Speakers, Times and Topics Can All Be Webinar Variants
Webinars continue to be a successful and profitable way of reaching your customers. As they become more frequent, variations will occur—like the half-day Web Workshop that BVR conducted last month and we wrote about in the March Hotline newsletter. Here are some helpful tips and ideas to remember:
1. Go after stars in your field to be speakers and pay them well. They are polished presenters, can bring in the crowds and can easily earn their fee. Be careful, however, that you are getting the very targeted information you need and not a keynote.
2. Expand your reach outside your house lists by encouraging speakers to market these sessions to their own contacts. You can help by offering to write these messages for them if they don’t have the time. And include links from their websites to yours.
3. Don’t be afraid to charge what you think your session is worth. Pricing that’s consistently too low can hurt response—there’s the perception of value to consider.
4. Get the chatbox spinning. Ask registrants short questions at the beginning that can be easily answered in the chatbox. It gets them used to the technology and involved right away.
5. When government agency personnel won’t speak at your paid webinars, former staffers of an agency may work well in their place—especially if you get a panel rather than a single speaker.
6. Try to be the first with a webinar on a subject—even if you don’t have all the answers yet. Maybe it’s about new legislation or the latest theory in your industry. It will demonstrate your ability to respond quickly to what’s happening.
7. Sponsored webinars can work well, but make sure their message is right for your audience. The less surprises the better. A sponsored webinar might also allow you to price a webinar lower than usual, but again be careful that you don’t set a precendent.
8. Promote the DVD of the webinar or webinar series to your audience. Some people could not “attend” the webinar but still want the information. (You can also sell them the link that you provide free to attendees.) Include on the DVDs at least two video formats plus the audio-only file and a PDF of the handouts.
9. Surveys can be time-consuming but what better way to find out the information that your customers truly want and need.
10. Be creative with your webinars. Maybe a speaker works well visually and you can film him or her. Or you can pre-record a short video segment that will complement the webinar presentation well.
11. Test different times. Just after lunch seems to be the most accepted time, but maybe another time would do well—or perhaps it will draw new customers who don’t do well with the after-lunch time.
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Speaking of webinars, SIPA has an
important one coming up and it’s free!
Managing Your Company’s Social Media
Exposures and Insurance Coverage Issues
Thursday May 19, 2011, 1 p.m.
Look at the legal issues involved in social media,
such as defamation, copyright and trademark law,
and discuss some of the insurance concerns with these
new technologies and how to protect your company.
Speakers: Mike DiSilvestro, V.P. Claims from AXIS PRO
Christopher Beall from Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz, LLP
A Publisher, TBA
Register now! It’s free!
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Webinars and video conferencing are best ways to connect with our target audiences, as it provides many benefits in terms of reduced cost, getting right audience, better collaboration with team members, getting message across to a large group of people at once, having application sharing, desktop sharing etc. One can use various web video conferencing tools such as WebEx, GoMeetNow, gotomeeting, RHUB etc. regarding the same.