Leveraging Webinars For Your Manufacturing Company Marketing

The best manufacturing marketing companies should present your business as an industry thought leader–on top of the latest trends, and able to share relevant, valuable information with customers and prospects at any time.

When building your digital marketing strategy, webinars should be a key piece of your content marketing approach. Webinars are virtual seminars that allow participants to join an online “classroom” to watch (and sometimes participate in) a live-streamed or pre-recorded presentation on a topic of interest.

Why webinars are effective tools for marketing for manufacturing companies

Effective manufacturing company marketing should position your company as an expert, and webinars are some of the best ways to do that. Develop webinar topics that are timely and relevant to your target audience, and use them as an opportunity not to push your brand, but to share authentic information and insights that they will find valuable. Best practice is to schedule your webinar during the week, at mid-day (but avoid the 12-1 p.m. lunch break). Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays generally see the highest attendance, with Wednesday and Thursday combining for over 50% of total webinar attendees.

Webinars also provide a lot of bang for your buck, since you can leverage them as evergreen digital assets with high replay potential. Record the webinar and post the recording on LinkedIn, or send it out to your email list. A good webinar can provide opportunity for positive word of mouth, which can give your business a boost through referral marketing.

Options for presenting your webinar

Webinars can be live, pre-recorded, or on-demand, and there are pros and cons of each approach:

• Live webinars
  • Advantages: can incorporate Q&A and other audience engagement tactics, easier and faster to produce, can help you build more genuine connections with viewers
  • Disadvantages: more room for human error, more difficult to schedule
• Pre-recorded webinars
  • Advantages: more control over your content and less potential for technical glitches or human error, enables you to choose the best time to present the webinar
  • Disadvantages: less audience interaction and engagement, can take longer to produce
• On-demand webinars
  • Advantages: more bang for your buck with the opportunity to recycle content, allows you to edit a live webinar for an on-demand audience
  • Disadvantages: less audience interaction and engagement

Promoting your webinar

It is critical that you promote your webinar through all of your marketing channels (website, social media, email, sales team, etc.). It takes a lot of effort to develop the content and put on a webinar. If you want to maximize your return on that effort, you have to make sure your target prospects will actually attend and hear your message.

Following up after a webinar

Good webinar attendance indicates a high level of sincere interest in your business, so be sure to follow up with attendees! Capture the leads via a registration list, and reach out to them early and often after the webinar to share a corresponding content piece, ask if they have any questions, and/or encourage them to set up a meeting.

Looking for a manufacturing marketing company that can help?

If you need support setting up and executing your manufacturing industry webinars, consider partnering with a marketing agency for manufacturing companies. At ZAG FIRST, we’ve worked with dozens of manufacturers to develop topic ideas, find speakers, produce webinars, and execute communication campaigns with excellence. Get in touch with us today to learn more.