Webinar Wire

The Webinar Minute - "The Marketing Hot Zone for Your Webinars"

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How to Promote Your Webinar or Webcast on a Budget

Webinars and webcasts are a good way to promote your business or even increase your income. However, as more and more free webinars are being launched every day, it’s getting harder to reach the audience. So how can you promote your webinar?

First of all, you should consider starting promoting the webinar 2 to 4 weeks before the delivery date. If it’s sooner, you won’t have enough time, if it’s earlier, the impact will be diminished, since people generally need a sense of urgency in order to act on an offer.

So here are some tips and tricks on how to promote and market your webinar or webcast:

1. Publish your webinar on your blog or website

This is the first natural step. Even if you use an event management website (such as BrightTalk or EventBrite), publish it on your website or blog as well.

2. Optimize your webinar page for search engines (SEO)

Use keywords in the webinar title (however, don’t go overboard and have a 4 line title), in the first paragraph, in links and headlines. It’s also useful to make your keywords bold. Limit yourself to 4 or 5 keywords because, if there are too many keywords, your page relevance for each keywords diminishes. It’s also advised not to repeat a single keyword more than 4 times on a page, it can be considered keyword spam if you do.

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Practiced Speakers Makes Perfect with Webinars

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Using Personal URLs and Variable Image Personalization for Webinar Audience Recruitment

Creativity, interaction and personalization are key components of successful email-based webinar recruitment efforts. A personalized landing page for each respondent (PURL) as well as Variable Image Personalization (VIP) for each individual email are highly effective at driving up conversion rates.

As publishers and marketers look for imaginative ways to deliver relevant information, a growing number are turning to one-to-one marketing methods. Creativity, interaction and personalization are key components of successful 1:1 email-based webinar recruitment efforts. Two examples are a personalized landing page (PURL) for each respondent as well as Variable Image Personalization (VIP) for each individual email. Each alone, or in combination, are highly effective at driving up response and conversion rates, and expand the window of time that mail recipients spend reviewing their mail, adding immeasurable value to the effectiveness of the message.

Personal URLs could very well be the future of email marketing.

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The Webinar Minute - "If Your Webinar Is For EVERYONE, It's For NO ONE"

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The Webinar Minute - Why Your Fans Won't Pay for Your Webinars

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Assembling and Fine-Tuning the Content for your Webinar

Now that we’ve developed the content and are recruiting our audience, it’s time to start to assembling the content from all of the speakers and contributors to your webinar presentation.

First and foremost, take a hard look to make sure that the overall content supports the messaging in the invitation and that the flow is of interest, relevant and something that, based on what you know about your audience, will engage them.

With this ensured, begin to render all of the discussions with, and supporting documents from, contributors into a presentation format, most typical of which is a slideware application. This will provide the basis for further engaging those contributors to assure that what you're presenting is factual and logical.

From there, the next step is to create a "time line" or "time chart" that enables you to visualize the time it will take to deliver each section and to examine the flow and order of the presenters. Scheduled "table reads", "dry runs" and "dress rehearsals" with your presenters then will begin to produce final iteration for the slides, and this same practicing together will enable you and the group to "take the rough edges off" and develop a natural, conversational interaction between the speakers.

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The Importance of Keeping Your Audience in the Room

Picture this: You are giving a live seminar and you announce at the outset, "If anyone has any questions, there is a lovely lady named Mabel sitting right outside the ballroom who will collect them from you. So, as you think of a question, simply leave the ballroom, give your question to Mabel, and then return to your seat. I'll answer your questions at the end of my presentation."

A fellow in the front row asks you, "Sir, if you see someone leaving the room to talk to Mabel, will you stop your presentation and wait for them to return?" "Of course not!" you reply, "For all I know you're taking a bathroom break. I'll never get my pitch done if I stop every time someone leaves the room."

Would you ever conduct a seminar this way? Of course not. So why on Earth would you conduct a webinar this way? Believe it or not, I attended just such a webinar today. The vendor, a marketing consultant, chose to use Livestream as the "webinar" tool.

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Developing An Effective Work Plan To Produce An Impactful Webinar

So much to do, so little time... I like to think of webinars as "movie trailers" or “mini events” and, like all events, there are a lot of moving parts. As with all events, webinars should be framed with a set of business objectives that becomes a roadmap for all of the best practices that follow, culminating in an engaging, impactful event.

First, a webinar production team must be led by a strong project manager and must be comprised of a production team possessing all of the needed skills, from creative design to content/messaging development to sound/video editing to reporting and analytics. It’s very important to know what each person's roles, responsibilities, deliverables and activity due dates are. And, in true collaboration, key internal/external stakeholders from the client's side need to be integrated into the process as well. Generally speaking, there will be elements of Marketing and Executive/Senior Sales management who make up the client side of the webinar production efforts.

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The Webinar Minute – “How to Select Your Most Saleable Content”

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