Whether you want to give an in-depth explanation of your product or service, onboard new clients, or boost your lead generation efforts, a webinar is a vital tool that you should have in your marketing tool kit.
But despite its value, a webinar has a few downsides, including the number of resources needed to host one. That does not necessarily mean that you need to abandon the webinar platform.
One great way to harness the benefits of using a webinar while minimizing or totally eliminating these cons is to use evergreen webinars.
What makes a webinar evergreen?
Before diving deep into the benefits of using evergreen webinars, sometimes called automated webinars, it is crucial to understand the concept of evergreen content.
The term evergreen is typically used in the context of articles, deriving its name from evergreen trees like the pine tree. The leaves of these trees remain essentially the same no matter what the season may be. Simply put, evergreen content is not time-sensitive.
An evergreen blog post, for example, covers topics that remain invaluable to its readers even several years after it has been written. In contrast, new articles and pieces about recent trends can stagnate in a matter of months or even days and weeks.
An evergreen webinar is just like an evergreen article or blog post: it provides value to viewers across a sustained period.
Why Evergreen Webinars Vital For Your Marketing Campaigns
Why are evergreen webinars important?
Apart from providing some of the benefits offered by a live webinar, an evergreen webinar provides a few other advantages that can prove invaluable to your marketing campaign.
Improved content
While it is difficult to achieve perfection in a webinar, especially during a live one, you can produce a better, more polished output.
Because an evergreen webinar is recorded before being published, you will have more time to address mistakes and other mishaps during the production and editing process.
That means that you can edit out dead air or even remove clips of an errant passerby in your background.
More importantly, you will achieve a good measure of consistency, especially when you have polished your script. Mistakes can be kept at a minimum, allowing you and your business to put your best foot forward and impress your viewers.
Fewer resources required
Hosting live webinars, even if you are broadcasting from your home office, require plenty of resources, from your time to your effort.
And when you have too much on your plate, those resources can be scarce, leaving you with little room for other more important tasks.
With an evergreen webinar, you can make sure that you provide quality content to your audience without requiring you to invest time and effort over and over again.
In turn, that leaves you with more time and energy to devote to other critical tasks in your business.
Available anytime
One chief drawback of live webinars is that you have to find a favorable time for all your target customers. While a live webinar can create a sense of urgency in your customers, it can also limit the number of people you can reach.
If you are focusing on a local market, that would not be too much of an issue because you are in the same time zone.
But what if you are trying to reach customers from different time zones? Using live webinars exclusively can mean that you are excluding a sizable portion of your target audience. That can translate to lost opportunities.
With an evergreen webinar, that isn’t much of an issue because your webinar is pre-recorded, and your customers can access your video anytime convenient to them.
A respite from contemporary topics
Discussing trending topics is a great way to build your authority in your industry.
However, finding your next topic for your webinar can be time-consuming. Furthermore, there is the possibility that you alienate some members of your audience that have little to no knowledge of your industry.
Using an evergreen webinar can provide you a respite from finding current topics and allow you to provide your audience with ideas that essentially are timeless and useful for a long time.
Furthermore, using evergreen topics for your webinars enables you to take a break while making sure that you have content to provide to your audience.
Helps online marketing efforts
The importance of online marketing can never be overstated, especially for businesses looking to level the playing field against bigger and more established industry competitors.
And one good way to boost your company’s SEO and social media marketing efforts is to use evergreen content, including evergreen webinars.
For SEO, you can make evergreen webinars invaluable by using the appropriate keywords that your intended customers typically use. In turn, this can drive more traffic to your website. And with more traffic to your website generated by using evergreen webinars, you can make money passively.
Aside from SEO purposes, you can also utilize evergreen webinars for your social media marketing. If you take the time and effort to provide valuable content to your viewers, they will not hesitate to share your videos. In turn, that multiplies the power of your evergreen webinars.
How Can You Use Evergreen Webinars?
Just like live webinars presented in real-time, evergreen webinars can be used in a variety of ways, depending on your business’s needs and goals.
Here are but a few types of evergreen webinars you can try using in your company.
Tutorials
While there is a sizeable number of people who can figure out how things work just by reading an instruction or blog post, nothing beats watching how to use something.
For example, if your business sells pet grooming products, you can offer your customers educational webinars on pet care, like using a hairbrush for cats to prevent tangling and matting.
Client onboarding
Client onboarding is vital to keep your customers happy and minimize complaints. And an evergreen webinar can prove to be an invaluable tool for this purpose.
With evergreen webinars, you can teach your new clients about your products or services, provide useful tips, and even manage expectations.
New hire training
New hire onboarding is critical for all businesses. It enables your new employees to understand not only their roles in your organization. More importantly, it can give them a good sense of your company culture.
New hire onboarding can also make your new employees feel valued and help them boost their performance.
For this task, you can utilize evergreen webinars. This is particularly true if your new employees are working remotely. And the best thing about using an evergreen webinar instead of a live webinar is that your new hires can watch the same content, no matter when they are hired and onboarded.
How Do You Make An Evergreen Webinar?
Are you interested in leveraging the power of evergreen webinars for your company? Here’s how you can get started and create an evergreen webinar.
1. Choose the appropriate format
Evergreen webinars can be broadly categorized into three formats: single speaker, interviews, and panel discussion.
Each of these formats has its advantages. For example, if you are presenting to a small group of people, consider using the single speaker format. On the other hand, if you want to bring in an industry expert, an interview format is a suitable option. Finally, a panel discussion is ideal for two or more people joining you for your webinar.
2. Draft your script
Your webinar’s script serves as its outline, allowing you to check and make sure that you cover everything that you need to discuss.
Remember, evergreen webinars are not just pre-recorded or automated webinars. You have to pay special attention to the topic that you would like to cover. That means focusing on evergreen content or issues that will be useful for your audience for a long time.
3. Gather your resources
Whether you are producing the webinar by yourself or if you have a team of professionals working with you, you should ensure that you have all the resources that you need.
That includes your scripts, features, stats, and graphs. Remember, a visual approach can make your evergreen webinars more appealing to your audience.
You will also have to choose the right webinar platform or webinar software that meets all your needs. Ideally, this platform can be used for producing an evergreen webinar and for hosting a live event.
4. Record and edit your webinar
Once you have gathered all the resources you need, you can now begin recording your webinar following the script you drafted.
Once you have finished recording, you can then proceed to edit your webinar. This will allow you to polish your end product by eliminating mistakes and adding more content like visuals.
5. Publish your webinar
Now that you have created your webinar, it is now time to show it to your audience. To ensure that your evergreen content reaches the highest possible number of viewers, you can utilize a few webinar marketing strategies. These include creating an email list, event page, thank you page, and registration page.
Cover All Your Bases With An Evergreen Webinar
You do not have to choose between automated webinars and live webinars. If you want to get the best of both worlds, you can use either depending on your goals and available resources.
Simply put, you do not have to rely solely on a live webinar hosted in real-time when you can use an automated webinar. As with most marketing tools, match the right type of webinar for your intended goal, whether that means using an automated webinar or a live event.