The B2B marketing webinar is one of the real workhorses of any marketing campaign. It’s an easy way to collect potential customers and prospects to view a presentation about your company’s products or services in a way that will make them willing to hear a sales pitch in the future. Yet, many people don’t give a lot of thought to the presentation layer of a webinar. With that in mind, here are 5 tips for better B2B marketing webinars.
TIP #1: Make it interactive
It’s too easy just to read from a prepared script, put together a few text-heavy slides, and make everyone slog through an hour of uninspiring content. But the best webinars are interactive. They make it exciting to have a real-time experience, rather than just something you’re barely paying attention to on your laptop or desktop.
For example, you can answer questions during the webinar. You can ask the audience if they’re following along OK. And you can insert commentary and insights about news and current events to let everyone know that this is, indeed, a live real-time experience.
TIP #2: Engage the multi-taskers via social media
In the current digital era, it’s perhaps too much to expect that a person will sit down at a computer and watch an entire webinar from beginning to end without other distractions. People are going to be tempted to check their email, to check their Facebook account, or to catch up on other work as they wait for the webinar to end.
So that’s where you can use social media like Twitter. Ask people to send out their questions via Twitter using a webinar-inspired hashtag. Provide pithy summaries of points with a single tweet. Or send out multimedia (e.g. photos) via social media to illustrate a key concept.
TIP #3: Keep it to less than 60 minutes
The default time for any webinar seems to be one hour. Maybe it’s our collective memory from our university days, when most academic classes were one hour. But today how many of us are really willing to give up an hour of our days? In the digital era, the trend is toward bite-size content that can be rapidly digested. Vines last all of 6 seconds. Snapchat Stories last all of 10 seconds. Most YouTube videos are 2 minutes, max. And you want people to invest 60 minutes?
TIP #4: Make the visual elements compelling
The difference between a webinar and a podcast is the video. Unfortunately, the
video for most webinars consists of either a live video of the host, or just a bunch of boring PowerPoint slides. It’s death by PowerPoint if these slides just contain a lot of facts presented in a non-compelling manner.
The problem with most webinar slides is that they provide either too much information or not enough information (staring at a few words of text for 5 minutes at a time is no fun for anyone). The answer is to create a smooth rhythm and pacing, where viewers only see a single slide for 10-15 seconds at a time.
#5: Always go for the highest quality sound and video quality
This may sound obvious, but nobody is going to invest an hour in a webinar that’s hard to listen to. People will just give up. So make you’ve tested and re-tested the audio quality. Make sure that all the clever animations in your PowerPoint slides actually work as expected. And get rid of any annoying static that makes it hard to understand what the presenter is actually saying!
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.