WORKWEEK

Webinars are hot again––but you don’t need to pack your content calendar full of them to be effective. 

This is the Contentment newsletter, after all. The goal here is to help you create content marketing programs that don’t burn you out. And to do that, you need to have a clear, documented strategy that serves your organization, helps it hit its goals, and doesn’t overdeliver with quantity where quality will do. 

Now, every company’s webinar strategy will differ slightly –– but the biggest driver of differentiation is your target audience and how long their sales cycle is. 

Let’s give an example to help understand why this is important.

• Sales cycle: 3 months. 
• What does this mean: The average lead converts roughly 3 months after you attain their information. 
• The supporting webinar strategy:
  • Month 1 of a quarter: Thought leadership webinar designed to drive a high amount of leads
  • Month 2 of a quarter: How-to webinar designed to show folks the power of a strategy within your tool
  • Month 3 of a quarter: Objection handling webinar designed to address a known objection for the target audience about the platform to help move them closer to buying 

This strategy will shift in sequencing depending on your sales cycle, but the point is that you want to build a webinar program with nurturing as a key component. 

For instance, your team will use webinar 2 to retarget attendees of webinar one across sales sequences, email nurture, retargeting ads, etc. 

But, none of these webinars are only about nurturing. All three still need to be high-level enough to drive leads. 

Why? 

Because the buyer’s journey is a mess, and wildly individual. Many prospects will have already tried your product, read your content, heard your name, etc. before they sign up for a webinar. 

I mean, just look at this modern buyer’s journey from Gartner:

And “webinar” attendance isn’t even on here! 

The point, though, is that you plan your content as a journey to drive and nurture leads, while keeping it high-level enough that leads could join in at any point in time. This is especially important for folks who work at companies in which they have products they need to cross-sell. 

OK OK, so what does this look like? 

Quarterly Approach	Month 1 Webinar	Month 2 Webinar	Month 3 Webinar
Content Strategy	Thought Leadership & Trends	Tactics & Tutorials	Platform Buy-In and ROI Selling
Funnel Stage	Top-of-funnel	Middle-of-funnel	Bottom-of-funnel
Webinar Format	Panel Discussion/Q&A/Fireside Chat	Standard Presentation	Product Walkthrough/Demo
Purpose	Power of Peer-to-Peer: Universally relevant subject matter that attracts prospects at all stages of sales consideration	Hands-On Learning & Actionable Tips: Showcase company’s expertise while providing value for prospects who are challenged by strategy and implementation	Show Me, Don’t Tell Me Marketing: Increase tool accessibility, trigger “aha” moments, and drive urgency
Participants	Panel of customers or influencers, moderated by the content team or executive sponsor	Presentation with 2-3 participants, usually a strategy implementation and success walk through by a partner.	Product marketing-lead and moderated with sales-led demo at the end

All right, and then, you want to think through distribution:

Lifecycle	Prospect promotion:Webinar promotion to relevant prospect audience Customer promotion Webinar promotion to relevant customer audience Partner promotionWebinar promotion via lifecycle by the partner, if there is one
Content	Live webinar > on-demandLeverage live webinar as an on-demand asset after live dateWebinar > blog Webinar recap of the most important / helpful topics covered.
Organic social	Company promo:3x promo of each webinar, 1x per week leading up the webinar, on all social channels. Guest / influencer /partner promotion of the webinar on their channelsPost-webinar video cuts: Promote video cuts from the webinar on social platform back to a supporting blog / on-demand webinar sign up
Sales	Sales plays for:Webinar leadsWebinar attendants Webinar engagers (engaged during the webinar) Webinar no-showsSequence additions, where it makes sense
Paid	Paid social lead genPrimarily on LinkedInSponsored newsletter placementsWebinar placements for target audience

That’s it. Webinars are fantastic tools for driving leads and engagement, but they are a lot of work. They take a ton of time to find the right guests, coordinate with those guests to present the content in the right format at the right time. 

As a result, work to decrease the amount of webinars you do, but increase the quality and strategy behind each.