the same level of engaged and immersive learning experience through webinars. In Citrix’s experience, training webinars have substantially lowered the barriers to global expansion & up-skilling of employees.
You can use it too to offer an immersive & sticky learning experience to your learners. Just remember to:
– Leverage interaction tools like text-chat, poll, hand-raise, voting, drawing in every session
– Put together compelling content – focused, driven by learner needs, and diverse. Weave in e-learning courses, videos, audios, images, presentations, tests, multiple presenters etc.
– Follow up with feedback questionnaires and assessments to keep the engagement alive
Education
Webinars allow schools and colleges to offer a blended learning model of pedagogy. They get to host their lectures live and on demand to students spread across. And students get to complete their degrees and diplomas from anywhere, yet gain from the rich experience of being guided by a teacher.
Webinars have come in most handy today as the education industry grapples with curriculums in a locked-down world. Nearly every education institute – from kindergartens to universities – is utilizing them to reach out to its students in the safety of their homes.
According to a study by the U.S. Department of Education, “on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face
instruction.”
Recent years have also seen the education industry evolve to leverage the webinar as a tool to engage with its prospective students. Forums such as open days online, virtual campus tours, online meetings, online recruitment guide help universities give their prospective students a first-hand understanding of the life in store for them.
Universities like the Durham University Business School (DUBS) replicate the grandeur of their physical open days in their Virtual Open Day. In a webinar branded in DUBS signature style, students move across 16 individual sessions on a variety of topics to learn from a faculty and interact with them. Outcome – the university exceeded its registration target by 36% and over 60% of registrants stayed engaged with the event throughout (industry average).
If expanding your reach as an education institute is your objective, it’s time you adopt webinars. Remember:
– When offering a blended model of pedagogy, supporting your learning community with a variety of tools is essential. These may include – email support, video/audio meetings in one-on-one or small group format
– Build student interaction by means of collaborative tasks that get them to engage with each other
– Follow up and share learning resources – handouts, lecture recordings, assessment
Product Demo
A product demonstration using webinar tools including screenshare, application sharing, integrated videos clips, or simply an on-camera demonstration comprises nearly 39% of all webinars hosted on Click Meeting. A deminar, as its often called, enables you to demonstrate your product or service while having a real-time conversation with your prospects.
Let’s take for example the SaaS industry. Most of the applications and platforms these organizations sell are complex and comprise plenty of features seeking clear explanation. So, while video based product demos win hands down in comparison to traditional product literature, Webinars offer an additional advantage of interaction.
71 percent of people buy because they like, trust and respect the salesperson they have engaged with. Live product demo webinars, augmented with features like chat, hand-raisers, online poll help you build conversations and relationships.
Actuate, an embedded analytic software company, acquired by Open Text, started leveraging branded live and on-demand webinars to reach out to its customers. The increased frequency of live demos and quality archived content had a pretty dramatic effect on the results within the first quarter. The organization saw a 25% increase in new contacts from the bi-weekly product demos, a 65% registration to attendee rate for the demos. Almost 90% of webinar attendees stayed for the entire event.
Product demo webinars, used as bottom-of-the-funnel webinars are built to give your prospects the information and comfort they need to make that final purchase decision. To craft a powerful one, remember to:
– Craft your script intelligently and passionately. Webinars work because they allow your customers to see that
– Highlight your brand, product USP, share testimonials – explicitly
– Leverages webinar tools like screen sharing, application sharing, and video recordings to keep it engaging
In conclusion
From learning yoga to shortlisting the next kitchen gadget, a lot is happening over webinars. This ubiquitous, simple tool has stepped up and come to our rescue to help us inform, connect, and engage with fellow humans in 2020. As a result, the rise of webinars as a business tool of the year has been unmistakable. ON24 reports a 66% jump from the number of webinars hosted in Mar 2019 to Mar2020. There’s a high chance you have either already attended or are planning to attend at least one during the current month.
So, if you’re not using webinars already to meet your business goal, now is the time. If you are using it, widen your options and bring a variety of tools and features into your webinars. Explore other ways to truly harness its potential. Do check our step-by-step guide to designing a perfect webinar for a deep dive by our experts into what works and what doesn’t.
