Webinars are not often considered a fundamental part of video marketing. But, whether live or on-demand, webinars are video assets that, when used effectively, can really contribute to your overall digital strategy.

The visual world in which we live is demanding more and more video content to learn and be entertained. This presents great opportunities to take the implementation of webinars in your digital strategy to the next level in order to humanize your brand, increase awareness, add value for prospects and customers alike, and generate leads.

Which Types of Webinars Succeed in the Era of Video?

Webinars traditionally consisted of one or two speakers going through a presentation to share information with their audience. And while this was an effective way to generate leads and educate the market, it wasn’t exactly the most engaging. Today, the new technologies and tools available, including real-time chat, remote production, and on-demand features, enables marketers to diversify their content and increase audience engagement and participation - really bringing their message home.

”When I think of webinars, I go right to the fact that it is video content,” said George B. Thomas, Impulse Creative. By considering webinars as video content, it opens up new opportunities for marketers to create all kinds of new and interesting concepts.

Product Launches

Launching products through a dynamic webinar humanizes your brand by putting a face behind the product being released. But you don’t have to have a massive budget and amount of production resources in order to create an effective product launch webinar; simply putting someone in front of a camera explaining the launch, combined with repurposed footage of your product or service, will still be an effective launch announcement. For example, here’s how we announced the launch of our webinar tool in September, 2018:

Weekly Sales Demos

Webinars are also effective for running online demonstrations. Putting your sales team on camera and running an online demonstration will not only help drive interest and awareness of your product and the value you can bring, but this content can also be repurposed for middle and bottom funnel campaigns.

Conferences, Events & Meetups

The value of hosting an event doesn’t end when the event is over. By repurposing the presentation slides and recorded talks, marketers can release the content to an exponentially larger audience, while at the same time creating leads by requiring registrations to view the content on-demand.

Hint, a healthcare startup based in San Francisco, did exactly this with their annual conference. While only 125+ people could attend the actual conference, they were able to capture an additional 1,000 leads from releasing their conference recordings on-demand:

Similar to conferences, meetups and events can be turned into webinar video content by simply recording and interspersing the presentation slides throughout. Here’s an example from The Video Marketing Meetup:

How can Marketers Make Webinars More Dynamic?

In our increasingly visual culture, it’s important for marketers to consider webinars less of an online presentation and more of a strategic digital marketing opportunity.

One way to do this is incorporating highly engaging video content into webinars, whether that be product launches, online demonstrations, or repurposing event footage. The more diverse the webinar content, the more uses marketers can get out of it in the hopes of attracting and engaging with audiences across all stages of the buyer’s journey.

Using Video Content

Video content can make a webinar that much more dynamic, allowing marketers to share a message quickly while also breaking up the monotony of just slides and audio. Adding in a case study of a real life customer talking about their success, or a product breakdown, is a simple adjustment that can make webinars that much more engaging.

Multi-Camera Productions

Putting the speakers on camera and using different angles relieves the static nature of webinars, and facilitates a connection between the viewers and presenter(s). These smaller clips can also be repurposed across other channels, such as social, to promote your next webinar.

Produced Q & As

Instead of writing up a Q&A interview, turn it into a dynamic webinar featuring, for example, industry experts discussing a topic of interest for your target market. Not only is this more engaging for your audience, but with today’s webinar tools, you will know exactly how many people watched how much of the webinar, giving an indication of how engaging the content is for future learnings - something that is not possible with a downloaded PDF.

The Right Webinar Tool

Despite all of the awareness building and lead generating opportunities webinars represent for digital marketers (as outlined above), our State of Webinars report found that existing webinar tools have a -28 NPS score. To respond to demand, we built a better, more useful webinar tool with marketers in mind. Our webinar tool can not only run slide-based webinars, but also has several dynamic production features: enabling multiple presenters broadcasting remotely, multi-camera options, direct in-browser streaming and on-demand functionalities. With more options for running webinars comes more opportunities to create engaging and powerful content, enabling marketers to connect with their audiences in new and exciting ways.