Consensus

A Marketer’s Confession: Why I Love Webinars

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According to ON24, the average webinar lasts one hour. Can you guess how long, on average, attendees stay tuned in?

56 minutes.

That number has been continually rising over the last few years, as webinars become more popular educational tools for prospects, and qualifying tools for marketers. As ON24 says, “Audiences are now looking at webinars as their main source of information throughout the buying cycle, so they’re staying tuned for a longer amount of time.” Here at CONSENSUS™, we’ve been hosting monthly webinars since December of 2014. The verdict? Webinars are one of our top two methods for generating leads. So here are my three favorite things about webinars:

watch-webinar-online-mac-consensusDevelop Trust and Build Rapport:

A webinar puts your ideas, expertise and overall mission into an event. An event creates a sense of formality and urgency that content marketing simply can’t achieve. More so, having industry experts or your CEO host the webinars shows your audience that you value them by taking your own time to talk to them. Handing them an eBook or infographic is good, but putting 1-2 hours aside at least once a month for them to directly talk with a trusted source such as a CEO or industry expert, builds a healthy rapport. Remember to have a Q&A session at the end (or anytime during) the webinar, and use poll questions and/or surveys to keep the audience engaged and interacting, as well as a way to collect valuable information about your audience.

Generate Qualified Leads:

When people sign up for a webinar, they’re filling out a landing page. Now, we have a way to contact them in the future. The question is, what should we ask them that will most benefit us but not deter them from filling it out? As HubSpot says, “the length of your form inevitably leads to a tradeoff between the quantity and quality of the leads you generate.” What your form asks depends on what your company needs are, but it’s important to note that the more perceived value there is, the more prospects are willing to share. Not surprisingly, webinars are perceived as highly valuable because they typically involve direct contact with highly reputable and trusted sources. This means that prospects are more willing to share more information, that may be more personal. In turn, marketers receive highly qualified leads.

Repurposing of Webinars:

In a content marketers’ world, we can all relate with the struggle to develop content in a timely manner without compromising its quality. Curating or repurposing content is one of the best ways to do that. After each CONSENSUS webinar, we create a recording in our own CONSENSUS format (using our platform) that we email to registrants, upload a recording to YouTube, and write a blog post summarizing the highlights. This is an efficient way to help share our webinars’ content, and the content often sparks new ideas for us marketers anyway. Also, don’t be deterred by a low registration to attendance conversion rate. The industry average is 50% according to ON24, and if you encourage registrants to watch the webinar recording, the only valuable thing you’ve really lost is that they weren’t there to answer poll or survey questions.

And just because you’re a marketer responsible for simply promoting the event, don’t forget to pay close attention to the content of the webinar yourself! Especially if it’s hosted by industry experts, you’re getting a front-row seat to their insights regarding the latest industry trends. So, what do you like about webinars?

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