Archive access equals archive success
We’ve all heard countless adages of coworkers who spend enormous amounts of time and efforts on a project, only to see them languish in obscurity after the fact. We all wish we were more productive, more efficient, and more effective in channeling company resources to produce the most bang for the marketing buck. Webinar archives are often an overlooked aspect of the webinar lifecycle. Conversely, being smart with your archives can be a great way for you to boost ROI on your webinar efforts.
Let’s explore a hypothetical example: You’ve spent hard earned time and treasure in developing your webinar channel. You’ve brought in the experts to ensure your events run without a hitch, and your speakers are delivering great content. How do you manage your archives? Do you just post a replay link from the webinar console for people to view? Is that a branded experience for your viewers? Does it allow you to track viewers in a meaningful way? Why spend all that time and effort beforehand, and not follow through after the fact with the most lasting touch point of your campaign? Below are the four steps to achieving archive success:
Step 1: The Cardinal Rule of Archives
If you’ve done any research into the shelf life of a typical archive, you know it is usually quite short. It’s imperative to assemble and promote an archive as soon as possible after an event. Even if you miss the first 72 hours directly after an event, chances are you’ll have lost valuable opportunity to get additional mileage out of your event. It’s better to partner with a provider who can turn your archives around right away, and can provide you with a permanent place to point viewers to from the very start.
Step 2: Ensure your archive is accessible anywhere, anytime, via any device
Most potential viewers will not try more than once or twice to play an archive before giving up and moving on. If your user has compatibility, buffering or streaming problems, it is unlikely that they will wade thru the technical errors to try to view the archive. V2 takes your archive, converts and posts it so that the technology does not get in the way of your message. And when we say it will play on any device, we mean ANY device – laptop, desktop, cell phone, iOS, Tablet, Android etc.
Step 3: Retain your branding WHILE gathering what you need to know
V2 can create a custom landing page that preserves your branding and message, and can gate the archive entry so you gather the exact demographic data that you need. You don’t have to redirect viewers to your corporate WebEx account to view an archive… so why do you? It’s better to own the messaging and interface completely, and not distract your audience with third party vendor branding. We’ll work with you to develop a landing page template that won’t scare viewers off.
Step 4: Keep the archive Alive
Sure we all know that archive viewership drops off very fast.. but that does NOT mean you shouldn’t keep archives accessible. Having archives posted in a searchable directly can bring in sporadic hits well past what you’d expect to be a normal lifecycle. And you never know when that one person yours sales team wants to talk to might just be searching for information on a topic you covered in a previous event. Using archives to build out a content library can also positively impact your overall SEO too. We recommend placing archives in a location that can exist for at least 12 months past the webinar date. It’s all about squeezing every last drop of usefulness out of your existing resources.
Ready to start? Give us call, or shoot us an email for your next event and archive. V2’s purpose is to make the world a little less stressful by thinking of every online event detail so you don’t have to. We envision a world where people remember the message, not the mess-ups. So just relax.
