Marketers put a lot of time and resources into their content – especially when it comes to webinars. Webinar fatigue has slowly crept in and getting your content noticed in this format has become increasingly challenging. So how do we re-energize our events?
Since webinars are core to our business at ReadyTalk and also a part of our lead gen efforts, we had to ask ourselves the same question. This month, we are teaming up with the content marketing experts at Scripted to cover some fresh approaches to the traditional webinar format and the content that’s included. We’ll discuss:
Crafting webinar content that gets you leads vs. just views
New webinar format ideas to not only capture registrants, but attendees
How to crowdsource your next webinar topic
Webinar inception – use this tactic to get the most milage from your content
3. 3
Why webinars FAIL…and attendance drops
1. Too many invites
2. Same ol’, same ol’ content
3. Time commitment
4. Less registrations, less attendees
5. Less captivating, less leads
#webinarwakeup
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Topic This is your hook
#webinarwakeup
Hook Helps determine where they are in the funnel
Content for leads, not just views
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Topic Hook
#webinarwakeup
Hook Helps determine where they are in the funnel
Funnel Stage Helps craft your messaging
Content for leads, not just views
9. 9
Topic Hook
#webinarwakeup
Hook Helps determine where they are in the funnel
Funnel Stage Helps craft your messaging
Follow-up Message Utilize content (and CTA) that’s
relevant to that stage
Content for leads, not just views
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Here’s how Scripted Webinars did it:
Webinars can be applied to any buyer stage:
Planning Content
in 2014
How to
Outsource
Content
Effectively
Best Practices
Using Scripted’s
Dashboard
#webinarwakeup
Awareness Research Evaluation
18. 18
Rethink your template
Average length watched of a single internet
video is 2.7 minutes.
90% of internet traffic is video content.
#webinarwakeup
20. 20
The Growler – 30 min format, followed by
a twitter discussion for Q&A
or Google hangout
#webinarwakeup
The Growler
21. 21
The Growler – 30 min format, followed by a
twitter discussion
#webinarwakeup
“Twitter Talks”
22. 22
The Vidinar ... Did I just make up a new marketing term??
#webinarwakeup
Name Your Own Format
The gateway drug to a video marketing strategy
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Scripted’s Stats on Engagement
Average attendee rate: 34%
% of attendees listening to entire live webinar: 83%
% of leads listening to entire recorded webinar: 25%
Open rate on thank you email to no shows: 31%
Click rate after opening on those emails: 40%
#webinarwakeup
24. 24
What THEY want to hear, not what YOU want to say.
#webinarwakeup
Crowdsourcing Webinar Content
Chapter 3
26. 26
6 ways to generate relevant content
#webinarwakeup
1. Twitter discussion - register a hashtag
27. 27
6 ways to generate relevant content
#webinarwakeup
2. LinkedIn Group
Discussion
3. Blog Post
28. 28
6 ways to generate relevant content
#webinarwakeup
1. Twitter discussion - register a hashtag
2. LinkedIn group discussion
3. Blog post – ask a relevant question for them to
engage with
4. FAQs on the website
29. 29
6 ways to generate relevant content
#webinarwakeup
1. Twitter discussion - register a hashtag
2. LinkedIn group discussion
3. Blog post – ask a relevant question for them to
engage with
4. FAQs on the website
5. Take advantage of other departments’ knowledge –
especially customer care. They know what people
want to know!
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Promote to your channels because:
It’s relevant
It’s timely
It’s thoughtful
It’s not a sales pitch
It could increase your live attendance rates
Next steps…
#webinarwakeup
How to design a live webinar with your on-demand strategy in mind
How to choose topics that are evergreen, yet compelling (Mathew)
Approaches for demand gen vs. nurturing series – how are they different?
What role does marketing automation play? (Mathew)
Measuring success – what does it look like? (we could both speak to this one)
Too many webinar invites – people are being inundated with webinar invites, you probably see at least 5 come across your inbox every week – again, how/why does your stand out?
