Unless you are brand new to marketing, this news isn’t new: “interruption marketing” is a tough way to make your goals—unless you have a pile of money

So how do you cut through the noise, build trust, and make sales without breaking the bank? One powerful option available to companies, large and small, is to use content marketing and webinars.

Content marketing, while often disguised in various terms, is something that is accessible via the web. And web conferencing (which enables interactive, web-based seminars or “webinars”) is a perfect medium to transform that content into findable, accessible, and shareable experiences. Together they bring us to an important question:

How do marketers transform webinars from tactics (e.g., “just another form of white paper”) to an agile, action-creating machine?

To help you create a practical strategy and path to accomplish this transformation, this paper illuminates four things:

• Why you absolutely must elevate webinars from a delivery mechanism to content marketing programme
• How to create your “think like a publisher” framework for success
• The five forces that underpin effective webinar content programmes
• Five accelerators to focus the five forces on for optimum impact

The missed opportunity: Webinars as “one offs”

A 1080 Group analysis of the webinar market shows that most individual webinars often happen in isolation. However unintentionally, often the experience delivered is counter-productive to marketing excellence:

• Content tries to be too many things to too many people
• Promotion tends to be push-oriented
• Presentations and webinar formats tend to be “one size fits all”

The consequences:

• Content seekers are underserved
• Results are limited (e.g., “How many leads did we get, and do we at least have valid contact info for follow up?”)
• Experiences tend to be one-dimensional (i.e., you wouldn’t hand a writer a white paper template and say “this is the only format we write to here,” would you?)

Using a single webinar in isolation is not “wrong.” Surveys from both 1080 Group and MarketingSherpa demonstrate users find webinars to be effective lead generation and qualification tools. The trouble is that this tends to “leave money on the table” relative to content-driven webinar programmes.

Delivering webinar programmes with a “content marketing” approach alternatively enables multiple new opportunities. Audiences are better targeted with the right content in the right manner for different stages of the sales cycle. Further, a portfolio approach not only mitigates risk, also improves the find-ability, accessibility, and share-ability that is friendlier to search and social marketing efforts.

Webinar programmes often deliver better outcomes

Take Action:

• Redefine “webinar” as a flexible delivery medium capable of serving more than one style of communication appropriate for content type and stage in the sales cycle
• Go beyond “name and number” lead generation to feed additional quantitative and qualitative data into the marketing/sales process

Create your webinar programme framework

Nothing “cuts through the noise” like specificity, and one significant benefit of using a content marketing approach to webinar programmes is “giving yourself permission” to avoid the “kitchen sink” and “one size fits all” approach webinars.

Success with this approach involves four “rights,” expressed as the following equation:

(right timing + right persona) determines (right content + right form)

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Take action

• Define sales stages by critical behavioral actions
• Define personas by primary decision criteria
• • Brainstorm stories that resonate in each sector
• Create content that delivers the optimum supporting evidence

Example matrix of topics: SoftwareCo targeting “widget” product developers

[Download PDF for chart]

Align the five forces of powerful webinars for each webinar’s content

Numerous sources note that online search engines are the most used resources by people investigating a company…a key factor in the power of content marketing. This “top level” view, however, doesn’t typically include how to optimise for a specific medium of communication.

Webinars deliver content interactively, making them uniquely influential for getting and keeping attention, gathering data, and inspiring action. To get the most out of each webinar, evaluate both the content and how it is delivered using the following five forces:

Intrinsically valuable

Action (registration, then attendance) is first inspired by value. Content that is intrinsically valuable requires the least effort and monetary expenditure per response.

Take action

• Focus on content that is essential to each persona’s need
• Think, “What would they pay for?” If the webinar is free, economic “elasticity” is in your favor
• Go beyond the presentation. Q&A with the subject matter expert is often as valuable (or more) than the presentation itself

Topical precision

Specific, well-targeted content increases “findability,” self-selects the right audience, and enables more useful behavioral qualification data (e.g., more accurate poll/survey results).

Take action

• Subdivide the overall content you need to deliver into “minimum marketable segments,” each a distinct webinar
• Consider alternatives to the “one hour” webinar. Shorter may be better

Conversational presenter

Many forms of content talk at prospects and customers, which is problematic in a short-attention span environment. The single fastest way to resonate and elicit data-generating audience responses is conversation, not broadcast.

Take action

• In large webinars, adopt a conversational style between the moderator and speakers. Consider extending that conversation to “before and after” via social media
• • In smaller webinars, build in “white space,” to enable more dialogue with attendees and the flexibility to respond/adjust on the fly

Strategic alignment

Content is the catalyst for generating and advancing the pipeline, but a lack of alignment will diminish results and miss new opportunities.

Take action

• Align vertically: Ensure the webinar’s content fits the organisation’s objectives and will deliver actionable data
• Align horizontally: Create programme momentum the webinar’s content fits in the overall portfolio of stories

Focus the forces for optimum programme impact/h1>

Once you’ve optimised the five forces of webinar content, the next step is to take advantage of that which happens over the life of a programme. Consider:

Plan: Think like an “agile social publisher”

Some webinars are true “events.” Because webinars can be highly interactive, however, you will better serve some conversations by not only incorporating them into an overall publishing strategy, but also integrating them into your social media framework. Example: Something big happens in your industry…the time to talk with your market about it is now, not in six weeks when you’ve pulled together an ‘event.’

Create: Write it once, publish it 15 times

Creating quality content takes time. While you don’t want to recycle content verbatim, a little imagination can increase its usability exponentially. Example: A story has a user, technical, and financial angle, and each could support an in-depth analysis (an entire webinar) and be summarised for supporting evidence in other webinars

Promote: Unleash your promotional “force multiplier”

Your webinar “force multiplier” combination of tactics that produce better results together than separately. Example: A registration page encourages signup for multiple events; the webinar moderator opens and closes one webinar mentioning the next in the series; the presenter might respond to an audience question and use the occasion to highlight a future webinar on that topic; the “thank you” email includes a link to the next (or similar) webinar.

Deliver: Teach your presenters how to help the cause

A subject matter expert can play a huge role in drawing in the audience (if they’re not, you could just hand a professional spokesperson or voice to read a script). Example: Improve data capture by guiding the presenter how to increase poll response, how to ask an open-ended question that encourages the audience to share responses that will help the sales team, or how to close their presentation in a manner that elicits that next action

Measure: Mine the whole, not the hole

Data, both for the sales team and your own continuous improvement, is king, queen, and court. Go beyond “contact name and number” to leverage the data that only happens in multiple-webinar programmes. Examples for sales: Did they register for multiple webinars? If so, which topics were of greater value than others? How did they answer polls and end-of-event surveys? What questions did they ask during those webinars? Examples for marketing: How do different webinars in the programme compare in registration rates, attendance rates, average attendee time on the webinar? What is your “sell through” rate (getting attendees from one webinar to register for the next)? What additional data are you capture as your progressively gain trust?

The Bottom Line

Excellence in webinar programmes takes effort, commonly more than many new users expect. That effort, however, has an upside. Webinar programmes uniquely enable interactivity with audiences around the world, and have data-capture opportunities beyond single activities. And as more organisations transform from simplistic broadcast tactics to momentum-gathering ways to trusted ongoing conversations, the slow responders will face one more critical question: What will happen to the competitiveness of those organisations who fail to respond?