A Manufacturing Checklist for Better Webinars

Showing physical products in a digital world is hard — especially when there is a whole portfolio of physical products you need to showcase to your audience. Fortunately, manufacturing webinars and digital experiences provide an excellent solution for any manufacturer needing to showcase a physical product.

To help you organize your digital event efforts, check out this checklist for creating better manufacturing webinars. In it, you’ll get the basic must-haves for organizing a digital experience featuring a physical product, whether it’s a deep-dive webinar, a quick product overview or crafting a virtual environment.

Check it out:

The Digital Experience Checklist for Marketers in Manufacturing

Your guide to Showcasing Physical Products in a Digital-First World 

How would a manufacturer showcase a physical item over a digital experience? The answer is through careful planning and a consideration of the needs of the audience. Let’s take the product demo as an example. A demo should showcase a product’s specific features and abilities. Ideally, the demo will show how a product provides a solution or solves a particular problem for the end-user, reseller or distributor. To communicate these elements over a digital experience, manufacturers need to break their experience — whether a manufacturing webinar, presentation, demo or video — down into constituent parts. This checklist is here to help.

Showing how a product either solves a problem — or to illustrate how a manufacturing product needs to be handled — demands planning. Your first step? Evaluating what you’re trying to accomplish. Be prepared to answer: 

• What you’re sharing? 
• Why you’re sharing this information in the first place? 
• Which specific audience you’re sharing this information with? 

Have answers for those three questions? Great. Now, it’s time to decide how you’ll present this information. Are you going to: 

• Create dynamic content, like a manufacturing webinar or other virtual event?
• Create or update static content, like a blog or data sheet? 

You’ll need a place to host your content regardless of what format it takes. Decide if your content will be shared: 

• On a specialized landing page for a partner or distributor. 
• On a resource hub. 
• During an interactive event, like a webinar or virtual conference. 
• A combination of the above. 

Okay. So you have your audience outlined, you know what kind of content you want to produce and what to do with it. Now, it’s time to actually plan out your content production. Digital experiences like manufacturing webinars and events have the most reuse value (meaning these experiences can be used to produce blogs,social posts and more), so we’re going to focus on what’s needed to produce that content. Break out your pencil, decide on a format below and check to make sure you have:

 

With this assessment in place, you can easily create engaging digital experiences that showcase a physical product and make your brand stand out. Since webinars are often the core content for digital experiences, use the checklists below to guide your manufacturing webinar preparation and execution:

Producing an interactive manufacturing webinar experience: 

Answer the five W’s of webinars:

• Who will host the event? 
• What will they showcase? 
• When will it need to be recorded by? 
• Where will you record this? 
• And why is this webinar being produced in the first place? 

Webinar material to have ready: 

With the five W’s of webinars answered, make sure you have elements of webinars in place as well. These are the ingredients required to host a successful manufacturing webinar. 

Do you have: 

• Recording tools, like webcams or camcorders? 
• A plain, clear background? 
• A knowledgeable presenter(s)?
• Prepared, easy-to-read slides?
• Downloadable resources or content?
• Prepared questions for a Q&A session?
• Subject matter experts ready to answer questions?
• The product you’re showcasing?
• A producer to record and edit your event?

For the manufacturing industry, creating robust digital experiences is almost like setting up a production plant. There are a lot of heavy lifts at the beginning when setting up your manufacturing webinar, but once every part of the plant moves in unison, the content produced is fast, effective and efficient. 

To see how you can take your digital experiences to the next level, check out our manufacturing showroom experience.