For the past few months I’ve been focusing my articles and webinars around the value proposition for “why” marketing professionals should consider doing a webinar series vs. just a “1-off” webinar.

During a recent 2 part webinar series I did on this topic “Winning Minds and Markets with Thought Leadership Webinars”, I conducted several polls and wanted to share the results and see how you and your organization stack up.

The responses to the first poll on “Our use of demand generation webinars is”,  were as follows:

43% – We do “1-off” webinars

37% – We’re considering doing a thought leadership webinar series

30% – We haven’t done either a “1-off” or a series yet

28% – We do our own thought leadership webinar series

What I found most interesting is that 30% or almost 1/3 of the audience has done neither a “1-off”, nor the more ambitious thought leadership series.  Congrats also to the 43% who do “1-off” webinars, and the 28% currently doing their own thought leadership webinars.  To the 37% who are considering doing a thought leadership webinar, go for it!

While there are many reasons as to why the 30% haven’t attempted a webinar, one of my thoughts is how effective they think a webinar would be for them.  That is, if their sole metric is only on new sales closed, there are more ways to measure a webinar’s effectiveness than simply the number of new deals that resulted from the webinar.  Here’s a link to a recent article that expands on other ways of measuring webinar effectiveness called Stop Focusing on Cost-Per-Lead When Measuring the Success of Your Demand Generation Webinars.

I was quite intrigued by the responses to another poll that I asked during the 2nd part of the series, which was “Our biggest webinar challenges are”:

52% – Recruiting an audience beyond our house list

47% – Creating a compelling message and story

31% – Finding and motivating speakers

28% – Not enough time to manage all of the moving parts

27% – Post webinar sales and nurturing follow up

Recruiting an audience beyond our house list at 52% validates what I continue to see as one of the biggest challenges clients have in both finding new leads and getting above the noise level to get folks to register for their webinars.  Coming in right below at 47%, is creating a compelling message and story which when done right, can help overcome some audience recruitment challenges.

The other 3 items, all within a few points of one another, also align with some of the webinar challenges we see with clients.

The three companies I showcased as my Case Studies were able to develop a thought leadership series strategy with the mentality of providing valuable information to educate their audiences.  As a result, they all had outcomes that justified their investments in the series.

You can view the slide decks for this 2 part series “Winning Minds and Markets with Thought Leadership Webinars” on Slideshare by clicking here for Part 1 and Part 2.

Thanks, and to your webinar success!

Mike

P.S. You can download a free copy of our eBook WebinarReady, which is our Playbook and Step-by-Step Guide to Hosting Successful Webinars and several others by clicking here.