3 Ways Webinars Can Extend the Success of Your Event

Michael Mayday is the Digital Content Manager for ON24, the leading webinar platform that’s on a mission to redefine how organizations engage with their audiences.

Let’s say an event just ended. Everyone loved the shared insights, but the accounts and leads you were hoping to connect with didn’t show. That’s just the way of the world and it’s time to move on, right?

Well, not so fast. Ignoring these potential prospects for now simply isn’t an option in today’s world. Fortunately, connecting these missing attendees with your high-quality, content-rich event is easy. All you have to do is record your presentations and create interactive webinars.

How and why? Let’s break it down:

Assess your resources and your sessions

First, you need to know what you’re working with. Assess the sessions and speakers and any recording equipment you may have. Identify the key sessions you want to capture and allocate equipment accordingly.

Keep in mind that high-end, high-definition cameras and audio recording equipment provide the most immersive experiences, but they’re also the most expensive. If you’re tight on money, look at what your organization has and get creative.  

For example, handheld camcorders can produce high-quality video, especially paired with a tripod and a shotgun microphone. Mobile phones, too, can capture quality video. Just make sure your shot is steady (use a tripod or gimbal) and the audio is clear.

Speaking of audio, prioritizing audio over video can make sense. A high-quality audio recorder can capture a slide-based presentation, which, if you have the slides, lets you pair the two up for a quality webinar. Really, it depends on what you have available.

Identify opportunities for interactivity

Okay, so you have your key sessions recorded and ready to upload to your webinar platform of choice. That should be it, right? Again, hold on.

Presentations on their own are fine, but in-person events stand out because they provide an opportunity to interact with the presenter and ask questions. It should be no different for your virtual seminar. Your webinar platform should be able to accommodate a live Q&A with presenters (or staff), downloadable resources and provide a close proximity to what attendees would get at an in-person event.

Webinars also provide you with an opportunity to directly address attendees before a presentation. Grab a camcorder and record an introduction. Let attendees know what they expect from the virtual event, how they can interact with the webinar and what your organization can do to help them, should they need it.

Finally, include polls and surveys. This a great way to gauge how well content is performing and helps identify engaged and interested leads.  

Promote, share and profit

Now comes the hard part: getting people into your virtual event. Fortunately, you already have a list of likely attendees: registrants who didn’t show to your in-person event. After your event is over, send an email to these target accounts telling them when they have the chance to consume the content they missed.

You can also use your virtual event as an opportunity to expand leads. Talk with your speakers to see if they can attend, answer questions and help drive visitors over social.

Finally, integrate your webinar platform with your CRM. Integrations are important because they can accelerate your post-event follow-ups and maintain valuable momentum. Advanced platforms can also provide sales with contextual information on an account, like what they’ve downloaded to how engaged they are with content.

Using webinars to expand an event isn’t just conjecture. Thomson Reuters, for example, recorded a one-day Risk and Compliance Summit. The company wanted to use its recordings to specifically reach would-be attendees who couldn’t make the journey to the event in London.

The virtual event saw great results. It extended the company’s reach by 75 percent, drove a 53 percent conversion rate and generated more than 100 market-qualified leads. And that’s with a one-time run with a limited audience.  

Depending on your strategy and goals, your virtual event can range in purpose from being a simple compliment for attendees and registrants to a full-fledged event aimed at expanding pipeline. There are a lot of options for using the content you create at events. Just remember to relax and have fun while you do it.

How can you get more engagement from your webinars? Learn the tips, tricks and tactics that make webinars work at Webinar World 2019.