Opinion
Putting webinars at centre stage to boost your demand gen efforts
With uncertainty still the prevailing wind, it’s impossible to plan live events with confidence. Consequently, stock in webinars is going up. But as one of your brand’s few viable ‘storefronts,’ today’s webinars must be expertly produced, highly engag- ing and well-integrated into marketing campaigns. Fortunately, videoconferencing services have previously untapped capabilities that can support high-quality webi- nars. By Paul Scholey, Senior Vice President and General Manager, International, BlueJeans by Verizon.
I’ll be the first to admit that once upon a time the prospect of joining a webi- nar filled me with a sense of despair. Those early webinars were notorious for their low production values, boring ‘death by PowerPoint’ formats, little to no interaction and awkward technical mishaps.
Although videoconferencing services and broadband speeds had been ad- vancing considerably in the last de- cade, it took the Covid crisis to final- ly launch the humble webinar into the 21st century. These days it’s not uncommon to hear someone at work talking up a great webinar they’ve re- cently attended.
Videoconferencing finally comes of age
Don’t assume that you need to hire
an outside firm to put on a rave-wor- thy webinar. Many of the companies producing these are simply making smart use of available technology and planning with the same rigour as they would with a live event.
Modern videoconferencing systems, like BlueJeans, have all the security features and ‘smart meeting’ capabil- ities like moderator controls, white- boarding, analytics, and Dolby noise cancellation that you need to run a professional, high-quality webinar. If you’re still in pre-Covid mode, only using videoconferencing to make low- cost audio calls, it’s either time to modernise or get more out of your ex- isting system.
Raising your brand’s accessibility Webinars will never be a permanent
substitute for making personal hu- man connections. However, webinars offer several other unique benefits in their own right. The most obvious is that they allow you to attract dele- gates from all over the world, live or on playback. People who habitually can’t attend events due to budget and trav- el restraints get to engage with your brand. But Webinars provide even more sub- tle and interesting accessibility bene- fits. For example, your sales process might depend upon persuading influ- encers in specialist roles like software developers who might not attend the kind of live events you normally run. With a webinar, you can cater to a much wider range of personas, and even run breakout sessions for people with special interests. But there’s an even less obvious ben-
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