While webinars are the most versatile, effective content marketing tool to engage your audience and drive significant pipeline, there are still a lot of companies out there that simply haven’t made webinars a consistent piece of their lead generation strategy. And after countless discussions with marketers, we’ve found three common barriers to webinar adoption:
- Bandwidth Issues – when a small marketing team looks at everything that a successful webinar entails, from registration page creation to event archive, they think there’s no way they can run a successful webinar campaign. It’s a legitimate concern, but if you work with a webinar provider that has a managed-service option, it can make the bandwidth issue obsolete. At Elastic, we assign a team to each of our client accounts to ensure their webinar process is seamless and on point. This includes a webcast project manager to build your registration page and customized webinar environment; taking care of all confirmation and reminder emails; managing scheduling logistics and dry runs; training your presenters on how they can be at their absolute best the day of the event; recording the day of the event and providing live support; archiving it on-demand and giving you an on-demand asset that you can use for lead-gen purposes for a long time to come, and much more! Long story short, having a team that can manage all the technical and production details, while you worry about producing great content, can help you execute great webinars on a more consistent basis
- Thinking they don’t have any content/topics to present on – we get this one all the time, but little do folks know that great content to present on is often staring them in the face! If you’re using blogs, repurpose a blog into a webinar. If you have whitepapers/eBooks/research reports/case studies, use those as the foundation of a webinar. Great content is typically there, you just need to know where to look for it. Read this blog to learn more
- They’ve been burned by webinars in the past – this is completely understandable. If you’ve had a bad experience with something in today’s world of instant gratification, you’re unlikely to go back to that well. However, we’ve found three reasons why folks have been burned by webinars:
- Their previous webinars weren’t properly promoted or properly managed – they didn’t promote them long and hard enough (3 weeks minimum, leveraging as many promotional channels as possible) and the project management of them was poorly executed. They didn’t have an outlined, 5-6 week webinar success plan in place. Proper planning is essential to webinar ROI
- Their previous webinars didn’t drive value for the attendees – the topics didn’t speak to the pains and challenges of their target audience; they didn’t truly educate their audience; and worst of all, they used webinars as a one hour sales pitch. Big no no.
- They had technical difficulties – plain and simple the webinar platform they were using didn’t work. Nobody could get in and watch the presentation; the slides wouldn’t move; the audio didn’t work; they didn’t get the reporting metrics they were looking for. And worst of all, they didn’t have anyone from their webinar provider that could troubleshoot it for them in a timely manner. Challenges like this can make it hard to regain the trust of your audience
Does any of this sound like the reason(s) you’ve shied away from using webinars as a tool to drive pipeline for your business? If so, all of these are challenges that can be easily solved!
If you’re compelled, please share your feedback below. Talk soon
Jason Stegent is the Founder & President of ElasticSolutions. Email him @ jstegent@elasticroi.com