For your marketing operations, you might need to organize a short online event in no time and webinar might be your first go-to.
But what if we told you there’s a better way to get more bang for your buck.
Webinars have the advantage of being a quick response to a specific tactical need.
But this format has its limits.
First, like most BtoB players in 2021, your audience probably suffers from webinar fatigue. Indeed, many companies rushed to this band-aid solution when in-person events had to be replaced in 2020, leaving the market flooded with invitations to unappealing webinars.
To top it off, webinars don’t allow you to promote your brand as they are not a white label tool, nor do they allow you to reach out and connect with your participants beyond the simple video session.
You’ll therefore find yourself in a bit of a jam when wanting to create a true long-term interaction with your audience, conveying a strong brand message, or measuring a concrete ROI.
Be more ambitious and shoot for the stars when planning short digital events!
Here’s how to broaden your horizons past ordinary webinars:
A short live online seminar
The word “webinar” comes from the association of words web and seminar. As such, it literally works like an online seminar.
It is a digital session where one or more speakers make a presentation to a group of people attending the conference live from their computers. This type of live session is a direct and simple way to address your audience.
A webinar is a short format, rarely lasting more than an hour, that aims to present a simple topic and can therefore meet the specific needs of marketing teams. The format is easy to set up: creating the session page, launching the registration form, and setting up the communication parameters only takes a few hours.
Finally, you have the possibility to record the video session during its live production and use this content in replay afterwards.
For all these reasons, webinars sometimes prove useful. But we’re recommending going above and beyond, to enrich the experience of your participants!
Here is how to get more out of this format when choosing to organize it on a platform like inwink.
All the perks you can expect from this type of event format
1) A digital environment 100% your brand
To organize a webinar on a dedicated webinar platform is to host your content on a third-party website on which you bring your audience to attend.
From the point of registration to the reminder email, the experience of your participants is the webinar platform’s hallmark, not yours.
You can choose a different approach: By using your personal brand identity and URL for your own website in which your emails are sent from your domain name, making your participants experience 100% of your brand having them in YOUR environment.
The reach of your communication and marketing power will be multiplied tenfold if you put your brand at the heart of the event, and not that of the webinar tool.
2) Participant’s data is and will be your unique property, not that of a third-party player
Webinar tools require you to delegate ownership and control of event data to a third-party, whose compliance with RGPD standards needs to be verified.
With an event platform like inwink, the participant data is, and will remain, your exclusive property. This avoids having the need for transferring your participant’s personal data to another entity.
3) A tenfold increase in interactivity that extends beyond the session
When searching for ways to increase interactivity between participants, you’ll be restricted in what you can do through a webinar. A chat where participants can ask questions in writing, and the possibility for the speaker to conduct a survey are examples of what a webinar has to offer, at best.
Having a more powerful solution opens the possibilities of interactivity beyond the limited moment of the presentation. You complete the one-to-many part (the presentation of a speaker to the participants who can only react in writing) with one-to-few where everyone can express themselves.
A valuable solution is to offer networking tables immediately after the presentation.
These tables allow a direct exchange between the speakers and the audience, with video and audio chat in a privileged context for the participants.
4) A little effort goes a long way
The webinar is a “one-off” format. You organize your webinar, invite your audience, the participants come, listen to your message, and leave. THE END.
To leverage the power of your short online events, you need to go beyond this one-off approach. How do you do this? By thinking recurrence and long term.
Firstly, with a platform like inwink, duplicating your short event in just 1 click allows you to easily replay your event for another audience, at another time, with other content.
You can think of your short sessions as a coherent series over time, which allocates space for you to animate a regular and recurrent conversation with your audiences.
Secondly, as we have seen, recording the video session gives you the possibility to use it in replay. However, what is greatly missing with a webinar tool is a place to keep this content alive after the first broadcast.
With an event platform like inwink, your event can continue to exist and receive participants after the first broadcast date by making the replay available on demand on the site created for the event.
In conclusion
Why deprive yourself of all the possibilities inwink offers in getting the most out of your short online events? Continue to enjoy the useful things about webinars while claiming much more!
Turn a one-off tactical approach into a continuous coherent strategy and maximize the impact of your event marketing.
Ready, get set, go!
