When properly harnessed, disruption in markets, industries and business can have a profound impact on the success of your webinar. It can make the difference between attracting a larger-than-expected targeted audience and an abysmal attendance. And, it can make a difference on whether you are seen as a thought leader in your industry or just part of the pack!

Now, when I talk about disruption I mean there’s an event, challenge or problem that throws an industry into confusion or disorder. Companies can also create a disruption by developing a solution that interrupts and changes the way companies think or act. In this article, I will be discussing the former as the thought leader Clayton M. Christensen argues that those companies that create innovative solutions or offerings will succeed market and industry disruptions, rather than being destroyed by them.

Below, I share with you how “disruption” helped a global brand and an emerging regional brand achieve a stronger than expected return on their webinar investment.

How Bosch Healthcare Used Disruption to Attract a Larger Than Expected Attendance

Bosch Healthcare, a subsidiary of the Robert Bosch family of companies that has approximately $67B in revenue and over 300,000 employees,  offers advanced remote patient monitoring and technology enabled care coordination through new coding options.

Now, it is safe to say that the healthcare industry is dealing with multiple disruptions.  The most obvious examples are the opportunities/challenges of Obamacare, as well as new use cases of technology, such as implementing telehealth for remote patient monitoring.

Recognizing these market disruptions, Bosch Healthcare decided to use webinars to educate their target market of Health Plans and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) on how some of their offerings, such as remote patient monitoring can improve the overall quality of care, while reducing costs and boosting productivity.

Rather than do a product or sales pitch on their telehealth programs and products, they chose instead to educate their target market on how a new and innovative reimbursement code can be used to bill for telehealth services so they can tap into new revenue streams.  Historically, there were no unique codes that adequately addressed comprehensive telehealth services for managed markets and fee for service programs.

But due to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services awarding a new S code for telehealth, the webinar panel of healthcare experts were able to develop a roadmap for the successful coding of telehealth services.  As such, they could tell the story that would reveal:

  • The current state of telehealth reimbursement
  • The purpose of these S-Codes
  • How the telehealth S-code can favorably impact an ACOs medical loss ratio
  • How to accomplish billing of telehealth services through medical claims.

How Knovel Used “Disruption” to Increase Their Thought Leadership

Knovel is a web based analytics firm that provides innovative online solutions for engineers that they can trust to drive innovation in the design of their offerings.  Knovel’s webinar approach is to gain a thought leadership position by informing and educating their audience of engineering executives on timely topics.  In doing over 16 webinars for Knovel, not one of them was about a product demo or sales pitch on their cloud based applications.  They save that for after the webinar.

Some of Knovel’s key markets focus on Oil and Gas, Aerospace & Defense, Engineering Design and Construction. All of these industries are highly regulated that must deal with various levels of regulatory compliance.  Failure to comply can in itself be disruptive.

Their goal is to keep their audience of engineering executives in the know to help them prevent both serious personal injury, unplanned downtime and mitigate the risk of steep governmental fines.

For example, a  few years ago, new performance based standards were introduced that provided an alternative to some of the more rigid rules outlining specific design safety practices.  An expert panel of three safety professionals shared best practices for defining, analyzing and verifying safety levels of proposed and existing safety systems.  The goal was to share the importance of the Safety Lifecycle so attendees would know how to define and document the activities needed to assure functional safety.

Now, look at what’s happening within your industry. What “disruptions” can you harness to attract a larger audience as your information will be “must have” versus “nice to have?”  What are some examples of how you’ve used market disruptions to successfully plan and host a webinar?

Share your thoughts below, then grab my ebook – WebinarReady: A Step by Step Guide to Hosting Successful Webinars so you see the actions you must take “before”, “during” and “after the webinar” to attract and engage with larger targeted audiences.

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