Webinars offer marketers and brands a powerful means of connecting with their audience. Organizations have built up a wealth of specific knowledge and expertise and sharing these with your audience creates a connection that emphasizes your value against the backdrop of a competitive marketplace. Here are your webinar best practices for creating engaging content that will boost brand recognition and customer loyalty.
1. Create Brand Focussed Webinars
Your webinar doesn’t have to be all about you - to connect with a wider audience, it can be valuable to host a range of experts from across the industry. But for your webinars to work as a marketing tool, you need to ensure that no matter how you’re providing content to your audience your brand is at the heart of the webinar.
“Creating branded tools that any webinar hosts use is a good way of balancing valuable contribution from a range of sources and awareness-boosting material for your audience,” says Kathy Edmond, a business writer at Next Coursework. “You should be using introductions and conclusions to tie your brand and its place within the industry to the information your webinar centers around, meaning that when customers think of the problems they need solving, your brand springs to mind.”
2. Make A Splash With Virtual Backgrounds
Effects, filters, and zoom backgrounds hit the headlines recently with the lawyer who accidentally turned himself into a cat. Whilst going viral might be great for your brand, maintaining a professional appeal is also vital, so don’t get too experimental with the filters. However, creating professional virtual backgrounds can add an additional layer of professionality and brand recognition to your webinars.
Zoom features many stock backgrounds from gardens to offices, and you can create custom backgrounds easily with VirtualOffice or other editing tools. Save your image as a .png in high resolution and import it into Zoom under account settings.
3. Engage With Your Audience
Using webinars and presentations as powerful marketing tools is all about leaving an impression on your audience. Creating interactive webinars that earn your audience’s attention will resonate long after the webinar finishes. Using chat functions, asking questions of your audience, and polling them during the webinar are all valuable ways of ensuring your audience feels included throughout the webinar.
“Polls are especially easy for users to take part in,” says Minerva Segovia, a productivity blogger at Brit Student. “Polls enable your audience to speak their mind. By giving your audience a way of speaking, you ensure they feel heard. This builds trust in your brand and provides the foundation for a long-term relationship.”
4. Start A Conversation
Getting the best return on investment from your marketing budget is all about encouraging your audience to keep the conversation going after you leave it. If your audience is inspired to keep talking about your brand, products, or innovations, you’ll get incredible organic reach that translates into real sales.
Pack your webinars with cutting-edge questions about the latest technology and trends in your industry, then use email to prompt your audience to share your content on social media. Feeds and comment bars will fill up with lively debate - your social accounts can follow these feeds and chip in to boost your brand across multiple channels.
5. Building An Archive
Building an archive of your webinars lets your creations live on - future audiences are out there waiting to discover the valuable content in your webinars. Zoom gives you the power to make your videos available on-demand, requiring a sign-up from users before they’re given access to a library of material, so these webinars can continue to generate leads for your business long after they’ve aired. Your webinars can also be shared internally within your organization and often become valuable material for the induction of new staff members.
In conclusion, create brand-led webinars packed full of content and your audience will love you. And remember, the conversation doesn’t have to end when the webinar does. Start a dialogue with your audience that reverberates across the web to have the biggest impact on your demographic. Start building a webinar today and don't forget to keep your brand in mind.
Written by George J. Newton is a business development manager at Academic Brits. He specializes in digital marketing strategies for new and emerging businesses and enjoys finding innovative ways to help organizations grow.