About the most frustrating thing that someone can do is work and work and work to produce a product, marketing campaign, or other creative excellence just to have it fall flat and be ineffective.
Unfortunately, as with many online tools, webinars fall into this same category. It’s a tool that people want to use and has massive potential to change the scope of your business, but also requires a good amount of pre-planning and strategy to make sure it pays off in the end.
Make no mistake, webinars take work and at the end of the day, it will be the work you did at the very beginning that makes the difference to you and your clients.
With that in mind, below we have 5 Resourceful Keys to Webinar Strategy. This should be the very first thing you do when planning a webinar. Getting ahead of yourself will only constrict these keys and push out vital decision making in the process.
Without further ado, here are 5 resourceful keys to webinar strategy. We’ll go into them in more depth further on.
- Prepare for your target market in depth.
- Utilize visual tools to market your brand.
- Prepare for different devices, mobile especially is an ever-growing platform!
- Decide whether you will charge (or not) for your webinar.
- Keep the end goal of your product or service in mind the whole time.
Define who is going to be there!
There’s no use putting on a webinar for the wrong person. Like other forms of internet marketing, success will come from your ability to correctly identify what your audience is LOOKING for. Relevant content, then, becomes the motivating factor for people sharing your ideas, tools, brand, and products with others. That’s a huge win!
Use these refining questions to define this:
- What demographics do I have available to me? Try to define these demographics by NEEDS so you may address them later.
- Who will be attending? This will define the needs they face.
- What challenges/problems are they facing? Create a list and then pair down to summarized clusters of the most powerful, heavy-hitting points. If you find you have too many points, AWESOME, that’s your NEXT webinar. Side note, this is an awesome job to organize in Trello.
- How can you get them where they are going? Make sure that YOU are the answer to all the problems that you are going to address in your webinar! If you feel like you are only half an answer, consider developing partners, strategies, or extra value content to shore up those gaps.
These questions will give you the foundation for having a webinar with an incredibly high return on investment. A webinar that shows up in client awareness, great reviews, a sense of belonging, and referrals that show that you are the expert.
Develop Visual Tools to Amplify your Brand Awareness
Webinars are different from other forms of marketing in that they bring people into a much more personal setting with you. They are interested in interacting with YOUR company. This makes your webinar a unique opportunity to influence the way they view your brand!
Aligning all your visual concepts with your brand’s overall marketing feel will take the professionalism up massively. Here’s a starter list for you to think about as you get ready:
1. Logo
Where will it be displayed? How can we display it more? Can we wear it?
2. Clothing
How should we dress? How does this speak to our brand?
3. Environment
Should we do this in the office? The home? The warehouse? Or some other location? A quick tip: if you are going to use a green screen, make sure your test it out thoroughly before starting the webinar. You don’t want half your head disappearing into a background you’ve selected! It’s best to experiment with distance, and your selected clothing and props/products ahead of time.
4. Hold Screen
If there are going to be waiting periods where nothing is going on, what kind of screen will you present during this time? It’s a great opportunity for video marketing, partner spotlights, showing the features of your product, or encouraging the next steps through calls to action.
5. Select a Set of Fonts and Styles
All your slides, examples, intro, outro and lower third graphics, should have the same fonts that are consistent with the branding you use in other forms of marketing.
6. Use Your Brand Colors
This will be one of the best ways to maintain consistency! Try to keep those colors through every visual element. This has the added bonus of making your brand recognizable after the event.
7. Entry animation
Do you have a video or graphic element that can be displayed to set the tone for beginning the webinar and/or any sessions? Does it include your logo? Is it memorable?
8. Lower Thirds
This is a fancy way of saying, the name that pops up when someone starts speaking. If you have a more structured webinar of presentations from multiple people this can be a really slick and professional touch!
9. Transition Visuals
A classically undervalued element of the webinar will be the opportunities you present people indirectly! Transition visuals are the elements heard and shown when switching between sessions or at break times. If you’re having a hard time visualizing it (pun!), think of the host saying something like…
Thank you so much, Mary Jane, for presenting on “Complex Ideas in Social Marketing”, we’re going to take a quick break and be back in two minutes with Ryan McFly to present the next tier of “Theoretical Engagement”! Get up, walk around and get that blood pumping, and please leave your reflections of our last session in the comment section. See you in two!
