If you’re a consumer in the B2B space, you’ve probably attended your fair share of webinars. Maybe you’ve even hosted one for your business. Thanks to their plentiful benefits, webinars are a highly popular marketing tactic in the B2B space.
However, there’s an untapped resource that many webinar hosts are missing out on: their strategic partners. If you thought webinars couldn’t get any better, think again. At New Breed, we’ve enhanced our webinar strategy by incorporating our network of strategic partners to streamline the process and create better content.
By hosting your next webinar with a partner, you can strengthen that relationship, lighten your workload, gain authority within your industry and expand your audience to capture more leads. If you’re not hosting your webinars with your partners, it’s time to start.
Strengthen Your Strategic Partnerships
Co-hosting a webinar is an excellent way to strengthen your existing strategic partners. In a day and age where the majority of our communications happen digitally, leveraging video and audio as a means to connect with others can enhance your relationship in a way that textual communications cannot.
Collaborating with your partners to have a conversation in the form of a webinar is a great way to build rapport and strengthen your relationship. Though this is not always feasible in the increasingly global world of business, factiliate your webinars face-to-face whenever possible. Doing so will do wonders for your relationship and heighten the quality of the conversation being held.
Lighten Your Workload
We marketers are very busy people, and hosting a successful webinar is no simple feat. Rather than tasking one marketing team with the undertaking of promoting the webinar, creating the content, hosting, speaking and following up, team up with a partner to spread the workload.
Lay out all of the necessary tasks for preparing, promoting and following up after the webinar and then delegate responsibilities from there.
Be sure to document each process and set clear expectations for you and your partners to adhere to. Doing so will ensure both parties are being held accountable to their end of the bargain.
Establish Authority in Your Industry
There’s a reason that people say it’s all about who you know. In an era where you can reach out to practically anyone with a simple LinkedIn message, your network is your greatest asset. By publicly partnering with a respected thought-leader or brand in your industry, you can enhance your own brand equity by association.
Moreover, if a prospective customer notices that your company is connected with another brand that they respect, or even use, your chances of gaining that prospect’s trust increase significantly.
Reach New Audiences and Capture More Leads
In addition to being a great way to cover content in high-detail, webinars are an excellent tool for lead generation as it is standard to require an email capture in order for the registrant to tune into the webinar at a later date.
Without a partner, the typical process of driving registrants consists of a few email blasts to your database, some social messages and maybe a blog post or two. But with a partner, you can double your lead generation effort. Now you can reach not only your database but your partner’s database too.
To make matters even better, with a co-hosted webinar, it is common courtesy to conduct to a lead-share with your partner and vice versa. So if you drive 100 registrants and your partner drives 100 registers, you each get access to the full list of 200 total registrants. Not only are you expanding your reach to their database, but you are capturing leads from it as well.
The Takeaway
Webinars are an effective way to provide comprehensive educational content to your audience in a way that’s more personal and engaging then written content — instead of just reading your words, webinars allow audiences to hear your voice and connect with the person behind your content.
Hosting webinars with partners allows you to share the workload and reach a wider audience to benefit all parties involved.
