5 Reasons Brands Should Adopt a Content Marketing Webinar Strategy

A webinar is a virtual seminar. It is any workshop, tutorial, or demonstration taking place online. These digital sessions can be pre-recorded messages or live events broadcast to educate a specific audience. 

Current trends indicate marketers rate webinars as an effective channel for brands to connect with a target audience. 

According to On24, 66% of marketers say their sales teams prioritize leads generated by varied webinar strategies. In addition, 99% of marketers cite webinars as key to their plans.

This blog will spotlight why those marketers adopt a webinar strategy. Below are the benefits of a webinar and why it’s necessary for your brand’s content curation strategy. 

5 Reasons Brands Should Adopt a Content Marketing Webinar Strategy

Image sourced from ON24

ALT: Percentages of businesses and audiences leveraging webinars

1. Enhanced Audience Engagement

Enhanced audience engagement is the biggest benefit of a content marketing webinar strategy. Webinars provide a platform for real-time interaction between your brand and its audience. 

90% of webinar users leverage engagement tools like slide sharing, polling, and passable microphones. These webinar tools facilitate immediate information and feedback exchange between you and your targets. 

For example, participants can engage a brand representative in real-time Q&A sessions and give opinions that shape product branding. The inevitable increase in engagement is also ideal for developing an online community as it helps the audience to trust the brand more.

It’s even possible to use automated webinar software that runs your pre-recorded webinars on a recurring schedule. This lets you engage your audience on autopilot while still utilizing the same interaction features such as live chat, polls, surveys, CTA popups, and more.

Moz is an excellent example of a brand leveraging webinars to engage its audience and grow a community. Moz develops SEO software tools and regularly hosts webinars to train business owners on web development, SEO, and analytics. 

For example, localized keywords like “buy domain hk” work excellently for web hosting service providers in Hong Kong. Moz provides webinar sessions that can teach business owners to find and leverage such keywords.

The brand recently hosted a webinar session to educate its audience on how to do efficient keyword research. The webinar featured discussions about how brands can spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time adding value to their keyword research.

Moz has gotten significant engagement with existing and new customers through its content marketing webinar strategy. It’s a big part of why they have a strong online community of 500,000 marketers. 

Screenshot from Moz.com

ALT: Promotional page for a webinar by Moz

2. Increased Brand Awareness and Credibility

26% of marketers are concerned about how they’ll engage their audience in overcrowded digital marketing channels. Webinars are excellent avenues for marketers to circumnavigate this challenge.

In addition to being highly engaging, webinars are great for showcasing expertise and niche authority. It’s an ideal platform to introduce your brand’s offering to prospective customers. You can also do that with traditional content marketing methods. But a webinar makes the process feel more personalized and credible:

• A video conference is the closest communication alternative to an in-person conversation. Compared with traditional content marketing, this makes it more effective for creating great first impressions with prospective clients. 

• Webinars also allow brands to collaborate with guest speakers to boost their visibility and credibility. Endorsement from famous figures and thought leaders in an industry can significantly improve brand reputation. 

Finally, webinars are great for getting the word out. You can write content for a webinar and repurpose the event into a blog or social media post. The webinar itself can also work as great content for a YouTube post.

Image created by the author

ALT: Tips for content marketers to ensure keyboard accessibility

3. Lead Generation and Nurturing

The goal of any content marketing strategy is to reach the target audience and get them to become brand customers. Most brands opt for traditional content approaches involving sales funnels for generating and nurturing leads.

Sales funnels can take too long to implement as they involve multiple stages of implementation. But, building an audience list through webinar registration is faster and more effective.

In addition, webinars provide an ideal platform for product and service demonstration, fast-tracking customers to the decision stage of the marketing funnel. For example, say you’re promoting a conversational AI platform; a webinar provides a platform to showcase its full functionalities to the audience in real time.

Through a webinar, you can also deliver effective follow-up strategies that nurture and engage leads. For example, you can host tutorials to show existing customers the best way to use your product. This follow-up initiative helps to convert one-time buyers into repeat customers.

4. Cost-Effectiveness and Scalability

Content marketing webinar strategy generally costs less compared to traditional marketing methods. Hosting a webinar requires enterprise meeting software with video conferencing functionalities. You can find various advanced webinar tools to fit your budget and needs, including some free options.

Despite this low upfront investment, webinars allow you to communicate effectively with a target audience from anywhere in the world. A cybersecurity expert can break down a complex topic like NIST CSF, exploring how it improves critical risk mitigation infrastructure without incurring extra expenses.

In addition, webinars are scalable since you can host any number of audiences without incurring a significant overhead.  Finally, webinars don’t necessarily have to be in real-time—an on-demand webinar gives you enough time to plan a robust marketing strategy around it and maximize your return on investment. 

5. Data-Driven Insights and Analytics

Webinars offer a significant advantage in the volume of data they help the organizer to collect. Depending on the platform and tools used to host the webinar, you can track attendee engagement metrics during the event.

With specialized enterprise meeting software, you can get valuable insights into attendee preferences by analyzing the webinar metrics. Whatever information you obtain from the data will be helpful in marketing optimization. 

For example, the following metrics are useful for determining attendee preferences:

• The volume and demography of attendees
• The duration of participation
• The volume and types of questions they ask
• Attendees response to in-event polls

Working with the actionable insights you derive, you’ll make more data-driven decisions for future content marketing strategies. That way, you can create targeted content and tailor your offers based on customer preferences.

Image sourced from Marketingcharts.com

ALT: Primary success metrics for a webinar

Supercharge Your Marketing Efforts with a Content Marketing Webinar

Content marketing webinars are potent strategies for brands to reach and engage their ideal audience. They’re ideal for driving interaction and building leads. 

But more than that, a webinar strategy delivers data-driven insights and up-close interaction with a willing audience that can shape content curation & branding efforts. That’s why more brands now use webinars as part of their overall content marketing strategy.

The post 5 Reasons Brands Should Adopt a Content Marketing Webinar Strategy appeared first on Scoop.it Blog.