Webinar Wire

Suit Your Webinar Audience

Posted by Ken Molay June 17 2008 4:04 PM EDT

Tom sent me a note prompted by my article on best days for scheduling web conferences. He works at a pharmaceuticals company and says that their sales management meetings are usually held on Fridays, which have been set aside for office work and a break from field visits and travel.

I would hazard a guess that Tom's organization is not alone in this practice. If you are targeting sales people as an audience for your web seminar, you might think very seriously about Fridays as a good day for your event.

But his note got me thinking about the "big picture" for web conferencing. It is easy to slip into a myopic view of webinars as suited for a particular purpose or audience, based on whatever our current focus might be. I have to be careful not to fall into this trap, as I talk to a variety of companies, using web seminars to reach many different kinds of attendees.

Just the other day, I had a call from corporate headquarters for a nationally known franchised restaurant chain. They wanted to use webinars to give training and news to their franchise owners around the country. If we used the "best times" findings and tried to hold the sessions on weekdays a little before lunch on the West Coast / after lunch on the East Coast, we would be hitting the franchise owners right at one of the busiest times of their day. Weekends or evenings would likely be more appropriate for this audience.

I was recently quoted in an article on the basics of web conferencing for online training. The reporter wrote about an unusual business operation making use of web seminars: e-Training for Dogs. e-Training for Dogs reaches a non-business home audience. Many of their customers are at work during the day, so weekend and evening courses are more practical as an option in this case. Certainly Oprah found the same thing when she set up her huge webcast series on "A New Earth." Evening classes were the way to go, even though her television show is more of a daytime offering.

My advice about webinar planning always includes a very early concentration on your audience. Try to determine their characteristics, their schedules, and their interests before you do much of anything else. For instance, if you are reaching out to school teachers, consider offering your seminars on weekends, when they are not preparing the next day's lesson plan or grading papers.

There is no one right answer for everybody. That is the power and the frustration of using web conferencing as a delivery medium. Make use of information such as my survey findings, but let your own unique circumstances dictate whether the results apply to you or not.