Ask these 5 questions to ensure you are connecting with your target audience, building brand awareness, and driving conversion with your webinar strategy.
If you have not reevaluated your virtual event strategy since the onset of the pandemic, you may be missing out on the enormous opportunity to connect with your target audience, build brand awareness, and drive better conversion through your marketing funnel. Perceptions of what’s possible with hosting virtual events and webinars have changed over the past few years. At the onset of the pandemic and the closure of in-person events, organizations scrambled to find virtual solutions to reach their audiences safely, while continuing to meet business objectives. Whether it was using an existing virtual events solution purchased by their IT department, attempting to use a virtual meeting solution to reach large audiences, or selecting the most popular brand around, marketers have come to learn that there are many other requirements for creating an effective virtual experience that most pre-pandemic event platforms cannot support.
Today, webinars, virtual events, and hybrid experiences play an even bigger role in how companies build awareness, launch products, generate leads, and engage customers. In a recent BlueJeans survey, 88% of respondents agreed that the future of events is hybrid, for both attendees and presenters. It’s now up to marketers to identify the best delivery method for each event, whether it’s a corporate announcement, sales webinar, training, conference, or customer event.
As you are looking to level-up your virtual event and webinar strategy, make sure you are asking these 5 questions to ensure you have the right platform in place to achieve the maximum return on your investment.
How easy is it to join an event?
As a basic rule, participants must be able to join your event fast and without any hassle. Requiring attendees to download a desktop or mobile app is a thing of the past and creates an unnecessary barrier to participate. Send out invitations and gather attendee data prior to the event and select a platform with a browser-based viewing experience to let them join with just one click.
If you would like your event to reach a broader audience, consider streaming it to social platforms like Facebook or YouTube, or consider embedding the live or recorded event onto your website for a fully branded experience, making it easy for a viewer to join and engage with your content.
How interactive is the platform for audiences?
If attendees are willing to invest time in attending your presentation, make sure they’ll have an engaging session from start to finish. The outdated, one-to-many webinar model no longer commands the attention of a large audience. Consider an any-to-many communication experience that brings all active participants into the conversation.
Webinars and virtual events are especially valuable when participants are focused and engrossed in the content. Create a healthy and engaging dialogue with them and capture their feedback via event chats, Q&As, and polls. Doing this can give you a wealth of data that you can use to identify leads and follow up with top candidates.
How easy is it to manage an event?
Without a doubt, your ability to manage your event with confidence and provide customized features to each participant segment is critical to an event’s success. With a world-class platform, you have visibility into all audience and presenter requests, and you can control what attendees see and hear — features that legacy webinar products typically don’t provide.
Choose a platform that offers up to four distinct user experience options: attendee, presenter, moderator, and producer. Customized features, settings, and interfaces enable presenters to deliver content, attendees to consume it, producers to manage on-screen transitions, and moderators to control all communications and event logistics.
Does it provide data insights into attendees and automation for capturing leads?
Replacing your old-school webinar platform with a modern solution can provide you with analytics of your event and attendees — and, importantly, insights to generate valuable sales leads. Through polls, you can send product-specific questions to evaluate buyer behavior, enabling you to qualify leads in real time.You should also be able to capture leads by gating your event with a registration form. After the event, embed the recording on a gated landing page so you can continue to capture leads and disseminate the event content.
Post-event analytics, the event recording, transcripts of chats, and other details are critical to maximize post-event follow up. To gain additional insights into the attentiveness of your participants during an event, consider a solution that comes with an attendee engagement monitor. This type of tracking can allow you to measure audience attentiveness based on duration, participation, and focus. The results can be extremely useful in helping you improve your events and follow up with the most engaged leads. Ensure your platform can integrate with your customer outreach applications and CRM for easy lead scoring and pipeline growth.
Are there “wow” factors?
Does your webinar look like a virtual meeting with a powerpoint being shared? If so, it’s time to step up your production quality. Having an event solution that comes with advanced production tools puts you at a great advantage. It allows you to create stunning, high-quality video content that engages your audiences, elevates your content, and puts your brand at the center.
It can be expensive to hire a production team and integrate multiple AV solutions together for TV-quality broadcasts though, putting an already tight virtual event budget at risk of exploding. By using an all-in-one solution that brings together the best of live video, content sharing, and streaming capabilities into a single, easy-to-use service, you can save time, money, and labor resources to create a production-grade event that will wow your audience and elevate your brand.
Transform Your Events With a Superior Video Streaming Solution
In this era of virtual and hybrid events, attendees are expecting more. Ease of participation, engaging content, and high-quality broadcasting are musts if you want to create memorable events.
So break away from worn-out webinar products and embrace a modern, virtual events solution that includes production tools that will wow your audience. The best of these solutions support flexible user environments, provide engaging participation features, and give moderators total control.
BlueJeans Events is a webinar and virtual events solution with easy-to-use production tools that helps companies engage audiences and elevate their brand while generating customer insights to drive the business forward. Find out how this globally trusted virtual events platform can transform your webinars and virtual events today.
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