The pandemic is revolutionizing the way audiences consume content and the way marketers engage with consumers. As social media, emails and other forms of digital communication grow in importance, a webinar is an increasingly valuable tactic that can make a lasting impact today and in the long term.
Here are five reasons it pays to incorporate webinars into your pandemic marketing plan:
1. Continue the conversation
Being top of mind with your customers and clients is key to driving business. A webinar is a key opportunity to easily and effectively connect with current and potential customers. It even provides an engagement touchpoint that can lead to sales without coming on too strong during the pandemic. Hosting a webinar is also a chance for your customers to get to know your brand and your experts better, improving your reputation as a thought leader in the industry.
2. Provide value
No one wants to see another “we’re all in this together” email that sounds generic and disingenuous. A webinar is an opportunity to provide valuable, useful and relevant information to your target audience that shows rather than tells your customers that you are thinking about them. And with many people using this extra time at home for self-improvement, your customers will likely appreciate an educational tool that helps them boost their skills and knowledge base.
3. Generate new content
A webinar can live on much longer than a single day and time – you can record it and put it up on your website for people to view at a later date. In fact, 28% of people who watch webinars signed up to do so after registration was over, suggesting they simply want to absorb the content, not necessarily participate in a live webinar. You can also repurpose the content to produce cost-effective assets like blog posts, infographics and social media posts.
4. Improve your SEO rankings
Search engines like Google reward quality content. This means having a variety of relevant and useful content on your site, like your webinar and the assets you produce from it, will have a positive impact on your rankings. Inbound and outbound links can also help your SEO performance, which webinars can support. According to the Content Marketing Institute, webinars are one of the top five types of content that can naturally attract links to your site, further improving your rankings.
5. Lead generation
An extensive, up-to-date email marketing list is more important than ever, with in-store and in-person touchpoints virtually eliminated for the time being. Registering for a webinar requires entering in a valid email address, which you can then add to your list following Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL) considerations to serve promotions and other important communications. You can even remarket to the people who signed up with Google display ads, which in turn will lower your CPC. By tracking who attends your webinar and their engagement, you can gain valuable insights into which of your customers are more qualified, hotter leads and which ones are more top of funnel and could benefit from further targeting and conversion incentives.
To help make your webinars come to life seamlessly and cost-effectively, Fifth Story has launched a new turnkey webinar production service. To learn more, contact us at info@fifthstory.com.