“Companies ‘need to refocus their content efforts on producing compelling content that will attract customers to them, and will truly engage them.”
The above quote is from Bridgeline Digital’s white paper Top 10 Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy. The white paper offers ten very useful and practical steps to follow in order to build an effective content marketing strategy. The paper proposes that “companies are missing valuable opportunities to drive engagement, conversion and revenue from their digital content because they’re lacking a well-rounded content marketing strategy.” I completely agree, especially when it comes to webinars. Webinars are an effective part of a content marketing strategy. A webinar is that “valuable opportunity” for customer “engagement, conversion and revenue.” Webinars help businesses to “effectively connect with customers and prospects in the information age.”
The 10 steps are designed to help you with “building and implementing a content marketing strategy.” Follow these steps “and you’ll be on your way to engaging customers, driving conversion and increasing revenue, all through the use of well-conceived and executed content.” An informational webinar is a type of content marketing, therefore, these steps are easily applied to webinar promotion and production. Each of the 10 steps are important for the success of your content marketing campaign, however, in relation to webinars there are some steps that I would like to highlight and further examine. Those particular steps would be number two, three, six, and ten.
Step 2 – Know Your Audience
This is a critical for any content marketing strategy and it is especially important in webinar promotion and production. In order to understand what your audience wants, and to then be able to produce that, you first have to know who they are. As the paper points out, this data “is important to have as a company starts to consider the different kinds of content its customers are interested in.”
In this step you will “establish the one or two overarching goals.” You would then take that information and “pinpoint the primary audience attached to these goals.” As applied to a webinar, in this step you would figure out what you want your webinar to be about (the topic) and then define who would make up your audience. This is not always a simple and direct process, “it is an important step, however, in developing a successful content marketing strategy.”
Step 3 – Understand the Content Needs of an Audience
After you gain an understanding of who your audience is and what they would like to know about, “it is time to start thinking about the kinds of content they might be interested in.” In other words, how would the audience like the information to be delivered? As mentioned in the paper, “Doing a little legwork can go a long way toward improving the results of any content effort.”
In an informational webinar the audience will most likely prefer a case study presented by a thought leader. There may, however, be another format that your audience favors. “One way to get this information is to conduct a few interviews with customers, asking them questions about what they are reading… checking out what the competition is doing can also help.”
Step 6 – Be a Valuable Source of Information
This step is crucial to any content marketing strategy, and it is especially important for webinars. Don’t turn your audience off by providing information that doesn’t apply to them, isn’t on topic, or is a thinly disguised sales pitch. “Problem-solving content is also a good way to show customers and prospects that a company is interested in helping people accomplish their goals or meet their objectives and isn’t simply trying to sell them something.”
In a webinar useful information is best portrayed in the form of a case study. With a case study the webinar speaker would share a problem that he or his company was having, how they solved it, the results, and any other relevant information. As written in the paper, “case studies and client narratives explain in real-life terms how a product or service brings value to someone’s life or business, they can be a good way to inform while keeping the sales pitch to a minimum.”
Step 10 – Track Results
As with any other content marketing strategy “it’s imperative to be able to track the results of your content efforts.” Otherwise, how will you know if your webinar was a success? There are several methods of tracking results for a webinar. For example, you can compare how many people registered for the webinar versus how many showed up. You can also look to see how long people stay at the webinar, keeping track of the number of audience members that stay tuned through to the end. Survey questions are also a way to get additional information about the attendees, the results of the survey can demonstrate how well your webinar topic met the needs of the attendees. After the webinar, you will also want to monitor how many webinar attendees followed up with you. This can be accomplish by checking into how many of those attendees actually bought your product or service as a result of the webinar.
In summary we can see that webinars are an effect content marketing technique and that a webinar’s success is dependent on the same principles used in other content marketing projects. Following the Top 10 Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy will indeed help you create a more successful content marketing campaign. To read the full white paper please visit: http://ity.vc/SCMSwhitepaper . You can also read just the 10 steps on WebAttract’s Blog.