We often get questions from our clients asking how to drive attendance on webcasts/webinars. So for this post, it makes sense to go over content best practices. With that in mind, we took to the field and got feedback from one of our most successful clients at driving attendance on their online events. Jenae at ServiceNow consistently drives 400-600 attendees to their webinars. Since their solutions are extremely technical, one would surmise they would give complex content methodology examples like Gamification and Adult Learning Theory. Instead we got three very tactical and practical strategies that should be considered if you want webinar success and sustainability.
Q:
Hi Jenae, I was hoping to recreate your success story and share it with our clients who are looking to drive more attendance. What have you done that has made your webinars so successful?
A:
For us it’s been a combination of market conditions, business maturity, and (most importantly) topics that resonate well with our audience versus pure product pitches. We’ve increased our database through list purchases with trusted vendors and account expansion campaigns which have fueled registrations from qualified, targeted contacts.
Here are my top 3 best practices for a successful webinar program:
- Center the program around content, versus your product or solution. Focus on topics that solve your target market’s problems and real world issues.
- Create an abstract/invitation that is clear about what an attendee can expect to get out of the webinar (You will learn…) and deliver those earnings, rather than bait and switch with a product/company pitch.
- Invite third party presenters to speak (Industry analysts, customers, etc) as they lend credibility and give a unique perspective on topics. This also provides the audience with additional best practices while simultaneously elevating the third party speaker as an industry leader among their peers.
Follow these three pieces of advice, and you will see an uptick in attendance, interest and sales!
Author-Cam Nicholson, V2 Business Development, has been in the conferencing industry for seven years, spending five of those as a UC champion with Microsoft.