Same ‘ol, same ‘ol – we’ll touch on this later, but you content has to be something THEY (your audience) want to learn, not just what you think they need to hear
Too much of a commitment (1 hour?!) – our time is precious, one hour is a lot to give up and if you are going to it REALLY has to benefit you. And if fails to do so, you likely won’t go back. We’re trying to keep ours to 45 min today, which is still a chunk, but hopefully with these ideas applied to both yours and our own webinars, we can start to cut them down even further – think video consumption.
these first few bullets mean Less registrations, which equals less attendees
If your format is Less than captivating, you get less leads out of the attendees you do have
A combination of these leads to an unsuccessful, but still time consuming event. Lose/ lose
In 2010 only 42% of B2B marketers were doing webinars, today 62%, no wonder people are fading – with so webinar invites coming across their inbox, what makes yours any different? How do you stand out and how do we combat this fast spreading epidemic?
Like a ninja - Get a head of the curve. Make the moves before your competition. Add an element of surprise.
we hope we can give you some tactics today that will help you do so. Keep an eye out for the Quick Tips in each section that will be called out on the slides with a little blue badge!
Although we’d like to get more views on our webinar content, maybe more attendees. I think we ought to first consider our objective? Is it quality of leads or quantity of leads.
I’d assume most people on this call are going for Quality.
SO in this section we are going to touch on how to create content that’s not just for the masses, but for those prospects that really matter, and the ways to keep that message going even after the webinar is over.
Thought for this one we could touch on the different places in the funnel that webinars can be used and how to craft your messaging for each of those stages and maybe even go a step further to talk about what kind of content to use in the follow-up for each , i.e. does the CTA in the follow-up point to an infographic (higher in the funnel) or maybe a case study (lower in the funnel, more qualified)
I’m sure we’ve all seen a graphic of some sort outlining which type of content to use at different stages of the funnel or buying cycle, but the point we want to bring home here is that webinars I think are unique in the sense that they can really be used to deliver messaging at every stage and there are a few ways to go about this.
We’ll start with the Topic – Is it a best practices presentation, or is it a specific way that the audiences benefits in X process by using YOUR product and making them better at their job? by nature of what you’re talking about you can begin to determine where that prospect is in the funnel.
Give them just enough information in the presentation to set a hook and make a case for the challenge they’re facing that maybe they didn’t realize
This Hook keeps them coming back for more info from you and continues to help you feed them the right info for where they are in the funnel
There are a number of ways you can approach this – determine the stage of the funnel you want to target FIRST and then begin to craft your topic and hook
OR Craft your topic first, create a compelling hook for that message that highlights a challenge, then let your audience self-select where they are in the funnel by offering up chances for them to give you that relevant pain point information (reg form, poll questions, their chatted questions, survey questions, etc)….
Now that you know their stage THEN you begin to craft your follow-up appropriately.
This helps you craft your message and also what type(s) of content to use in the follow-up for each stage
Here is where you want to use both appropriate content and CTA
an infographic (higher in the funnel) followed by a webinar (mid-funnel) that breaks out the pieces of the infographic or maybe a case study (lower in the funnel, more qualified)
The more specific you are, the more information from the leads you’ll be getting.
Another example from hubspot
Scripted’s first webinar was on planning content for 2014. We were so excited to pull off a great webinar that we felt compelled to cover every single topic of content marketing, from planning to measuring content. We created over 60 slides and even ran out of time during the webinar. Never again! You don’t have to deliver the most complete webinar of all time. Focus on one topic and make sure you cover that one topic deeply.
Client asked about if promote content through our dashboard and sales told them that we can refer them to work with discovery networks and in fact, we have a webinar with Taboola next week. Provided credibility and the client ended up starting a trial with Scripted after attending the webinar.
