In a world of constant and escalating marketing change, it’s a huge relief that there are some marketing tools, channels or techniques that you can rely on – and I think it’s pretty unarguable that webinars fit into that category.
Webinars have been a critical and highly effective B2B marketing tool for well over a decade now, offering typically unrivalled performance in lead generation, engagement and above all value for money.
But given their longevity and ubiquitousness, you’d be forgiven for thinking that everything it’s possible to say about webinars has already been said, and that there is nothing more to learn. You’d be forgiven, but you’d be wrong. And I’ve personally proved this, repeatedly, attending four (yes four!) of the Webinar World events run by ON24.
How to make good webinars great
Webinar World does exactly what it sounds like it does: it’s a ‘deep dive’ on all aspects of webinar best practice, covering just about anything you could think of – promotion, UX, content creation, presentation skills, sales handover, polling, speaker selection, serialisation… you get the picture. In other words, it’s a total geek-out for those involved with using webinars for excellent and effective B2B marketing.
And this is probably ON24’s real moment of genius: they realised that their best customers were the ones who had really gone down the rabbit hole and become webinar geeks… or ‘webinerds’, as they have called them. It’s a bit like when disenfranchised groups take ownership or reclaim a derogatory term and make it their own. Except that ON24 invented ‘webinerds’ in the first place – and they printed the t-shirt. Hundreds of them in fact, and gave them out free at Webinar World. I have one, and so does my colleague Minesh, who produces our webinars… and we only wear them semi-ironically.
Not missing the bigger picture
But please don’t let this put you off! You don’t have to be a webinerd to enjoy Webinar World… but it’s quite likely that you might be one by the time you’ve experienced it. There is also a wealth of keynote speakers dealing with topline B2B marketing issues.
In the 15 years since we founded B2B marketing I’ve been to more martech vendor conferences than I can count, but none have the cohesiveness, focus, understanding of its audience and genuine sense of fun that Webinar World has.
In short, if you’re looking to find out how to do better, more engaging and more effective webinars, or if you’re not even doing webinars currently but you just want to drive more leads and better engagement with your audience, you should make time to attend Webinar World 2019. I guarantee you’ll come away excited, enthused and inspired – and you’ll come away with a free t-shirt. What’s not to like? See you there.
- Webinar World London 2019 takes place on 1-2 October at the Park Plaza, London.