4 reasons webinars are a wonderful online tool for community building
The Power Of Online Engagement
Online marketing has been here for ages and there have been different approaches suggested everytime. Some calculate their brand strength by counting their Facebook likes and Twitter followers and some others by how many visits they have had on their websites. However, what seems to make more sense is the number of people talking to the brand. Sharing their feedback, asking for solutions, giving suggestions are so much more productive for every brand.
When the key metrics that matter are of the number of consumers who spoke to the brand for whatever reasons, the game redefines itself.
The Role Webinars Play
While face to face conversations is still the best form of spending time with our consumers and delivering knowledge, being at every event is an expensive affair. The new age, quicker and more measurable way is to take the whole experience online. Today, with technology on our side, it’s super simple to interweave online engagement with knowledge.
Four Strong Reasons
Given that the marketing, presentation and agenda parts are planned just as we would for an offline event, let’s look at four of the advantages of hosting a webinar:
1. Simpler To Setup
With tools such as WebEx, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, Appear.in, etc. which can quickly set us up without any installation, starting a webinar is a cakewalk. There are others like Skype, Join.me and Oovoo which need installing, however that is also simple.
Then there is the absolutely free tool (maybe for a lifetime) called Google Hangouts. Almost everyone today has a Gmail account and everyone who has a Gmail account has access to Google Hangouts.
2. Reaches More People
The convenience of joining in on a webinar from anywhere gives an enormous edge to participants who are interested in our discussion topic. As most of the aforementioned channels of starting a webinar are simple signups, we already know who has joined, unless the attendee intentionally keeps herself anonymous. And the anonymous is certainly too shy for us to interact with and so we don’t need to bother about her anyway.
3. We Get Stats
Be it those attendees who gave us their information or those who are anonymous, everyone’s interaction can be observed, right from how many people joined in, how many of them were men and how many women, how many asked questions and how many voiced opinions, to what questions and opinions were voiced by more than one person, etc. All these parameters are available and useful to us thanks to us being able to identify the interaction with the individual. These stats could be later used to analyze possible synergies, as feedback to improve our products or services and also could be used to boast about as a part of our achievements. Online engagement always pays great dividends.
4. We Generate Content
Some webinars could be recorded and some not. We prefer recording the content be it for personal distribution or making it public. Apart from the video content itself, we could write blogs and articles about the content discussed, the opinions received and even build our FAQs based on the queries the attendees had.
The video could be sliced and diced to form short nuggets for quick reference of the attendees and consumption for new users on YouTube, Vimeo or other video platforms. The same can be embedded in our websites and blogs.
When the audio is extracted from the video, it can be fed into podcast channels for those who want to hear the session on the go. We could also record certain observations as a separate audio and integrate it with the podcast material that can be uploaded to platforms such as iTunes Store or SoundCloud.
The Inference
Considering that we have taken the utmost advantage of the webinar we conducted, we are not just engaging with users of our community, we are also extending the knowledge and learning to others who are not yet part of our communities and could qualify as prospects.
It’s very important that we have calls to action placed strategically for people to join our community, reach out to us and if possible even buy our products or services outright. All in all a powerful tool and a No Miss.