Webinars can be a highly effective marketing tactic when trying to reach an audience of dental professionals. They provide strong sales opportunities, the ability to build brand awareness and thought leadership, and a chance to directly interact with your target audience.
According to research from the Content Marketing Institute, webinars are in the top eight of content marketing tactics, with 58 percent of B2B marketers using them, and 32 percent saying that webinars are critical to their content marketing success.
Webinars offer many benefits to dental companies, including:
- A motivated and interested audience. Attendees are committing an hour or so of their busy day to listen to your message and engage with your presenters. That takes a lot more effort on your attendee’s part than, for instance, scanning an email or reading a web page.
- Through webinar registrations, you gain attendees’ contact information and can perform marketing follow-up and lead nurturing activities.
- You can interact with your audience and even collect valuable information from them for use in later marketing by creating polling questions relevant to the topic and including them in the webinar.
With these powerful benefits, it’s no surprise that webinars work. You can make them work even better by focusing on the following five keys to webinar success.
1. Choose an Educational Topic
- Recent research conducted by Dentalcompare’s parent company Compare Networks showed B2B professionals attend webinars during the middle exploration and evaluation stages of their buying cycle when they have a recognized need and are sorting through ways to solve their problem.
- If the webinar is focused on technology, pinpoint how it solves a problem your target customer is facing. Focus on educating your audience, not on the features and specifications of your product, or on making a sales pitch. That can come later.
- Consider presenting case studies that demonstrate new ways to solve an existing problem. This can position your product as a solution to common problems or a path to new efficiencies.
2. Give Careful Thought to Who’s Presenting
- Whenever possible, use third parties such as customers, industry experts, or analysts to be your presenters. You immediately gain credibility and generate a sense of objectivity in your material.
- If relying on in-house speakers, invite an R&D scientist or technical professional to explain technical concepts. Don’t rely only on marketers as your speakers.
- Use only speakers with strong presentation skills to keep your audience interested.
- Communicate with presenters to explain topic scope, time requirements, presentation requirements, and logistics.
- Review all speaker presentations ahead of time so you are familiar with all material and can make content suggestions as needed.
- Ask speakers for questions they anticipate getting from the audience. You can use these as seed questions if needed during the Q&A portion of the webinar.
3. Promote the Webinar Early and Often
- Plan a mini-marketing campaign to promote the webinar, starting at least four weeks before its scheduled date.
- Use all available channels including email blasts, social media posts, banner ads on your website and third party sites, and even promoting the webinar in your email signatures.
- Touch each prospect at least three times via email. For example: three weeks prior to the webinar, 1.5 weeks, and the day before.
- Create a landing page that offers more information and makes registration easy and obvious. Include information on the topic and presenters. Collect only enough data from registrants to enable follow-up and to continue a dialogue. It’s probably enough to capture name, email address, and company. You can get the rest later as you continue lead nurturing.
- Offer an incentive for registering. For example: access to gated content such as proprietary research data or an informative ebook. Another enticement is to provide a special offer for any attendees who later purchase your product.
4. Give Your Webinar Professional Production Values
- Avoid embarrassing and time-wasting problems by testing all network and sound equipment ahead of time. You don’t want your audience complaining that slides aren’t showing up or that they can’t hear. That could damage your credibility.
- Presenters are often geographically separated. Make sure all presenters are in a quiet location and have reliable Internet. Don’t use speakerphones. Headsets are better.
- Quality control can be improved if speakers pre-record their presentation.
- The moderator should prepare a script that includes an introduction of speakers and a call for questions during and/or after the presentation is complete.
- On the day of the webinar meet with all presenters and review logistics. Test sound and network connections.
- Archive the webinar and make it available within 48 hours of the live event.
5. Measurement and Follow-up
- Determine metrics to track ahead of time, such as number of registrants, number of attendees, drop-off rate, and audience engagement (downloads, questions asked, etc.)
- Send an email to notify registrants and attendees of the archived webinar. Include any additional or promised content.
- Add registrants and attendees to a lead nurturing campaign to help guide them through their purchasing journey.
- With each nurturing touch, offer additional information such as practical tips, infographics, articles, product details, and other content. Always include a call to action and encourage prospects to take the next step.
- Be sure to attribute the webinar as a lead source when an attendee becomes a customer. That way you can better track the ROI of your webinars.
If webinars are part of your marketing strategy—and they should be—Dentalcompare can help you achieve success. Dentalcompare is read to produce your live or pre-recorded, on-demand custom webinar about a topic of your choice, or you can sponsor one of Dentalcompare’s webinar series hosted by our Clinical Director Dr. Jeff Rohde. Learn more about webinars and other digital marketing opportunities with Dentalcompare by contacting [email protected].