Webinars have become standard in many online marketing strategies, particularly in the private sector. In fact, more than 95% of private sector marketers use webinar marketing in their overall marketing strategy.
The public sector has been a bit slower on the uptake, it’s gaining traction as the benefits of webinar marketing become more evident.
The thing about webinars is that they are cost-effective with decent ROI.
This is important because public sector budgets are tight with government departments expected to do more with less.
We’re going to look more closely at how to create a successful webinar, the benefits, and how to manage the technical side.
Public Sector Webinars And Marketing Benefits
The benefits of webinar marketing campaigns are myriad. Here are five of the biggest benefits for the public sector.
1) Increased Brand Awareness
Whether you operate in the private or public sector, brand awareness is a key to success.
Positive brand awareness. You don’t want your webinar campaign to implode because that can put off potential customers for life. They’re likely to treat all upcoming webinars with suspicion, even if they are stellar.
You want to be recognised for your topics, creativity, style, and making informative content engaging and interactive. This drives brand loyalty and can create brand ambassadors who share your webinars far and wide.
2) Lead Generation
This is related to positive brand awareness and a good reputation. It also relates to the power of your marketing strategy. An awesome webinar needs awesome support, which includes an awesome landing page. A well-designed landing page can turn curiosity into interest as more people register, seeding your webinar and generating pre-qualified leads.
3) Audience Engagement
If you take one thing from this post, let it be the importance of audience engagement. Webinar attendees love engaging with hosts and other audience members through real-time polls and discussion ‘rooms’.
Q&A sessions are especially popular, so opening the floor to the audience is a great idea.
4) Thought Leadership
An interesting topic, delivered in a captivating manner, that demonstrates how well you meet customers’ needs. That’s how you start building your reputation as a thought leader in your industry. Audiences trust you and the validity of your content and come to see you as a leading authority in the field.
You can leverage your expert status and use it to bolster future webinar marketing efforts.
5) Multipurpose
Webinars can be a lot of other things if you take the content and adapt it for other purposes. For example:
- An infographic
- A blog post or a series of posts
- A series of short videos for social media channels
- A guest post
- A whitepaper or eBook
How To Create A Winning Webinar
There are several steps to create a successful webinar that entices your target audience.
1) Identify Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience is the starting point for all marketing efforts. You must know their pain points and their capacity to become qualified leads. For example, your local mental health clinic needs extra staff training. You provide training courses in their niche.
But, their budget for ongoing training is quite small and your course is hosted at a five-star venue with catering and the latest tools and technology – and the price to match.
Either provide a more affordable option or cast your net in another (private sector) direction.
2) Set Goals For Your Webinar Marketing Campaign
Are you going to launch a new product that will revolutionise mental health care or are you trying to generate leads for an existing product that has been updated?
Your webinar must be designed to deliver your objective. For example, target regional government healthcare departments to launch your new, revolutionary product.
On the other hand, your updated product might be perfect for the local mental health clinic’s need to manage rising numbers of teenage depression.
The goals are similar, but the webinars will be completely different.
3) Choose A Suitable Webinar Topic
If you’re launching a product or service, your topic is clear, but if you’re aiming to be informative you must choose a topic that is relevant to your target audience’s pain points. For example, the age group most affected by teenage depression.
Consider how you’re going to present your webinar. A panel discussion, featuring well-known experts in teenage depression might be the perfect vehicle for your topic.
Alternatively, your topic might better suit a presentation with real-time polls. It depends entirely on your target audience, so you can see why defining your audience is so important.
4) Create Valuable Content
The whole point of the webinar is to develop high-quality content that is engaging and aligns with your audience’s needs and your goals.
Webinar content encompasses marketing emails, your website, the landing page – anything that will promote your webinar.
Emails, for example, should be short and sweet, and include a punchy subject line, an image or something that engages your audience before the broadcast date.
Webinar landing pages and blogs should be optimised for SEO. This entails tactical keyword insertion, length, images, and webinar format.
5) Webinar Marketing And Promotional Efforts
The best way to capture your audience’s attention is to cover all likely bases. Email campaigns are an effective way to spread the news. Publishing a blog on your website is a good idea, so is publishing a press release on content syndication platforms.
Banner ads at an event, like an expo, can work well.
Social media platforms like LinkedIn are a good option, but it’s worth considering TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Your target audience consists of regular people living their regular lives. You could pique their interest enough to encourage webinar registration.
You could also reach out to industry influencers, which boosts interest and exposes your webinar to their followers.
6) During Your Webinar
We’ve mentioned engagement via Q&A, polls, discussions, etc. But unless you have an engaging speaker, your polls will be wasted. You need someone with character. Someone who not only speaks well but is also good at public speaking. Someone with style.
Someone who can encourage and support connections among audience members, enabling basic networking.
7) Post-Webinar
Your job isn’t done when you switch off the camera. You’ve got to keep momentum going with post event follow-up. Ask for feedback via a survey. Send personalised thank you emails with a gift, like a discount coupon.
It’s a good idea to send personalised email invitations to your next webinar or online event.
Don’t ignore absentees. Just because they didn’t attend the webinar doesn’t mean they didn’t want to. They could have been busy. They could have been in traffic. They could have forgotten. Reach out to them. Make on-demand webinars available. Be understanding and accommodating. Make friends, don’t burn bridges.
8) Measure It
Audience feedback is great, but it’s subjective. If you want to understand how the webinar really performed you need analytics.
Analytics provide a wealth of information that assesses performance so you can improve any upcoming webinars. For example:
- Attendance rate: This is your registration-to-attendance ratio. You may have had one hundred registrations, but if only 33 turned up, you need to figure out why.
- Engagement: This looks at the number of comments, poll responses, drop-off rate, etc.
- Satisfaction: What information comes up in a post-webinar survey? Did participants even complete the survey?
The Technical Side
The tech that enables your broadcast is as important as webinar design and marketing. After all, it’d be a catastrophe if you wrapped up the video, yelled cut, and no one had pressed record.
Or the internet cut out, or a cable broke, or the camera was pointing in the wrong direction. A lot can go wrong if you don’t double-check the tech.
Conduct a dress rehearsal with the speaker. You must check the time, speaker’s position, and things like internet speed and audio disturbance.
Check the cables to ensure they’re plugged in properly, you don’t want one to fall out just as you reach the crux of the webinar.
Test the features and tools; for example, screen sharing and the live comments section.
And always have a Plan B.
Optimise Your Webinars And Extend Your Reach With Cadence Marketing
All of this is a lot to take in. It’s so much that you might feel like a deer in the headlights. You know what to do, but you’re frozen to the spot.
Cadence Marketing specialises in B2G marketing, with an array of services that include end-to-end support for webinars and email marketing.
Contact us for a free consultation and discover how our knowledge of webinar marketing can set you on the track for success in public sector procurement.
