Webinars as a tool to boost your online communication strategy

A webinar is a seminar that takes place on the internet, enabling participants from different locations to see and hear the panel of speakers, ask questions, and even answer polls. Webinars are a great way to get a conversation going and engage with your community. Here are just a few reasons why webinars should become a regular part of your communication and dissemination plan.
 

Create Interaction

You should never plan a webinar where you are the only one who speaks; quite the opposite. This means getting creative about ways to interact with your audience: encouraging them to share their opinions; pain points; how they feel about your product/service and their future intentions. Some good ways to do this can be polls, Q&A sessions and asking open questions to your audience.  These are all excellent ways to get a worthwhile discussion going. 
 

Lead Generation

Webinars can be a very effective means of generating new leads. Here, the idea is to use the webinar to transform participants into qualified leads that will potentially use your project’s products or services. In the worst-case scenario, if subscribers do not actually take part in the webinar, you can still engage with them in the future via newsletters or invite them to other webinars. 
 

Low Cost

A well-organised webinar can achieve the same results at a fraction of the costs compared to a physical event, both for the organisers and the participants. 
 

Reusable Material

The material and slides that you produce for the webinar can fuel your social media channels for months and can also be a good source for news and press releases. You can also make the webinar recording available on your website to attract leads.

Our approach: webinar management tailored to your project’s needs

Despite their usefulness, webinars have drawbacks too. The increasing numbers of webinars organised over the past couple of years have created what has come to be known as “Zoom fatigue”. So it’s even more important to find novel and fun ways to engage with your audience to counteract this.
Our strategy for webinar organisation consists of the following steps:

• Webinar platform set-up and registration link creation: We have a paid Zoom account that we use to host our clients’ webinars. This allows both us and our clients to focus on maximising the number of attendees without limits on the number of participants or time. 
• Webinar page creation: This is fundamental to give an overview of the topics to be addressed, the agenda, the speakers, who should attend and the expected impact. The content of the page has to be tailored to your target audience, to maximise the number of participants and pique their interest.
• Agenda creation: Defining the perfect agenda for your event is one of the most delicate tasks when organising a webinar. The content of each presentation has to be tailored to the interests of your target audience and grab their interest in your event. Consider creating a downloadable version of the agenda for ease of consultation as we did for the Ontology Commons addressing challenges of the Industry 5.0 transition workshop of the OntoCommons project.
• Media content creation: A mix of various professional media content types tailored to your project’s visual identity will boost the promotion of your webinar. At Trust-IT we create event banners, Social media cards, promotional videos and even virtual call backgrounds (such as the StandICT.eu 2023 event banner, OntoCommons social media cards and OntoCommons promotional video).
• Social media promotion: Social media promotion before, during and after the webinar will help you to keep your target audience engaged with your activities and results, as we are doing for the StandICT.eu 2023 upcoming webinar.
• Newsletter promotion: At trust-IT, we believe that newsletters are a great way to promote your webinars, as your newsletter subscribers are a “warm audience”, given that they have already expressed interest in your project’s activities. Therefore, if you promote your webinar through your newsletter, you are very likely to experience an increase in registered participants, which is exactly what happened during the newsletter promotion of the OntoCommons 1st global workshop. 
• Speakers invitations: Choosing the appropriate speakers is another crucial step. Ideally, you would want to invite people from relevant organisations in your domain who can bring authority, experience and a fresh perspective to the content addressed by your event. According to the topic of the webinar, make sure to invite policymakers for a policy perspective or industry leaders to share real-life hands-on use case examples. For example, for the 7th "Walk & Talk" Webinar - Women in ICT Standards organised by us on behalf of the StandICT.eu 2023 project, among the speakers we are excited to have Helen Köpman, European Commission Acting Head of Unit, Digital Innovation & Blockchain. Gender balance among the speakers is also an aspect that needs to be taken into account to provide a well-balanced point of view to the content of your webinar.
• Participants invitations: Participant invitation is a complex ongoing activity that will define the success of your webinar. At Trust-IT, we tailor each invitation to the channels used to communicate, to the type of stakeholders, down to customisation of a personal message for each prospect. We use a mix of various channels to maximise the number of participants invitations and registrations, such as Newsletters, Social media promotion, LinkedIn events (such as the OntoCommons global workshop LinkedIn event), press releases and even pay-per-click advertising campaigns.
• Webinar speakers and participants management: Once the webinar has started, we make sure that everything goes according to plan by moderating the event, supporting speakers or participants in the chat and managing the tools used to further engage the participants.
• Recording and slide dissemination: Publishing the recording and slides of the webinar on the event page will give an opportunity to the people that missed the event to learn about the topics addressed and gain all of the valuable insights that your speakers shared during the event, as we have done for the OntoCommons standardisation ecosystem webinar.
• Post-webinar report: At Trust-IT, we maximise the amount of value that we can extract from each project activity. A great example of this approach is the creation of post-event reports (such as the OntoCommons standardisation ecosystem post-event report) that summarise all the key insights shared during your event to provide your target audience with an additional content type that they can consult to learn about your activities, products and services.

We believe webinars are here to stay even after the pandemic. What were once traditional physical events will most probably turn into hybrid events (physical and virtual). This is why it is important to set up a proper webinar strategy for your project and not miss out on the opportunity to use this form of media to engage with your community and turn them into users of your product and services.
 

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Article by

Luigi Colucci
Marketing Analyst