Webinars and building thought leadership.
Showcasing thought leadership has become increasingly important in the B2B market. We are creating content to do so; unique content that shows our personality and expertise has become perfect for the industry and to gain success.
Webinars are the perfect blend of personality and content. It lets you speak on end about a topic you are passionate about— always a plus— and it puts us on the map as an expert.
But that is only when your webinar engages and interacts with your audience base.
When done with passion and planning, your webinar will help you grow and connect with the people watching it.
And it is our audience who will decide if we are thought leaders or not.
But first,
What is a webinar?
A seminar that is live or pre-recorded and hosted & published on the internet is a webinar. It is a type of web conferencing.
A web seminar. Simple and clean.
Participants of a webinar attend the session(s) to learn from an expert or experts. Webinar topics range from B2B trends and tips to the best motorcycles in the market.
The hosts engage the audience and share information on their topic.
What are thought leaders?
Thought leaders are creative thinkers. They can bring their ideas into reality, and it gives them authority. Thought leaders also educate others and help their ideas come to life. Hard work and creative thinking have made them experts in their chosen fields.
But how can you show your thought leadership if you have no platform?
96.55% of websites get no organic traffic. Webinars can become tools to change that and create thought leaders.
How can webinars help us overcome the content saturation barrier?
Webinars aren’t just gimmicky tools. We have heard about content saturation; it is plaguing our market. So much so that 96.55% of websites get no traffic. Here is the data from Ahref’s CMO Tim Soulo’s mouth.
Webinars offer us an opportunity to breathe fresh air into a topic. Here’s a list of webinar statistics.
At a glance, two metrics stand out:
- 73% of B2B marketers say webinars generate high-quality leads
- 54% of B2B professionals engage in webinars weekly.
We can confidently say that webinars have pull. They are helping us generate high-quality leads and helping us become visible.
A great webinar will draw in an audience in our niche and keep them interested long enough for us to convert them.
We must create content that is intriguing and shareable. Engage our audience, whether it’s a live or pre-recorded webinar.
The keyword here is engage. A webinar must have high-quality content and should also be interactive.
Engaging content is easier said than done. All of us creative marketers have wracked our brains in search of it. And what have we ended with? The answer, always, is good research!
Good Research of our:
- Audience
- And our topic.
Creating an Engaging Webinar is no joke. But we can do it. How?
1. Ideation
One of the most underrated steps of any creative process is ideation and brainstorming.
We often forget how much power is behind creating an outline for our idea and letting it grow naturally. Ideation requires us to consider all possibilities. From how we would present to the ideal audience reaction, we must anticipate and outline there.
2. Pre-Webinar
A good outline requires us to understand the depth of our topic, but let’s assume we have that. Secondly, we must understand our audience. To whom are we talking to? And what problem does our webinar solve or get them interested in what we offer?
Once you have that, begin your pre-webinar engagement. From LinkedIn to emails, send them to people we know would love to hear what we have. Engagement requires patience, people will need time to respond and word of mouth to spread.
We need to spend time in the pre-webinar phase. Choose a goal: How many attendees should register? Once you have it in place, post a date.
3. Research
When we are done understanding our audience, engagement, and reaching out, we need to explore the depth of our topic again. Challenge our preconceived notions and explore new trends and data. Gartner and Forrester are good partners here.
4. Collate
Now, let your idea simmer. Write down drafts. Make the data you have to make sense.
5. Storytelling
B2B markets are continually evolving. We love personalization and connecting emotionally now. The best way to engage our audience is to tell a story. We all love them; they feel personal and emotion-rich.
Why should our audience care? The story is the answer to this question. Whether it’s a product/service or our expertise, the audience must know we care and why they should, too.
What are the problems we have seen?
How have we solved them in a way that benefits our audience?
That is the story.
6. Delivery
In this phase, we have to imagine talking to our audience. What questions will we ask them? How will we ask these questions?
We can break the webinar into chapters like a good story.
Decide on how each chapter presents itself.
Is one chapter fun and another serious?
Is it all fun or serious?
We will set the tone for our entire webinar here. We can go a step further and add markers for specific questions we want to ask our audience. Here, practice will be our friend. The more we practice, the more natural we will be on the big day.
7. Downloadable Material/ Companion Piece
Downloadable material and companion pieces are not new ideas. But they are effective.
We can create guides, resources, e-books, whitepapers, or even something as small as the key to our data. Audiences from live and pre-recorded webinars will appreciate it. Because they know we are here to share knowledge, not sell. And that will sell.
A live webinar is more interactive, but a pre-recorded webinar can be shared.
Live V.S. Pre-Recorded Webinars
Live sessions can be more interactive. We will talk to our live audience directly. Obviously, in terms of engagement live sessions are gripping.
But the webinar that we took won’t be a one-time session. We need more of our audience to watch it, and a pre-recorded webinar can be downloaded and shared, increasing our reach.
And engaging webinars are shareable. And sharing brings authority. To SEO and thought.
Webinars are crucial tools for a Content Syndication Strategy.
Content Syndication is one of the cornerstones of increasing authority. The catch is that only high-quality content syndicates organically. But we know how to create an engaging webinar.
All that is left is to ask publications to help us reach a wide audience. The clicks, referrals, and linking will create Domain Authority.
Domain Authority increases our SEO value. It is a positive feedback loop.
Syndication means more people will see it, and more publishers will link to us, making us stand out organically and create our thought leadership.
Webinars are the perfect tool to generate high-quality leads, and we should invest in them.
In conclusion, webinars are effective in generating high-quality leads. The sessions are ideal to spread our knowledge authentically and interactively.
Through webinars, we can let our audience know that we care about the problem plaguing them and are actively out to solve these problems.
In the course of such ideals, we will find an audience ready to connect and try our services, not because we have sold them a product but because there is much-needed genuineness in us.
And, as marketers and storytellers, we must strive to be genuine. It is the perfect lead generation strategy.
