It is widely acknowledged that digital marketing can enhance the value of products. To make the most of your webinar content, which should be an integral part of your marketing strategy, it's key to offer something that will help you stand out from the crowd. Why should you bother creating special gifts when you've already prepared the perfect presentation? It might seem like an exaggeration, but you need to think outside the box if you want to be remembered - that’s why.
How can bonus materials boost your webinar strategy?
Webinars are a powerful marketing tool, no doubt about it. However, they have one significant drawback - if they aren't recorded, they are a one-time event. As a result of that, after hosting a live video, only digital data can be used for further promotion and retaining contact with your audience. But what about physical aspects?
Creating a set of bonus files can help engage your participants and make them remember you better. When preparing extra materials don’t forget to use your company's logos and colors, which should be saved in your brand book. This way, you can combine digital and traditional marketing, and benefit from them both.
Warm-up your participants before the broadcast
At first, try to make your own webinar checklist, as you want your presentation to be just perfect. Webinar planning will help you in many cases. It’s often hard to choose the tone for your presentation. In some cases, you don’t know how advanced your audience’s knowledge is in a particular topic, so preparing materials for the speech might be tricky. To overcome this, you can provide your attendees with specific exercises and information to get familiar with before the webinar
The benefits of sending materials in advance
When you are planning your webinar strategy, you will probably think about combining it with email marketing. This is a smart move because it allows you to take care of your participants at every stage of the funnel. Nevertheless, sometimes the emails that we receive are dull and the content seems repetitive.
To kick off the contact with your audience and make yourself memorable right away, you can provide them with useful assets in one of the first emails that you send to the people who have signed up for the event. That way, you can engage your potential clients a few days before your live performance.
Besides, you can try to balance the experience of the participants. It might be a useful tip If you’re not making an online course for which you know how advanced your attendees are, but your target group is rather more generic.
Activate your attendees with relevant questions and exercises
Depending on the topic of your presentation, you can make an introduction before the webinar. There are a few things you could send to your future participants. The first of them is a brief overview of the subject to ensure they have the basic knowledge and understand what you'll be talking about.
When you're sure that the audience is on a similar intellectual level, you can focus on delivering information that will be as personal as possible whilst speaking to a group. It's possible to achieve this by providing your participants with materials that can help them relate your presentation to their own experiences and issues.
A glossary to avoid misunderstandings
If you’re going to use specialist terminology, you can make a short glossary that every attendee can have at their fingertips. No misunderstandings and no irrelevant questions during the presentation that would tear apart the structure of your speech.
Creating such a handout should be a piece of cake for you as an expert in your field. What might be tricky, therefore, is to find out which phrases might be problematic for your audience. You could always ask a few people from your work, via a team chat app, for their opinions, or present a brief overview of your webinar content to someone completely new to the topic. It might be an eye-opening experience, as some words that are simple for you may turn out to be inexplicable for a newcomer. With a glossary, every participant has the ability to get familiar with specific language or check meanings during the presentation.
Ask them questions to make your webinar personal
Being able to make your presentation quite generic yet personal at the same time is a hard nut to crack, but it's worth the effort. What might make your webinars exceptional (and insanely useful) is having a unique approach to the topic and combining it with materials tailored to your attendees' needs. Although presenting in front of the public will never be as personal as a one-to-one conversation, it might deliver customized solutions.
Think of how your presentation can help different business models and cases. Then prepare a handout with specific questions related to your topic, allowing your participants to discover their needs and adjust the general message to fit them. Thanks to that, your attendees might also be aware of their shortcomings and expectations. A whopping 92% of attendees want a live Q&A session at the end of a webinar, so it's good to encourage them to think about their business actions and goals in advance. Doing so can help you and your participants make the most of the interaction time, as the questions can be more specific instead of general. This way your participants will be able to listen to your presentation and draw conclusions that apply personally to their case.
Go the extra mile during the webinar
Before we dive into the topic and some examples, let's clarify one thing. Although this section is dedicated to the things you can do during a presentation, these materials should be sent in advance to allow printing of the assets. This should be a day (or a few days) before the live stream, in order to give the attendees some time to get ready for your performance.
To ensure that your audience is well informed about the event, you can send them an email reminder informing that they will be provided with printable documents to use during the webinar. It's a great practice, as you will show how much you respect their time and care about their preparation for your speech. Integrations with email automation software systems might be handy and help you with managing-it-all. You can focus on the content, while LiveWebinar and the mailing tool of your choice send the reminders and assets to participants.
Use worksheets to leverage participant’s engagement
When you invest your time (and sometimes also money) in watching a webinar, you would likely expect to improve your skills and/or knowledge. That's what your participants probably hope to get back in return for signing up to your event. If the video isn't recorded, there's no possibility to go back to a particular snippet and replay certain parts. Thanks to providing supplementary materials to use while listening to the presentation, you can improve your attendees' engagement.
Bonus gifts to send after the webinar
Now, you've finished the presentation and emotions are cooling down, it's time to uphold contact with your audience. Don't let potential customers slip through your fingers. This is also a moment to reach those people who didn't attend your webinar, or saw just part of it that was most interesting for them personally.
Extend your slides and make a summary
During the webinar, your slides should supplement your speech. Their role is to visualize the subject you're talking about and help the audience acquire knowledge. We've prepared a guide on how to prepare a webinar presentation, which might be an inspiring resource for you. However, after the webinar, you can expand your presentation by adding more useful content to it. You could share insights about topics you talked about during the presentation to include context to enigmatic, minimalistic slides. That way, with a little effort, you can create a handy knowledge base that might be incredibly useful for your participants.
Provide participants with the effects of their own work
When you're a part of an event, it's nice to be provided with group work results. These might be different types of assets, including graphics and text documents, as well as screenshots of the notes made by the host.
With LiveWebinar, you can use a whiteboard to show concepts or make a brainstorming session and send the final results afterward. If you want to know your attendees' point of view, you’re able to create polls and surveys. You can save these and send the results to the participants, giving them access to fresh insights and real numbers to analyze and draw interesting conclusions. It also gives your audience the feeling of being part of a community, which might be useful for your further webinar marketing actions.
Key takeaways and cheat sheets
Another way to summarize is to collect all the information and choose the most significant points. This won’t be so comprehensive, but it lets you have the fundamental facts gathered in one place. When making a cheat sheet, it's wise to take care of the visuals. Think about whether you want the final file to be printable or made for digital use only, which might affect the page and font size. You can use bullet points and other differentiators to show the key takeaways.
Take your webinar strategy to the next level with branded materials
Visuals aren't only important just for users' comfort, they can also be a great marketing tool that can help you spread the knowledge about your company. Whenever you decide to make a bonus worksheet or any other asset, keep in mind that it can be a complementary promotion channel.
Building a consistent image of your company is vital and should be applied to the whole strategy. Besides using your brand's color palette and logotype on the website and materials, which you can send to supplement your online event, you can add them to the webinar itself. It's easier than it sounds and is fully customizable. The branding tool feature in LiveWebinar lets you adjust the theme to your brand's identity with dedicated fonts, colors, logos, and more. Plus, you can save multiple templates and use them according to the topic of each webinar.
All of the ideas listed above can help your audience remember your presentation for a long time and recognize your brand among others. Sounds nice? Now you have the option to test our platform if you create a free account which is lifetime but also has some limitations.