October 17, 2019 Michael Mayday
Marketers know that keeping customers happy is an important part of driving revenue today. After all, a famous (now 20-year-old) study by Bain & Company, Earl Sasser and the Harvard Business School found that a 5% improvement in customer retention rates can improve profits by 25% to 95%.
That’s a lot of potential, but reaping such rewards requires a lot of work, patience and foresight. The best time to implement improvements to your customer marketing efforts — or even start it — is, of course, now.
Fortunately for marketers, it’s easier than ever update — or even launch — customer marketing program. Simply re-examine a webinar program and repurpose it to address customer needs.
Here are three reasons why an organization should turn to webinars to reimagine its customer marketing outreach:
Webinars Put Customers in the Driver’s Seat
Webinars put customers in control of their own experiences, allowing them to attend a live, simulive or on-demand webinar from virtually anywhere on any device.
For example, if a busy customer needs an update on a recent product release, or is wrestling with a new strategy or tactic, then they should be able to consume that content on their own terms. By using a powerful webinar platform, you can provide your audience with the ability to consume webinar on their schedule.
Being able to accommodate content consumption on-the-go is becoming increasingly important as the average commute time increases for workers. Listening to, or participating in, a webinar during a commute on, say, public transit, can save customers time and reinforce trust with your brand.
Customers should also be able to watch what they want to watch in the order they want to watch them in. Webinars empower them to do so while still interacting with a brand and its thought leaders directly.
For example, an organization can collect all of its webinar content on its various products and  services, and consolidate them into an organized self-service hub. There, customers can easily find the latest insights by topic or industry, discover new tactics promoted by your thought leaders and even continue their professional education.
Best yet, with the right tools in place, your on-demand customers can still ask questions, download resources and get information from your team well after a webinar’s initial launch date.
Webinars Refine Customer Experiences
By empowering customers to consume content on-the-go and interact with on-demand and simulive webinars, organizations can continue to collect data on the experiences customers actually want or need. With this data in hand, customer marketers can refine experiences and more.
For example, let’s say you have a new high-profile customer to onboard and little time to do it in. Webinars empower you to look at your historical data and identify the most valuable content previous clients consumed during their onboarding process. In addition to content, you can also identify the most common questions asked and other typical pain points.
With this information, you can easily create a single webinar (or series of webinars) that brings a single account up to speed on your product, how it’s used by similar organizations and chart a path to a successful implementation.
Finally, the ability to act on this data grows more powerful over time. Say a particular industry uses your product in a specific way. With enough data and content, you can create a self-service hub that guides new and old customers through a tactic’s implementation and provide a forum for discussing particular strategies with peers.
Webinars Amplify Customer Advocates
Finally, webinars are powerful tools for nurturing and promoting customer advocates, one of the most valuable marketing assets today. In fact, according to a recent research report from Forrester, prospects consider peers and colleagues to be the No. 1 resource for gathering information about a product or service during the discovery phase of a purchase decision.
This is because prospects at the top of the funnel are eager to hear of the value they can get out of a service from people who actually make use out of the product they’re considering.
Webinars provide the perfect forum for organizations to highlight customer advocates, educate prospects and customers, validate decisions and build a community around your solution.
For example, a single customer advocate webinar can provide attendees with resources on product use, highlight results realized from using your product, clarify any questions about using the product from a trustworthy source, validate your decisions around using your product and, finally, make your customer advocate feel like a rockstar.
All of these elements create a tightly-knit community around your service. And when you have more customer advocates in your webinar program, you can strengthen your buyer’s journey and realize the full value of your customer marketing program.