Webcasts area a great way to connect with potential and existing customers. They can be used as pre-sales educational tools, for lead generation, and to further the knowledge of existing customers.

I’ve created and hosted dozens of webcasts over the years. Each one is developed with specific goals in mind which vary based on the targeted audience, product, and problem at hand. Whether it is for a product launch, lead generation campaign, or customer retention, webcasts are great methods of communication.

In my experience, the best B2B webcasts aren’t used as a hard sell the product. To be the most effective, approaching a webcast as an educational opportunity leads directly to customer questions. This opens the door to further engage with the customer to identify their specific needs. In these continuing conversations, you now have the opportunity to determine if the solution is a good fit, including allocated budget, timeline and who has the power to sign off on any invoices.

Webcasts don’t even need to focus directly on the solution at hand, for example, while at Extensis I created a webcast that focused specifically on the compliance aspect of font management. This is a topic that is important to the buying persona of the software, and can be a great hook to get people in the door and talking, even if it might not be the primary problem they are seeking to solve.

Whether webcast viewers were using the solution that I represented or another solution, the webcast could still be of interest. If the viewer was using an alternate solution and they weren’t happy with it, they will likely remember that the other solution provided them with valuable information, and likely view the product in a more positive light.

The following is an example of a webcast that was created with two goals in mind. First, it was designed to help users understand the new cloud-based SaaS font management solution. Secondly, it was designed to help existing customers who were using the on-premise, installed software understand what their options were. This helped existing customers make the best choice for their needs – sticking with their current solution as-is, moving their current solution to a cloud hosting service, or subscribing to the new SaaS solution.

As a final example, this webcast was created for the B2C market. We sold a single-user font management solution used by individual graphic designers, in house professionals, publishers and printers. It wasn’t financially feasible for us to have individual training for each of these users. Also, since many people prefer video over reading the manual, a webcast is a perfect vehicle to convey the maximum amount of information in the shortest amount of time. This webcast was used as both education for existing customers as well as a pre-sales tool foe new customers who desire a complete overview of the product.

Most marketing programs can benefit from the inclusion of at least a few webcasts per year. Want to chat about your needs? Shoot me a note and we’ll see what I can do for you.

Want to chat about webcasts? Shoot me a note!