This post is the latest in our series on scrappy marketing – an approach can help you achieve better results in less time.
Let’s say you just ran a webinar, and it was great. Your speakers knocked it out of the park, the discussion was lively and informative, and your audience asked some inspired questions. What now? Do you just shelve the project and move on? After all that work?
The lifecycle of a webinar doesn’t have to end with its broadcast date. In this post, we’ll suggest scrappy ways of extending the life of your latest webinar by six months and beyond by making it into an on-demand webinar.
Up to 48 hours
After the stream is stopped, the panel has been thanked, and the mics are packed away, the first thing you need to do is send out a link to the recording of the webinar – not just to those who attended, but to anyone who registered who may not have shown.
Don’t worry about those streaming your webinar having a lesser experience – most interactive tools, such as chat, polls and CTAs – will still work on an on-demand webinar. Your on-demand viewers will still get answers to their questions, they just won’t be in real time.
One week
Even though the webinar is over, it’s important to keep promoting it, and social is a great way to keep the momentum going. Post links to your webinar with the call to action ‘Watch now’ along with some eye-catching imagery on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. It’s fine to keep it informal – that’s what we expect on social media.
Change up the message by drawing out different topics of the webinar and giving these their own social campaigns – say, SEO this week, paid search next week – so it doesn’t go stale, and that you can capture different audiences.
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Six months… and beyond
Even when the webinar is well and truly in its long tail stage of popularity, you can continue to put it to work by making sure it’s always on. In fact, you can continue to promote the webinar by creating the following pieces of content that can point back to the on-demand webinar. Some ideas include:
- Tweets: Was there an interesting poll result during the webinar? Tweet it out with a link to the webinar page.
- Blogs: Write a blog post, perhaps a round-up of what was discussed in the webinar, or a series of blogs, each based around one of the webinar’s themes. Drop a link to the webinar in the sidebar.
- Slides: If you have permission, post the webinar slides on SlideShare to reach a larger audience.
- White paper: A longer piece of content, this could draw and expand on the themes raised in the webinar. Keep it relatively short.
- Infographic: This could sum up everything that the webinar covered on a single screen. If you don’t have a design team, hire a freelancer to create this for you.
- Put it in other webinars: Use the resources section of your webinar platform to link back to previous sessions. By doing so, you can encourage the type of ‘webinar bingeing’ that makes it easier for your audience to further their buyer journey.
- Syndicate on other sites: To get new leads from a new audience, try syndicating your webinars on third-party sites and publishers. One bonus is that if you’re using a performance-based model for syndication, you’ll only pay for the leads that sign up.
Finally, as the original air date of the webinar draws further away, you might start to consider running it again as a simulive event, say, after about six months. This will allow you to reach a different audience and build on the insights offered by the webinar on its first airing.
To find out more about how you can make your webinars deliver results for longer, check out our guide on the Keys to Building an On-Demand Webinar Strategy.