Webinars can be enormously effective in terms of building your brand, generating leads, increasing engagement, and highlighting your expertise. But there are a few misconceptions out there that sabotage even the most prepared company’s webinar efforts. Don’t let this happen to you. Here are a few misconceptions to be aware of.
Your webinar is all about you. If you want your webinar to succeed, you’ll have to choose the right topic—and focusing the webinar on your company or your product is a mistake. Webinars should be about your audience—a problem they have that you solve with your product, service, or expertise. Even if the point of the webinar is to highlight and help users get the most out of a new product, the approach should always be to focus on the audience—a problem they have that this product solves.
Webinars are complex and difficult to put together. You don’t need a lot of money or technical skill to produce a great webinar. Even a webinar with fairly low production value can attract a large audience as long as the topic is extremely relevant.
Webinars are online lectures. A webinar needs to be more than a lecture. An online webinar isn’t like an in-person class; participants can come and go, and you’re competing with the entire Internet for their attention. Audience engagement is one of the most crucial parts of successful webinar production, and you can do that by including quizzes, interactive Q&A sessions, participatory critiques, and more.
Build it and they will come. Even the greatest webinar, on a topic that’s of high interest to your audience, needs to be promoted to attract that audience. Use your social media platforms to tell your audience about the webinar. Build an email promotional campaign that sends visitors to a landing page to drive sign-ups. Talk up your webinar on the company blog and in your newsletter. With all the competing information products out there, promotion needs to be fairly strategic to generate attention.
Once you’ve made the webinar, you’re done. A good webinar doesn’t just present one opportunity for promotion. The content and material you put together for your webinar can be repurposed for a variety of platforms. Use the source material to write a white paper; develop several blog posts expanding on the topics you address, compose a series of tweets, or create articles for your email newsletter. You can also save the webinar recording and use it for lead generation.
Webinars can be an extremely powerful tool for lead generation—but it’s important not to let common misconceptions hold you back. The most important component to producing a successful webinar is getting the topic right. Once you pick a topic that resonates with your target audience, follow through on production, promote it across all your marketing platforms, and repurpose the content, you’ll get far more out of your webinar investment than you put in.