During the two minute breaks, you display a call to action, product, or further information to keep the value up while still giving your attendees a break. Get creative!
10. Slides
First, make sure your slides follow the above points about font and colors. Beyond this, it is always best if the slides can be customized for the webinar. If your webinar has a particular flair visually, include that in your slides. If you have multiple guests who will use slides consider sending a template slide for them to use so that visual cues are consistent between presentations.
11. Your Desktop Background
Maybe you wouldn’t think of this one, but if you are planning on sharing your screen in the midst of the webinar, make sure nothing will pop up that you don’t want someone seeing! Even pictures of family or your home can be sensitive material depending on your attendees.
Remember that these details are one of the primary ways that you will be able to create a consistent narrative with your clients. When all those little pieces come together they paint a picture about who you are in the minds of your clients. This is how a brand grows into an idea! And those ideas drive returning customers.
Prepare Your Webinar Strategy for Different Devices
While most of the people who attend your webinar with most likely do so from a computer, (according to WorkCast.com) more than a quarter of attendees will show up on some kind of mobile device. From large tablets to tiny cell phones, people will be dealing with significantly different viewing experiences!
In order to keep a bunch of your attendees from missing out, here is a shortlist of considerations for staying relevant on any screen size.
- Intentionally size up the text for all visuals. Remember that any text your show will be on a tiny mobile device. This means slides with large amounts of text or text that is hard to read will be nearly impossible to read for those who attend on mobile. The easy solution is to break up your large text blocks into either summary bullet points or use more slides to present it.
- Offer your visuals to your attendees to follow along. Attendees love to receive value, and as Jeanne likes to say, “Free value is better!” Getting the slides from your webinar will allow them to take notes and ultimately be more invested in the webinar itself. Not to mention it’s easy. This will also just be a nice way to take care of your customers. They will appreciate it!
- Pick a platform that optimizes for mobile and desktop. This simple step will significantly reduce your production time and energy! With so many options out there, there’s no reason to do this work when you don’t have to. Many platforms will provide #2 as a ready option for your attendees. Look for other perks like chat, polling, reactions, and document sharing.
Want to check out some platforms real quick? Here are some of our favorites.
If all this seems like a major piece of work, don’t forget that you can contact us and we’ll help to get you fitted to the right solution!
To Charge or Not?
Yet another great thing about webinars is that there is a large market for free as well as paid webinars. If you have a webinar that you refine over time, you can certainly produce a high-quality product that can then be marketed to a paying audience with REAL value still placed before them. But if you don’t have that, don’t worry! Your content can engage at a free level as well and will give you many of the benefits of interacting with your customer and generating further interactions.
Marketing is not always cheap, especially if you are trying to meet with a very large number of people. It’s difficult to leverage the basic marketing tactics of Facebook or other social media in a free manner and have the result you want with the masses. So, you might need to start paying.
This begs the question; how do we recoup those costs? In general, it is not a good idea to presume that webinar will pay for itself (especially if you do not have any data about how well it has performed in the past). Instead, starting small and working your way into being a market leader who people are clamoring to get to know can be the best way to integrate payment. Once you do go there make sure you deliver at a high level!
A great byproduct of a paid webinar is that your attendees tend to be far more engaged in the process. They are putting some skin in the game to receive good information ad that will generate a much warmer room for great conversation and excellent returns.
MOST IMPORTANT: Steer Towards Your Solutions
Finally, this may seem like a very obvious piece of the puzzle, but I promise it’s much harder to do in practice than to just talk about. This is because people often put the cart before the horse and don’t examine their solutions at the beginning of the webinar.
Instead, they tend to have a great idea for a webinar and pursue it without ever considering if that webinar is deep in their ability to solve. With the prework you are doing here, that issue can be solved by gentle steering towards your solutions. In the end, if your product comes up as the obvious, best solution, then you’ve done it right!
The webinar itself MUST be valuable in and of itself. Add value and solutions to your attendees in a way that makes them feel heard, respected, and not pushed. One of the greatest ways to do this is to regularly engage in your core principles.
The answer to WHY you do what you do is often the best motivating factor for others who feel the same way. Webinars are a great place to express this!
If you need help getting all this organized and executed well, feel free to contact us and we’ll help make a plan for success for your business!