There’s no question that in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, people are experiencing extreme upheaval. And if you’re like 30 million other small business owners in the United States, you may be struggling to keep yourself afloat and connect with an audience that suddenly has a lot on its mind.
But now that non-essential businesses have closed their doors and large numbers of people are working from home, it’s webinars’ time to shine. Here are a few tips for using webinars to reach your employees and audience even during the darkest of times.
Don’t Worry So Much About Production Value
During the pandemic, everyone is going low production. Celebrities are even filming TikTok videos out of their basements! Your audience will forgive you if you don’t film in a fancy sound studio or use a production crew. In fact, if you do, some might question whether you’re following the appropriate rules of social distancing.
Pick Timely Topics
No matter how diverse your audience is, chances are they’re all dealing with the same anxiety right now. Plan your content strategy on how to help people deal with the challenges they face in this crisis. Chances are you’ll get plenty of traction and hopefully help people too.
Consider how the coronavirus is impacting your audience and what information you can give to help. Push out more content like a webinar on the proper disinfecting technique or a video on how to apply for unemployment benefits in your state. The coronavirus is impacting people in many ways and chances are you have some expertise that can help.
Focus on Post-Launch Marketing
With schools closing and work-from-home mandates in many states, it’s likely that your audience is more distracted than usual. You may get fewer attendance numbers on the day of your webinar launch than normal. However, those numbers could go up significantly on downloads of the recording that you post after the event.
So in the days and weeks after you post your webinar, put some attention into marketing and promoting it across all your social media channels! This way, people can still find it and those who signed up but couldn’t attend will be reminded.
Build Trust
These days, straight self-promotion can look a bit self-serving. Your webinar marketing and promotion strategy should focus more on helping people and keeping lines of communication open rather than promoting your business. The topic you pick here can do a lot of the heavy lifting if it’s helpful to your audience in the time of coronavirus.
These are difficult times—but we’ll get through them together. Use your webinar platform to help and inform, don’t worry so much about production value, and do your best to publish in a spirit of building trust and being useful to your audience, and you should see your webinar strategy achieve success.
