On-Demand Webinars: Tailoring Your Program
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This is a guest post from Allison Moehlenkamp, Senior Marketing Specialist at RSM and Jesse Dang, Marketing Campaign Program Manager at Twilio.
Does your company use webinars as a tool to build interest, grow leads, increase your brand voice, or just deliver great content to your audience? For most organizations, the answer is a combination of multiple factors, but the importance of each factor can vary radically based on the industry, segment, and particular organization. In our last blog, we talked about the similarities between the Twilio on-demand webinar program, which focuses on the marketing funnel, and the RSM program, which is centered around delivering timely and relevant tax, audit, and consulting updates (and as an added value, the vast majority offer CPE credit) — but the differences are every bit as important.
On-demand webinars in marketing and training
As a communications platform geared to a broad range of tech industries, Twilio is a great case study for marketing webinars. Twilio’s customers include a wide range of industries with unique messaging, calling or other communication needs, which means the content has to be geared around the buyer’s journey.
While many companies mostly use webinars at one stage of the marketing funnel, Twilio gets good results from webinar content at multiple touch points. Once a live event is over, we repurpose the content into on-demand webinars for lead nurturing, using five lead tracks. Not only does that nurture leads and get more eyes on the original content — it also generates registration and attendance for future events.
At RSM, many of our webinars are offered as continuing education classes. As a leading tax, audit and consulting services provider for the middle-market, we understand the need for professionals to stay up to date on the latest issues critical to their business, as well as the need to fulfill educational and professional licensing requirements. work with a large professional network who depend on our CPE classes to hone their skills and meet licensing requirements.
On-demand webinars need to provide viewers the information they are seeking. By providing a combination of well-curated clips, full webinars, and CPE credit courses, RSM can serve that whole audience, and turn viewers who might initially want some quick info into customers and prospects.
Measuring on-demand webinar ROI
We’re both ON24 users, which means we can measure pretty much anything we want and feed the data into our marketing automation. However, the data that matters most in webinar marketing isn’t necessarily the same data that’s important for virtual training. Even within an industry and use case, the metrics for ROI can vary considerably. For marketing, it depends a lot on what part of the marketing funnel you’re focusing on, and many companies focus on top of the funnel issues like demand generation. In Twilio, however, the data showed us that webinars are the top drivers of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Focusing our eyes on MQLs gives us an easy way to gauge the effectiveness as we tweak and refine our on-demand webinar program.
Webinar training requires a different approach to metrics. You need to use engagement data in a pretty concrete way — to see if your audience understands the data. Virtual training in RSM’s industry also requires us to make sure our audience are actually the webinars — not just skipping to the end and plugging in answers. ON24 allows us to embed questions throughout our classes, and ensure our audiences are doing the work required to earn their CPE credit.
However, that data also helps tweak our on-demand webinars to measure and improve ROI. We can look at the non-credit courses and see information like who is watching them, when, and for how long. By paying attention to audience interaction from a targeting and scheduling perspective and plugging that data into Eloqua, we can see what our audience is interested in learning, and schedule new live webinars to meet in a way maximizes signups and attendance for particular audience segments.
Get more from your webinar content
You wouldn’t only give a whitepaper out on one particular day, or take down a blog post after only a few hundred people have read it, but many people do just that with their live events. Whatever your industry, a well-designed on-demand webinar program can ensure your events keep delivering value to your company, long after the big day has passed.