By Emily Garner Sumner
Multi-channel Education Marketing Strategy & Demand Generation
By Emily Garner Sumner
The number of marketing channels and strategies available to education marketers is immense, and changing all the time. But while the options may seem limitless, marketing budgets aren’t. So of all the marketing strategies and tactics available, which deliver the most bang for the buck? That’s a question I’m asked frequently, and one we face when crafting marketing plans for our customers. After two decades helping education brands develop campaigns, the answer we always come back to is webinars.
Amongst all the excitement and chatter about high-tech, AI-powered marketing strategies, webinars may seem old school but they still consistently win out when it comes to achieving the primary marketing goals of our clients — increasing brand awareness and lead generation.
Webinars are a workhorse for any education marketer, whether your target audience is district-level leaders or classroom teachers. As the Spyre team will tell you, I can talk passionately about the benefits of webinars for hours but I’ll stay focused here and share just four of my favorites. (Narrowing it to four was harder than you’d think! I’ve seen webinars work their magic in so many ways.)
Your brand is so much more than your logo, fonts and colors. Your brand is how educators perceive and feel about your company and its role in the industry. By hosting webinars that offer unique insights or strategies, connect educators with both internal and external experts, and provide innovative solutions to pressing problems, you position your organization as not only a thought leader, but a trusted resource and ally.
A series of webinars on a particular topic can amplify your brand voice and make your organization the go-to subject matter expert for a trending topic. Webinar series also allow for a more in-depth exploration of a topic than a single hour-long webinar, and the opportunity to showcase the expertise of multiple people.
Educators are seeking long-term partners, not just vendors. Webinars demonstrate your company’s commitment to supporting them and helping them achieve their goals. This is one of the clearest ways I know to move from transactional marketing to relationship-building.
Educators spend a lot of time researching solutions and strategies independently and are generally well into the decision-making process by the time they reach out to speak to a sales person. Webinars are an opportunity for educators to see and hear from representatives of your organization without the commitment of a one-on-one demo or sales call. Even in a purely thought leadership session, educators can get a firsthand sense of your company culture, what working with your company would be like, and the real-world value of your products. This human connection—seeing real people with real energy—goes a long way in building trust.
Through the Chat during a live webinar you can reach out to individual educators to thank them for their comments, respond to questions, and provide additional information. Even helping someone with a tech issue during a webinar is an opportunity to make a connection and a good impression. And if an educator is especially active or inquisitive during the session, a personal follow-up from a sales person can be an effective, low-pressure way to keep the conversation going. .
While one-on-one connections and interactions with educators are valuable, where thought leadership webinars really shine is in generating a large number of warm leads. Educators are life-long learners and webinars offer a convenient way for them to learn about the latest educational research, gain information about new instructional strategies, and generally build their knowledge to improve their practice. When you host webinars with learning communities like edWeb, educators can earn continuing education credit to put toward professional development and licensure requirements, making your webinars an even more attractive learning opportunity.
We have yet to find a marketing channel that generates as many quality leads for the investment. (And we’ve tested just about everything!) Keep in mind though, educators who register for a webinar are top-of-funnel leads and it will likely take time to convert them to marketing qualified and sales qualified leads. Your brand recognition is high immediately following a webinar so enter registrants into a lead nurture email series within a day or two of the live webinar. Start by sending registrants a copy of the webinar recording, the slide deck, and an additional resource or two so they continue to engage with the webinar content and your organization.
Depending on your product or service and the length of your sales cycle, a webinar lead nurture series may be as few as three emails sent over two weeks or as long as 10 to 12 emails sent out over the span of a few months. Regardless of how many emails are in your lead nurture series, the principle is the same: deliver relevant, helpful content aligned with the webinar topic, gradually leading educators toward your solution.
Another cool thing about webinars… Webinars can be both top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel content. Thought leadership webinars are generally top-of-funnel content designed to generate leads but product webinars, whether featuring a customer or a straightforward product demo, are an exceptional way to provide educators with a preview of your solution and increase their interest in speaking with a sales person or requesting a quote.
The value of a webinar isn’t just in the live 30- or 60-minute event, and that is what I love most about them. After the live event you have a treasure trove of material to use to develop additional content. Here are just a few of my favorite ways to repurpose webinars and get even more from your investment than just one batch of leads.
Definitely send the recorded webinar to everyone who registered for the live webinar but don’t stop there. The recorded webinar can continue to generate new leads for you. Post it to your website and continue to promote it on a regular basis through email, social media, digital ads, and your other marketing channels.
At Spyre, we love to create professional learning bundles that may include several on-demand webinars or a single webinar packaged with articles, eBooks, and other resources on the same topic.
Recorded webinars can also be edited to create smaller bite-size learning “chunks.” A 60-minute webinar could be re-released in four 15-minute segments or you could create a “highlights” reel that is just three to five minutes but includes the best soundbites and nuggets of information. (Shorter clips like these are perfect for social media and make the content more accessible for busy educators.)
Infographics are popular with busy educators because they offer a lot of information in just a glance. An infographic that shares the key takeaways from a live webinar is a nice content piece to include in the initial follow up email to webinar registrants but can also serve as a stand-alone content piece.
A written summary of the webinar can be an effective way to promote the recorded version and get more educators to sign up to watch it. When the Spyre team writes webinar summaries we like to include a one to five minute excerpt from the webinar, or a “highlights” reel, to encourage educators to watch the full recording.
Because webinars are generally on focused topics, writing a keyword optimized blog about each of your webinars can be also an effective part of your search engine optimization strategy.
Did your webinar speaker share a series of tips or best practices? This is great information to pull out into action-oriented worksheets or checklists for educators. We’ve used these content pieces as stand-alone lead magnets as well as incorporated them into larger content pieces like eBooks, playbooks and toolkits. These takeaways are especially impactful when tied to concrete classroom applications or instructional goals.
I could go on waxing poetic about why webinars are the number one marketing strategy I recommend to our clients, but I promised I’d limit myself to just four key benefits. If you’d like to hear more about how to leverage webinars to build your brand, generate leads, and fuel your content pipeline, feel free to reach out and book a time to chat with me. I’ve always got time to talk about webinars — as long as I’m not in the middle of hosting one!
About EmilySince 2013, the Spyre team has organized and marketed 455 webinars, most of which Emily has hosted. Emily loves to work with education businesses to help them connect with educators through targeted, content-driven marketing campaigns. Lucky for her, she gets to do that every day as CEO of Spyre Marketing. Emily holds a Masters of Library and Information Science and in her free time loves to knit, eat doughnuts, and ride her bike up big mountains. Though rarely all at the same time.