Team lunch, sales/marketing meetings, simple email newsletter
Going from registrant to attendee
So if I didn’t get to my point on this slide in less than that 9 seconds you’ve already started checking your email, answering a text, talking to a co-worker…
So how am I keeping your attention? By keeping the content digestible– Read Stats
AND LARGE
Any Beer people in the crowd? CO is full of microbreweries so I had to use a relevant example -
which of these forms is more digestible? We’ll say over the course of a weekend by one person
The keg of the growler?
The growler right? Not quite the full keg but you’re still left feeling satisfied and maybe even room for more later. Promoting your webinar with shorter format may serve as an incentive to registrants to actually attend when they know they’re going to get the full amt of info, just in a shorter time span.
Like eric’s example, realizing not everything has to be smashed into one webinar, break that content up if need to be to cater to people’s attention span and also their ability to digest what you’re saying. This makes it much more sticky than trying to cover everything with one swoop. Plus it gives you the chance to create more content/additional webinars and engage new audiences.
Twitter Talks: 30 min webinar, followed by a Q&A session on Twitter with a #hashtag for those that want to dive deeper into the topic
Filming a video of the webinar presenters and promoting that as your event vs. just the typical slidedeck presentation. Basically a pre-recorded webinar topic with a video aspect to make it more engaging.
Here is an example of what we did with on of our recent webinars – took the questions from the Q&A portion and turned it into a video with the speakers after the fact. That way, for people that didn’t attend, they still had a good recap the important questions that came from like-minded peers that stood out in the event and it was much shorter – 15 min!
We sent this out in a follow-up email, pointed to it on our blog and social channels and put it on our YouTube page.
Get creative – your webinars don’t HAVE to follow protocol – that’s the beauty of it
Let’s open the hood and actually share what I’ve been seeing for Scripted’s webinars. I’m not sure what industry metrics we have on this, or what the audience is seeing, but here is where we are. Again, I’m about 12 webinars in and feel pretty good about these numbers. Let’s look at the percent of live attendees who are listening to the entire webinar vs those who just listen to the recording. We can probably do a better job on packaging our recorded webinar instead of just putting up the hour of content. Open rate is showing that people aren’t signing up and forgetting. 31% still want know about the webinar, but missed it.
I touched on this briefly earlier when we discussed formulating your webinar topic, so what we want to dive into in this chapter is addressing the ways that can get your target audience to generate the topic for you
You have to find this little sliver of relevance or you lose them – so how do we do this?
Start a twitter discussion with a hashtag – see example
Then begin a LinkedIn discussion with that same hashtag and point people to twitter or leave their comments in the thread
Promote those discussion on your blog and ask for additional suggestions – see example
Utilize the FAQs on your company website Then promote to those channels and let people know that the topic was generated by them and you’ll be answering their questions. Makes it much more relevant and timely. Could also be a factor in driving live attendance rates up (since people are starting to see those decline).
talk to your customer care team to see what kind of questions people are asking most – they are getting questions day and day out that people want to know. This gives CC another resource to push people too and makes your audience grow (whether it be the live webinar or a recording)
Think of your webinars as a brand new set of tires – they certainly don’t do you any good if you use them once and then park the car in the garage. You try to get the most milage out of them as possible.
Once they’re done, you could throw them into the tire graveyard OR you could turn them back into something unique that will attract an entirely new audience.
Same goes with webinars. Don’t let them go to waste and throw them on the archive page to die. Reimage the ways that you can repurose your webinar content.
We recently did this with one of our own webinars that was called Maximizing the Impact of Webinars as a Lead Gen Channel. We were able to cut that 60 min webinar into 5, 2-3min snippets that captured the essence of the entire event, but talked about a very specific part of that topic. We then put those snippets on landing pages and drove traffic to them via different promotional mediums
-social
-email series
-blog series
-LinkedIn group discussions and polls
-archive page
we are maximizing all this recorded content and continue to capture leads after the live event. And this is just ONE webinar. Just think how many you probably have sitting around that you could begin this process with.