Build Webinars with Clients in Mind

This post was originally published on which-50.com.

Schneider Electric builds its webinars based on partners or end-users and then pulls together content accordingly, according to Chris Quinn, its VP of Marketing.

Quinn said from that stage the company may involve multiple of its own teams to bring content together.

“For example, a seminar targeting water and waste water end-user customers included three of our businesses plus a customer who talked to a case study implementation.

“The webinar enabled us to attract people from right around the country in a cost-effective way compared to an on-ground or physical event approach — and also shows respect for customer time constraints. We reached 120 customers, which was above target.”

Quinn said Schneider Electric is a broad business covering many market segments and the company’s customers know it for a particular aspect of what it does.

“So a challenge for the company is to find practical ways to help them understand the broader problem-solving capability and solutions that we can bring to help them,” he said.

Extracting Value From Customers

When designing a program that focuses on extracting more value from existing customers, Quinn said it has to start with the customer first, then the company collaborating across teams to pull together the right content and style.

“Having a customer talk to their experience is always valuable and we generally include plenty of time for Q&A.

“We have successfully applied live polling on a few occasions to drive engagement. Most of the effort is required in the planning phase and it depends on strong collaboration, including external participation,” he said.

Types Of Webinars

There are various types of webinars and all have a specific role to play.

As one example, Quinn cites the waste water webinar as one designed to engage customers and help them understand the broader role the company can play.

As another example, Quinn said, the company had recently hosted on “targeting specifiers (electrical consultants) on the topic of digitised electrical distribution — an emerging space where we have leadership credibility.

“We did two webinars in this space — one was thought leadership/vision and the other was a technical presentation that went into the practicalities of how to get involved in this emerging space.”

Schneider’s most recent webinar was on smart grid for utility customers, targeting technical people from electrical utilities all around Australia. Smart grid, according to Quinn, is also described as “pipeline acceleration”.

He said the company did this webinar based on the opportunities it observed in the past through various tactics, and found that movement in the sector is very slow.

“We pulled the report and invited customers with the help of the sales team.

“The content for this webinar was real examples directly from one of the customers and partners using the solution,” he said

The result from that was 212 people registered, and 142 people attended.

He explained, “From the sales cycle point of view, it’s hard to comment at this stage. However, the engagement level was very high. We provided five different resources (224 downloads) and three videos (64 views).” The Q&A portion yielded 25 questions or interactions.

Want to learn more about how webinars work in APAC? Check out Webinar World Sydney right here.