With most non-essential businesses working from home or working remotely, connecting with your consumer base and your community must have also gone digital. Webinars and other virtual meetups are replacing town halls, forums, and conferences.
Boostability is a big fan of webinars. We’ve been hosting them for years, and we’ve even launched a special series called Search Sessions geared towards helping businesses manage the fallout of COVID-19. We’re sharing our favorite webinar tactics to make them effective, powerful growth tools for your business.
Create consistent branding
Your webinar or virtual meeting is an extension of your branding. It should therefore match the rest of your look to give a cohesive and authoritative feel to your presentation.
There are a few easy ways to do this. Having a branded Power Point is a great basic, but you can take it a step further with a branded Zoom background or specialized emails for announcing your meetup. If you can make the virtual event feel like an in person one through measures like these, do it!
Form partnerships within your industry
Joining forces with others is always a good idea when you’re facing something difficult. COVID-19 is the same kind of foe. While location, time changes, and availability may have prevented a joint event a few months ago, circumstances have changed.
Reach out to other companies in your industry that have similar goals and consumer bases, and invite them to co-host or “guest star” in your webinar. This establishes your organization as a leader, and allows you to expand your audience with help from someone else. You can extend these partnership through joint offers or discounts, encouraging attendees to sign up for a newsletter or subscribe to a service in conjunction with your partnership.
Boostability’s Search Sessions series have featured guests from SAGE, FranklinCovey, and Yext—join us in the coming weeks for more information from other great industry leaders.
Offer resources for attendees
Right now, everyone is hurting. While the severity may vary, all organizations are making sacrifices and implementing changes to manage our new normal. Because of this, offering something of value to the people who attend your event is critical.
What’s considered “valuable” will vary based on what you offer, but there are a few common options. Downloadable materials—a calendar, business guide, whitepaper, case study—are easy-to-create options. A free consultation in exchange for showing up is also a great opportunity. A discount on a product, free attendance at a future event, or branded swag are also things to consider. As long as you prove the worth of attending in some way, you’re good to go.
Encourage interaction between attendees and presenters
One of the hardest parts about the changes caused by COVID-19 is the lack of interaction we’re experiencing while working from home. But fortunately, most online platforms allow for some sort of chat or reply feature, which makes up for the somewhat lacking social engagement.
In each of our webinars, we allot a certain amount of time for a Q&A session. While we allow for questions on our Zoom platform, we also open up forums on our Twitter account, which makes it possible for viewers to engage with the larger online community.
If live questions aren’t your thing, consider allowing attendees to send in video questions beforehand. They could also tag social media posts with a certain hashtag to be part of a virtual conversation. If you’d like to house the conversation in one place, create an event on Facebook and ask members to join the discussion there. No matter how, help foster connections that will last until you can meet with people in person.
Use this time as a period of growth
As the markets continue to fluctuate and public safety measures change, find ways to continue to grow your business. For some, that may just look like staying afloat, but planning for the long-term while also implementing contingency measures is going to be critical for success after the pandemic eases.
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In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Boostability is hosting a regular webinar series, Search Sessions. To see the rest of the series, click here.
