The New Way to Webinar

The most common pain points we hear when talking to marketers about producing webinars are specifying a topic that doesn’t make the event sound like a sales pitch, and signing up speakers who are influencers in their industry.

If you are a marketer working for an instrument maker, a chemical company, or a software provider, signing up prestigious speakers who have influence in your industry and who are familiar with the products or methods you are hoping to highlight can be close to impossible. This can be due to research or grant restrictions placed on these potential presenters by their institution or other affiliations, as well as an interest by the speaker, especially in academia, to stay company neutral. This leaves you with two options – find a sales manager who can present on the desired topic without making it sound like a sales pitch, or asking a willing customer to give an account of their experience using your product or services.

A few years ago, these methods worked well for generating quality leads from webinars. But as more and more publishers and companies are hopping on the webinar wagon, potential webinar registrants are seeing their email accounts and social media feeds littered with event invitations. Making sure your invitation stands out in the crowd is essential if you want the right decision makers to attend your webinar so that you can appeal to them as a thought leader in your industry.

Enter scientific publishers and custom content webinars as a solution.

Asking a publisher to produce and customize a webinar for your company is advantageous in a few ways. First, you don’t have to come up with the content yourself, leaving you able to devote more time to your other marketing duties.

Second, distinguished speakers are more likely to partner with a reputable publisher, rather than industry, which increases your chances of getting a high caliber presenter familiar with the niche your products or services exist to fill. Third, the publisher you’ve tasked to create content will usually do the marketing for the event on their own website, and to their own audience of readers and decision makers, giving you a larger pool of leads – some of whom might not have signed up for a webinar with product focused content. Some publishers will do everything from top to bottom, so that the package is so seamless and turnkey, – all you’ll need to do is send in a logo, wait for the event to be over, and collect the leads, making your marketing spend completely turnkey and result focused.

So, which scientific publishers are offering this? Most all of them. The C&EN Media Group recently launched our own custom content webinar program called the C&EN Web Symposia, and so far, registrations for these events are averaging double from that of sponsor produced content. If you are looking to stay in front of your industry as a thought leader, while continuing to generate high quality, cost effective leads, this seems to be the new way to do so.