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Tips for running
A SUCCESSFUL WEBINAR The uptake of webinars and Virtual Conferences has exploded since COVID-19 hit and all trade shows and faceto-face meetings were banned, and they aren’t going away anytime soon.
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he pandemic has highlighted that webinars aren’t just a substitute for live events – they have their own benefits when it comes to branding, customer engagement and quality lead generation. If you’re thinking about reaching potential customers with a webinar, here are five tips to help you better connect with your audience and for your event to run as smoothly as possible behind the scenes.
1. AUDIENCE: ARE YOU REACHING YOUR TARGET MARKET? The main purpose of any webinar or Virtual Conference is to provide information to your target market – the people you want to engage with your product or service. So the first thing you need to decide is whether you will be talking to your existing audience or if you want to reach new people. If you’re targeting your existing audience you can directly promote your webinar to them and offer educational and/or interesting content. If you want to reach a new market, the best way to find the most relevant people is through external marketing. This could include social media promotion or other channels like advertising in industry newsletters, allowing you to precisely track how many registrations it drives. Using social platforms like LinkedIn also allows you to identify a new audience based on factors such as job title and location, so you can find exactly who you want to attend your webinar. Monkey Media Managing Editor, Laura Harvey, said virtual events also tend to attract a lot more people than a live event. Monkey Media has run several Virtual Conferences in 2020, including Digital Utilities, Disaster Management, Asset Management for Critical Infrastructure, Flow Technology, and Smart Cities. “For example, at our Smart Cities Conference, we’d normally get around 300 people for a live event, but by making it a Virtual Conference, we had more than 1,000 people registering,” Laura said. Once you’ve decided who your target audience is, it’s important to engage with them before and after the event to foster the relationships. Before the webinar, think about
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UTILITY • AUGUST 2020
setting up an automated newsletter that sends them useful information on the topic. During the webinar ensure they can participate in the conversation using Q&A chat functions to send questions to speakers, or through poll questions.
2. CONTENT: WHAT VALUE IS IT OFFERING? The content of the webinar or Virtual Conference is what will get people to register, so you need to be offering high-quality information and engaging speakers. Think about what your identified target audience and potential customers would want to learn about and create a program around their interests and pain points. Laura creates the programs for Monkey Media’s Virtual Conferences and said the choice of speakers can play a big part in the success. “You need to decide if you will use an internal speaker from your own company, external experts, or both. A mix is often good as it provides broader program appeal and can look less promotional,” she said. “The key with speaker selection is to first define the topics you want to address in your webinar, and then choose the speakers who are well-regarded and best placed to address these topics, internally or externally. “Speakers who have a high public profile, and who have their own broad networks that they can leverage to attract more delegates to your event are also beneficial.” There’s been a huge number of new webinars popping up lately, so like anything else there are good and bad ones. You want to make sure you’re not contributing to ‘webinar spam’. Don’t just do a webinar because everyone else is. You still need to have something useful to say. 3. FORMAT: MAKE IT FIT-FOR-PURPOSE There is no set rule for how long a webinar or Virtual Conference should be, as the length of time should fit the content. If you’re turning a previously live event into a webinar, it’s important to not try to just jam in the existing content. For an event that was previously a one or two day conference, this could be compressed into a 3-4 hour webinar. WWW.UTILITYMAGAZINE.COM.AU
