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Two decades into its existence, the humble webinar still reigns supreme in enterprise sales and marketing. After all, few other formats offer the scale, reach, and flexibility of a Webinar when it comes to engaging fresh leads and compelling action. Part of their appeal is also how simple and effortless they are to set up, often requiring just a webcam, laptop, and internet connection to get started.
With that said, however, the ease of hosting and low barriers to entry have led to low-effort and low-value webinars flooding the market, which are essentially jargon-filled corporate snoozefests.
Today, offering content for free no longer cuts it, as the internet is filled with free information. In order to stand out, marketers have to go the extra mile, and offer compelling, captivating, and memorable content.
Creating a compelling tech webinar that turns your product or brand into the talk of the town is a science, just as much as it is an art. It involves implementing a slew of tried-and-tested principles and best practices making it a science, but is also something that is perfected over time, similar to art.
In this article, we cover both ends of the spectrum, helping you create works of art that leave prospects in awe.
Creating A Compelling Tech Webinar
1.Understand Your Audience
Although customary for most marketing endeavors, having a clear understanding of your audience persona plays an outsized role when it comes to webinars. This is largely owing to the substantial time commitment and engagement required from the said audiences.
The key is to emphasize with your audience, their mindsets, skill levels, and experience, while crafting content that best resonates with the same. You don’t want to be pitching to a group of certified auditors, and start with your first slide on ‘Why Is Internal Audit Important?’
Even if that might be relevant to the broader picture, it only leads to viewers zoning out, and once they zone out, it’s hard to regain their attention. Moreover, such obvious content and statements might come off as cringeworthy or even unprofessional at certain points, making it critical to craft each slide with a perfect idea of your target audience persona.
2.Define The Goals
What exactly is the end result of the webinar? Is it to get warm leads to convert into sales? Or draw them further into the sales funnel? Should participants be expected to keep their credit cards, or would just a cashless commitment work?
These are a few of the questions you need to ask before coming up with the outline and content for the webinar. For example, if your call-to-action involves getting participants to pay, the last segments of the webinar should consist of details pertaining to the payment, including the amount, link, and terms if any.
Webinars that aim to convert leads into paying customers should also go all-out when it comes to their content, explaining and demonstrating all aspects of the product or service within the session. In the end, you can only create a compelling webinar, only if you have a good understanding of what it is you want to compel participants to do.
3.Create An Outline
Once you have a clear picture of your audiences and goals, it becomes fairly straightforward to come up with a content outline that best resonates with the same. This section essentially involves coming up with the main topic, the sub-topics, and the sub-sub topics, along with how the overall webinar will be structured and held together for the maximum impact.
This section essentially defines the broader content development process, and is thus, very crucial for a successful webinar. It is in this section that you will also be determining the tone, pace, and the overall information that needs to be conveyed.
While the ‘Audience Persona’ along with the CTAs and goals should be the guiding beacons in this regard, there is another guiding principle, popularly known as the ‘3 Es’, or entertaining, educational, and engaging, for excellent content in webinars. Once the outline is ready, all other contents, visuals, and effects can start taking their place.
4.Use Visuals
This goes without saying, but visuals do a great deal of heavy lifting for sales webinars, and with the right selection, color palettes, and placements, they can complement the content and audio incredibly well. This includes interactive slides, diagrams, charts, and animations, but can also include videos, and all other visual representations of information that help drive the narrative.
Participants find it hard to stay present when there is absolutely nothing happening on the screen, or if the webinar is audio-heavy, and doesn’t include much in the way of visuals. The key to keeping audiences hooked is by ensuring that the screen is constantly in transition, but not too much, as it could also serve to distract viewers from the main issue.
5.Keep It Interactive
A key element of all compelling and captivating webinars is the host’s ability to turn viewers into participants. This is often done by asking questions, and having participants answer them in the chat box, taking impromptu surveys, or by having each participant introduce themselves at the beginning. Many webinars also take the form of a live discussion, keeping all participants hooked onto the subject-matter.
Making a webinar interactive isn’t easy, and it takes hosts years of experience to get a hang of it, but there are few better ways of holding onto the attention of participants, and creating memorable experiences that help turn warm leads into sales. This is where the art lies in creating compelling sales webinars, and is something that is mastered over years to trials and efforts.
Final Words
Webinars still remain the preferred choice for B2B tech marketing and sales, and will likely remain so for years to come. Whether you want to use free webinars for lead generation, or nurture and convert existing leads via the same, a webinar can add plenty of value to your sales funnel when used right.
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IPwithease is aimed at sharing knowledge across varied domains like Network, Security, Virtualization, Software, Wireless, etc.
