The 2022 Benchmark Report for Webinars and Virtual Events is here! Notified analyzed data from their customers’ webinars and virtual events over the last year to provide you with data-driven insights, top trends, best practices, and action items to help you craft a winning event strategy in 2023.
Marketers who rely on experiences to connect with their audience, understand the power of webinars – whether it is for demand generation, thought leadership, or product launches. It is no secret that with the widespread adoption of event technology over the past several years, some norms and best practices have been persistent and new trends started to emerge. So, you might be asking yourself:
- What is the best day and time to run a webinar?
- What is the average attendance rate?
- How can you offer experiences that engage?
- What are other marketers doing and where are they finding success?
The 2022 Benchmark Report for Webinars and Virtual Events has the answers! Notified, a leading provider of event technology, recently analyzed the data from a subset of customers’ webinars and virtual events conducted between June 2021 and June 2022. The report provides data-driven insights, top trends, best practices, and action items to help you craft a winning event and webinar strategy in 2023.
Here are our favorite key takeaways from the report related to webinars:
Build Anticipation Before Your Webinar
The average promotion time of webinars has increased to 44 days (compared to 39 days in 2019) meaning you have plenty of time and opportunity to engage with your attendees leading up to the event to ensure they attend your webinar live. Not only that, 32% of registrations is generated 7 days prior to the webinar live date.
So, what does this mean? Timing plays an important part in your communication strategy. There is so much time to engage with your attendees leading up to the live session. Offer your registrants opportunities for engagement ahead of the live webinar: ask questions, survey attendees, encourage chat participation, and promote relevant content. This also allows you to shape the webinar content based on your audience needs and provide meaningful dialogue during the live webinar. Pre-webinar engagement leads to higher attendance rate.
Increase Your Live Engagement
According to our benchmark data, 65% of registrants attend the live webinar (compared to 39% in 2019). Viewers are embracing the nature of LIVE events in greater numbers and are getting more comfortable with attending virtually.
Let’s be real, your attendees will multi-task even when they join live!
Why not offer opportunities for them to do so during the webinar? Here are a few ideas:
- Sprinkle polls throughout the webinar to learn more about your audience
- Include relevant handouts to download
- Launch a survey and ask attendees to complete a survey live. Consider offering a prize to one lucky winner.
Design Targeted Content and Programming
When looking at the data, we saw that Wednesday and Thursday were the most popular days to host a webinar.
On top of that, we found that 41% of all webinars were held between 11:00 am – 1:00 pm. Why does this information matter?
Your attendee’s time is valuable – they won’t attend your webinar if they can’t make it fit into their busy schedule. While every audience is different, understanding the people that will be attending will allow you to design your content and programming based on their specific needs and interest.
When we design an event based on our attendees’ needs, it leads to higher engagement and a better experience with your audience. Strong events have a singular goal and provide unique content suited to the needs of your audience.
Engage Your Audience Long After the Live Event
So much has changed in the events industry over the last few years, a big one being the extended shelf life of your content. Your webinar lives on long after the live session concludes and can continue to be a powerful marketing tool to continue to refer to.
When your audience registers for your webinar but do not attend the live session, this means they are interested in the topic but may want to consume it in a different format. Find ways to repurpose your content by turning the webinar into a blog series, FAQ document, or a series of social media posts to keep people engaging with your content.
If you are a marketer and you are not hungry for data, this is the time to be!
Data should be used at every step of your event planning process. Leveraging data is critical in helping you design and deliver experiences that attendees crave.
The data collected in Notified’s 2022 Benchmark Report: The Latest and Greatest in Webinars and Virtual Events can be used to turn a good webinar, into an awesome webinar.
Download the report to get access to ALL the webinar data along with similar data points and best practices for virtual events as well. Trust us, you don’t want to miss out on this content.