January 23, 2018 Jesse Dang
Webinars can be a vital part of your marketing arsenal, provided you’re making the best use of your efforts. Your job is to fill the webinar with content and your platform’s job is to help you do so with ease. Here are a few tips for building your audience easily and consistently with ON24.
With more than a decade of experience as marketing professional, I’ve seen numerous methods of business development come and go. In all honesty, the vast majority of them aren’t reliable, and they usually fall out of favor for good reason. The most consistently effective strategy, the one with real staying power, is webinars. Combining the power to educate your target audience while also promoting your brand in an honest and open environment, webinars are an invaluable tool for any marketer looking to generate leads and engage their clients.
Speaking from experience, any entrepreneur hoping to make the most of their webinar experience can begin and end their search with ON24.
Currently, I am the marketing campaign manager at Twilio, a cutting-edge cloud communications platform. I wasn’t always in marketing, though. I began my career in IT support. It was there that I learned to differentiate between those companies that talk a good game and those that can back it up with solid technology.
That ability to differentiate between quality and bluster is integral to my current position, where it is my responsibility to provide high profile brands like Lyft, Airbnb, and Zendesk with the building blocks they need to best communicate with their clients.
To successfully accomplish Twilio’s business goals, as well as those of our clients, webinars are essential. And no one does webinars better than the team at ON24, a leading webinar marketing platform.
I wasn’t always equipped with such a powerful asset. Before making the switch to ON24, I spent a year using a competitor’s webinar platform. However, when you host five webinars a month for each of your clients, the platform you work with has to be many things at once.
- User-Friendly: When you’re always in the process of introducing your webinars to new clients, you need to ensure that no one is going to waste valuable time wondering how to use it.
- Branded: Your users need to know that you’re relying on a trusted, valued brand from the moment they begin your webinar. After all, the platform you use says something about your taste and your talent.
- Consistently Reliable: Your time is better spent focusing on the content of your webinar, not anxiety about whether or not the software will actually work.
- Analytical Powerhouse: In today’s ever-competitive business world, you need real-time reporting and insight just to keep up to date.
Unfortunately, after several trials and errors the competitor missed the mark entirely and it was time to make a change.
I made it a top priority to transition Twilio’s webinars to ON24. The entire process was surprisingly easy thanks to their intuitive interface and helpful staff. Before long, ON24 had empowered me to take my webinars to a whole new level.
While Twilio hosts live webinars, we also archive each one so that our users can access them on demand. Our benchmark attendance rate for a live webinar is about 35 percent of registrants. What’s even more impressive is the value you get out of a webinar once it’s complete. Over time, your webinar will find its way into the hands of a much larger audience than a simple one-time showing. That is why on-demand webinars are so crucial to content marketing efforts.
Year over year, there is a steady increase in the number of on-demand webinar viewers. The data shows that if you aren’t marketing your on-demand webinar content, you could be missing out on up to 30 percent of your potential audience. For example, when you promote an on-demand webinar using Facebook, this content is consumed by up to one-third of the original number or registrants. Basically, it’s like running a live webinar without being forced to take the time out of your hectic schedule to do so.
Thankfully, ON24 is able to help you archive and display your webinars with ease.
Developing a live webinar is a huge endeavor that requires a significant investment. Many businesses miss out on the opportunity to capture new users by hosting a live webinar, but never making it an on-demand option for later consumption. When I speak at panel discussions about on-demand webinars, I like to emphasize the importance of using Facebook advertising. This platform takes webinar registrant information and targets similar audiences. This is, by far, one of the most powerful methods for promoting on-demand webinars.
If you’d like to transition to using on-demand webinars as well as live viewings, there are a variety of methods you can employ to give your on-demand webinars longer life:
- Avoid using exact dates in your webinars to help give them a longer shelf life.
- Promote related on-demand webinars during live webinars.
- Use webinar analytics, survey results, and polling data to understand your audience better so you can create stronger social media promotion.
- Continue to share on-demand webinars via marketing channels—sales pages, search engine marketing, emails, your other webinars, social media, online advertisements, and your own website—even after you’ve moved on to new projects.
None of this success would have been possible without help from ON24. Choosing them was easy from the outset, not only because they’re a well known and highly trusted brand, but because they proved to my inner IT pro that they were a group of passionate experts whose goals were in line with my own. Since we’ve made the switch from their competitor, several members of the Twilio team have praised ON24’s audience console and easy customization, and we’ve come to place a lot of stock in ON24’s immediate analytical feedback when we’re building Twilio’s next great webinar.