Content Marketing: 6 Tips to Make Your Webinar Brilliant

Dan Zarrella’s brilliantly executed science lesson

What would you consider phenomenal attendance to an online marketing event? A webinar let’s say? Would the low hundreds be a success, the high hundreds, how about 1500? I am pretty sure that most would agree that multiple hundreds attending a one off webcast that was promoted for say four to three weeks in advance would be a fairly good success. Even a fraction of a conversion rate would most likely yield a good return. And the eyes and ears that offered their time would lend to the continued awareness of the brand.

What if I told you that I recently attended a webinar just last week that had over 24,000 attendees and leveraged that audience to quickly become one of the highest trending topics on twitter while it was running and for about a good hour later? Wait before you answer that what if I also told you that this audience was witness to a perfectly executed transition from meaningful data to a very intelligent soft product pitch?

Brilliant, that was my reaction. Absolutely brilliant.

The title of the webcast was “The Science of Timing Learn the best time to tweet, blog, email and more!”  hosted by Hubspot’s social scientist in residence Dan Zarrella. Dan is a master of analyzing such stats and offering his insight into what they should mean to the day to day practitioner. His work is a must for anyone who seeks to better leverage the social web to drive improved customer relationships and translate those relationships into long lasting business.

The meat of Dan’s talk was a breakdown of stats on when emails are most open or read, the tipping point of tweet volume that translates into more retweets, and when a blog post is most likely to be consumed. For those of us trying to sort out how we prioritize efforts such as these it was very good baseline data that helps in the decision making.

Tip 1: No, seriously Godin is right the content has to be remarkable.

The content itself was incredibly valuable to targeted practioners. That might be motherhood and apple pie kind of stuff, but it cannot be emphasized enough, if you truly know your targeted buyer then you can easily translate that knowledge into the development of content that they’ll find useful. Seth Godin calls it remarkable.

Tip 2: Define how the audience should share.

This starting point was made even better by Dan’s effort to make it easy for his audience, already social media savvy in most cases, to share what they were viewing to their networks. In this case by starting the presentation off by first disclosing the viewer numbers, and then introducing the hash (#) tag to use during the event. Dan instructed his audience to use the tag #timesci if they wanted to share

Tip 3: Tell your audience exactly what to share

This ease of use didn’t stop there, however. After each major point that Dan wanted to make he offered up a suggested tweet for his audience. Each was indicative of the point just covered and made to be short enough to allow for re-tweets.

At this point in the webcast I logged into tweetchat – a tool that you can use to keep track of all tweets using a specific hashtag – to do two things. 1) share some of the knowledge gained with my followers and 2) get a sense for just how much traffic the 24,000 was producing. I was surprised to see that tweetchat was choking on the volume, something that I’ve rarely seen in the variety of twitter chats that I’ve participated in. With this kind of traffic I knew the topic had to be trending and sure enough #timesci was in the top five according to whatthetrend.com. What kind of volume are we talking about with this sort of trend? Take a look at the chart here from Trendistic.com .

#timesci peaked at about .3% of all twitter traffic which, based on an average daily tweet volume of 140M, is about 420,000 tweets.

Tip 4: Include some hidden gems.

Another element of the event was the little tidbits of useful information used to support each key point. for instance I am a user of the Bit.ly url shortener. Why do I use it? I don’t know I suppose because it is the one I see in twitter the most. Dan included a tidbit about adding a plus sign (+) to the end of any bit.ly shortened URL to reveal the stats of that particular link. Pretty cool stuff which opened up a new reality for me regarding link sharing as I quickly learned that most URL shorteners offer up such stats. (side bar – this tidbit about bit.ly I shared with my twitter followers and it received the most retweets during the webcast).

Tip 5: Keep the crowd engaged after the event

Dan also did something that kept the energy of the webcast going after it concluded. Something he called a twitter after party. Dan asked those interested to hang out for the after party by continuing to offer up their questions via twitter using the #timesci hashtag and included an incentive of 1 free hour of consulting delivered by Dan himself.

Tip 6: Create a natural, meaningful, and relevant product pitch transition

Lastly, and admittedly the most brilliant element of the webcast, was an incredibly seamless and relevant transition to the software being tangentially pitched – Hubspot. After the reams of meaningful remarkable data shared by Dan he wrapped up with three simple screen shots of the Hubspot software. These were not thrown in as an ‘oh by the way you should buy our stuff’, but instead were used to offer up a suggestion of how all this data can be made even more beneficial to a company if they have tools in house that will let them act on the activity generated by blog posts, tweets and blogs. The pitch lasted maybe five minutes of the entire 60 minute presentation.

Man I loved it! It was fantastic stuff and I wrote down a note in my Evernote ‘post fodder’ tag that I HAD to write about it. So I’ll gladly cross that one off and begin to harness some of what I learned. Here is a link to Dan’s webcast. Give it some time you’ll be glad you did.

In the meantime what are you doing to increase the conversation and sharing of your online events?

photo credit: Horia Varlan