Episode Summary
Webinars have been in the marketing toolbox for quite a long time. And, if used appropriately, they can be used in every stage of your entire marketing funnel.
But most brands today don’t know how to set up an effective webinar strategy and give their audience exactly what they want. Marketers are instead relying upon antiquated tactics and are missing out on a big opportunity to connect with customers.
In this episode of Content Logistics, Camille Trent welcomes Ashley Levesque, the VP of Marketing at Banzai, a modern event platform that empowers marketers to produce revenue-generating events. During the conversation, Ashley outlines the process companies can use to implement an effective webinar strategy.
Ashley herself has hosted hundreds of engaging webinars, and she knows all about what makes a good live event. She thinks marketing is about relationship building, and webinars are a perfect two-way communication platform for building those relationships.
Guest Profile
- Name: Ashley Levesque
- What she does: She's the VP of Marketing at Banzai, a leading enterprise SaaS provider of Event Marketing solutions for virtual, in-person, and hybrid events.
- Company: Banzai
- Noteworthy: Apart from being the VP of Marketing, Ashley is also a Mentor at #GirlsClub and a Host of the SaaS Breakthrough Podcast.
Key Insights
- Webinars are appropriate everywhere in the funnel. Although most commonly used as top-of-funnel content, webinars are actually quite versatile and can be effective at every stage of the funnel. That is if you use them wisely. According to Ashley, marketers have a chance to build relationships through webinars. "If we reframe webinars to be an engagement relationship-building opportunity that marketers have, suddenly we've opened up the scope of what a webinar can be outside of just a sales motion, which is how too many marketers are using it right now."
- You should learn about your audience as you teach them. Webinars provide a unique opportunity to learn and teach at the same time. You simultaneously learn more about them as you answer your audience's burning questions and guide them through the sales funnel. That way, you can make more informed marketing decisions later on. "We also started doing 'Ask Me Anything' webinars, which has been so successful for us and was really designed as just like a formal way to say, "What are your questions? I'm going to answer them in real-time.' It's like market feedback in real-time. I'm learning about my target audience as I'm teaching them."
- How do you repurpose webinars into great content? By not repurposing webinars for a wider impact, you miss out on a huge opportunity. Ashley says she hears many marketers complain about lack of resources, lack of content, etc. Webinars are a great way to generate more content and create evergreen material for your brand. "If the content is evergreen, meaning it doesn't really have an expiration date, it should definitely be put on-demand. Make it accessible to people to find whenever they are hungry for that kind of content and continue to generate leads - an easy win. Make sure that you are clipping that webinar into multiple different kinds of videos. Let your content kind of expand upon itself that way."
Episode Highlights
What Marketers Are Getting Wrong With Webinars
“There are so many things that come to mind, but I’ll distill it into three main points. So, the first thing which you touched on is that marketers are creating what they’re calling top-of-funnel webinars, what they are promoting as top-of-funnel webinars, but then you get on, and they’re showing you a product demo.
So that’s the first thing. They’re not leveraging webinars as an actual engagement channel. They’re using webinars, which are designed to be the best two-way communication channel that marketers have; they’re using it as one-way. So it’s just like a presentation that might as well have been an email. And the third one is just bad marketing in general. It’s like marketers are saving all their bad habits just for webinars. So there, they don’t know their target audience, and they don’t know what their target audience really wants. So I call it the desired outcome. Well, I don’t call it that. A lot of people call it that. I just adopted it. But, really understanding what your target audience wants to achieve and knowing that it’s not your product and service.”
Webinar Should Move Your Audience Closer to Their Desired Outcome
“The third thing that I always recommend, but I think is really underrated is what I call the webinar arc, which is this idea that your webinar purpose is actually to take your audience from their current state, where they are right now, to a state that’s a little closer to where they want to be. So that goes back to their desired outcome. So, the webinar is designed to just move them. Over the course of the webinar, they should go on an experience that lands them in a place that is not where they started from. That’s the only intent of your webinar.”
Webinars Can Serve Businesses Requiring Relationship Building
“There are very few businesses or industries or types that I would think wouldn’t be served by having a two-way communication channel with somebody. Prospect, customer, a reactivation […] I can’t imagine what that would look like, but again, this is why we have to reframe the webinar. The webinar is not just a sales tool. A webinar is a two-way communication platform that is designed to build a relationship with somebody. So use it that way.”
The Three DON’Ts in Webinar Hosting
“There are three reasons that people leave webinars early. One is, the content was not what they expected, which is a problem in transparency. And again, a problem with people saying it’s top-of-funnel when it’s really a product demo. The other reason is that the presenter was too salesy, which we also talked about. And the third reason is that the presenter wasn’t engaging.”
