You’ve got a great subject idea for a webinar and a fantastic speaker lined up. Your team are confident they can provide a webinar that will resonate with and have a positive impact on your audience.
Putting together an engaging, thought-provoking and useful webinar can really benefit your organisation, but you need to ensure that it is attended by the right people.
Successful webinar marketing will help get your messages in front of your target audience so that you can start providing benefit and value to them.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can successfully market your science webinar.
What are the benefits of using webinars to market Science?
So what opportunities are presented by running webinars? Here are a few potential benefits to your organisation:
A platform to provide value to your audience
Focus on providing value to your audience. People have given up their valuable time to attend your webinar so be sure to give them a good reason for doing so by providing knowledge and actionable insights.
Increase brand awareness
Before registering for your webinar your audience will likely have already been exposed to your brand at several touch points. Provide a positive experience during your webinar and it will not only benefit them but also increases the likelihood that they tell a colleague or someone in their network about you. All good for increasing your brand awareness.
Establish yourself as a thought leader
Having an audience attend your webinar provides you with the perfect platform to share your knowledge. Consistently providing useful information will help establish yourself as a thought leader within the science industry and keep you top of mind!
Nurture your audience
Your webinar can also help to nurture your audience so that you can follow up with and focus on the attendees most likely to benefit from your expertise, products and services in the future.
"A smaller more qualified audience can be more beneficial to your organisation than a larger unqualified one"
Improve your social media presence
During your webinar you can encourage people to follow you on LinkedIn or Twitter. Or you can continue the conversation on social once the webinar is over. You could even send a personal note to your webinar attendees on LinkedIn to thank them and see if they have any follow up questions. Provide value to your audience and the chances are they will want to engage with you again in the future.
Generate interest and leads for your organisation
Providing a high-quality and insightful webinar will help position yourself and your organisation as leaders in your field. Your audience might be attending your webinar because they have a skill gap so ensure that you are providing the answers that they are looking for and you will remain ‘top of mind’ when they think about related organisations in the future.
Reduce costs
Running webinars as opposed to face-to-face presentations means that you can save on travel costs and utilise your time more effectively. Providing an engaging user experience can help make up for the fact that you’re not getting that personal touch. The cost-saving also means that you will likely have surplus budget that you can invest in other areas of your marketing.
How to successfully market your Science webinars
Marketing your science webinar beforehand:
- Set your webinar goals: as with all marketing campaigns it is essential that you set clear goals for your webinar marketing. These could be reach new prospects, build brand awareness, etc.
- Establish your audience: Be very clear about who your webinar is and isn’t for. If the subject requires some existing knowledge or skill, then be sure to advertise that. A smaller more qualified audience will likely be far more beneficial to you than a large generic one.
- Select a title that resonates with your desired audience: Like the previous point. Pick a subject that is going to address a pain point that your target audience currently has. You want your target audience to see your webinar title being marketed and immediately to think that this subject can help me.
- Use multi-channel promotion approach to your webinar: Email is a primary channel for marketing your science webinar to your existing mailing list but don’t forget to make the most of your other channels as well. If you run a podcast, then encourage registrations at the end and provide a link to do so in the notes section. Utilise organic social media posts and / or use paid social to promote your science webinar. Finally, why not write a blog post about your subject so that you can introduce your subject, generate interest, and encourage registrations.
- Pick an engaging speaker: Picking an engaging speaker will not only improve the user experience but is more likely to lead to highly engaged audience.
Marketing during your Science webinar:
- Educate, don’t sell: Remember webinars are the perfect platform to educate your audience. The hard sell will not only lead to people leaving your webinar but could also cause lasting damage to your brand.
- Ensure you solve the pain point that you are aiming solve: Important! Don’t leave your audience confused or annoyed at the end of your webinar by not addressing and solving the question or issue that you promised to resolve in your title.
- Gain insights during the webinar with polls: During your webinar you can run a poll to gain insight into a problem you think you target audience may be having. This is not only a good way of making your webinar more engaging but can also prepare you for the Q&A section and provide you with data that you can use to create follow up content.
- Run a great webinar Q&A: Having a Q&A as part of your webinar provides you with a great opportunity to further place yourself as a leader on your webinar subject. It also enhances the user experience because an attendee might have a very specific question that hasn’t be addressed yet.
- Have a clear call to action(s): What do you want your audience to do once the webinar is over? Maybe you want them to register for the next in the series or continue the conversation on Twitter? Straight after the webinar is the best time to ask your audience to do something else (if it was a worthwhile experience for them).
Marketing after your webinar:
- Follow up with your guests and no shows: Thank your audience for attending. Send them the recording of the webinar to watch on-demand. Ask for feedback. Promote your next webinar? Following up with those who did and did not attend your webinar is a crucial step and another great opportunity to expose your audience to your brand and or address any issues that they may have had.
- Engage with your audience on social media: Be available on social media after your webinar so that you can follow up with any additional questions that your audience has. Straight after the webinar is a great time to grow your network and to start building mutually beneficial relationships.
Conclusion
We wrote this post in order to give you some actionable ideas about how you can better market your science webinars.
The best webinar in the world is wasted without an audience and the best marketing plan is useless without a great subject and speaker!
Getting each right is critical to ensuring that you can provide a great user experience and will help you and your organisation to successfully market your science webinars!
Are you looking to improve your webinar marketing?
Watch our 2020 webinar: "Using Webinars to Market Science" now on demand
We discuss all aspects of your webinar including:
- How best to market your webinar
- Keeping your audience engaged throughout the webinar
- How to capture and utilise webinar data
- Advice on platforms, equipment and managing your webinars
Gain valuable and actionable insights to support your webinar marketing.
This session is aimed at Sales and Marketing professionals in Science, Engineering and Healthcare.
