High barriers to getting started with a new growth channel kill creativity and limit us as marketers/growth hackers. Having founded a webinar platform, we see tons of webinars every day. One of the biggest reasons why people are not getting started or continuing with a webinar strategy - is the lack of time to prepare content and plan webinars.
Here are three things we have seen work to reduce these barriers and grow webinars scalably with limited resources:
Plan out a webinar series instead of one webinar at a time. This way of batching will make your marketing efforts easier, give your attendees more possible dates to attend, and present clear next steps if the attendees are not ready to take action after the first webinar. Also setting up webinars becomes easier doing it in batch.
Cut down on the scope of the webinar and not make it too broad. Instead, run it for niche target audiences where you lift out relevant topics and repurpose your existing content for the target group or theme.
The biggest success factor we have seen, in order to stay consistent with webinars, is to use the interaction with attendees through polls and Q&A to source questions and "peer-generated content". Instead of 1hr planned out content, run 20 min prepared content and do 20 min of questions. This makes every webinar unique and does not cost anything in terms of preparing, as long as you are somewhat of an expert on the topic and can answer questions on the fly.
Do you recognize the above in your webinar growth strategy, or experiencing some other barriers or success factors for your webinars?
@oceanskk Yes, you can definitely apply the same strategy to hybrid events/webinars. Typically, the challenge with hybrid is being forced to prioritize one audience. My tips are to 1. Make sure the communication channels are super clear both for digital and in-person attendees and 2. highlight questions that come in, so everyone feels encouraged and valued.
An alternative is to split it up into separate events to make it easier. At Univid, we typically run all of our in-house webinars digitally and then plan out separate physical events. We have seen customers successfully split their strategy - and run digital replays of their most successful in-person events. Or the other way around, running a webinar series, and cherry-picking successful events to later host in person, in more intimate settings.
