What I Learned from Banzai’s First Webinar

Last week, Banzai hit a milestone by hosting our first-ever webinar. As a B2B event marketing company, we knew that the only way to truly be experts in the field is to practice what we preach. We had a blast sharing our event marketing knowledge with our audience and we learned a few useful tips along the way. Here is a brief roundup of my biggest takeaways and learning moments from our webinar.

You can listen to the full webinar here.

Know your target audience

I will be honest, I went into this thinking that I just wanted people to show up. If they happen to fit my target audience, great. If not, well then this will be good practice. I went to the Banzai team supporting our outreach and registrations and told them my target audience was any marketing professional at any type of organization. They came back to me with a list of 65,000 prospects and a request that I refine my audience profile.

As a went through the list, I realized that having this wide range of prospects hurt me rather than helped me. If I was going to do this webinar, it was important that I do it right. Narrowing down my audience to my target attendee of field marketing managers, and marketing and demand generation leaders at B2B enterprise organizations, allowed me to refine my content to make sure it was relevant to those attending. It also allowed the Banzai team to put their outreach efforts towards prospective registrants that are likely to convert, instead of wasting their time and resources on attendees that didn’t make sense for Banzai.

In the future, I plan to narrow down my target audience even more. The more I know exactly who I am talking to, the greater the likelihood that my content will be relevant and have the right impact for Banzai.

Short and sweet

When planning our webinar, I initially scheduled it for an hour. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a full hour wasn’t necessary. I know that I struggle to attend a lot of webinars because it is hard to fit an hour into my schedule. I also get distracted while watching or leave halfway through because something else comes up. I wanted our webinar to be an event that people could reasonably attend, so I settled on 20 minutes of content with time left over for questions. We received great feedback in our post-event survey that the 30-minute webinar showed respect for our attendees’ busy schedules. The 30-minute webinar is officially a best practice moving forward.

Examples are essential

One area where we can continue to improve is to show more relevant use case and customer examples. I am happy to talk about Banzai and the trends I am seeing in event marketing all day long, but I know it’s the real-world stories that provide the most value. As we continue to develop our webinar program, our goal is for you to hear first hand how targeted attendee outreach has transformed your peer's events and the overall quality of leads they are bringing back to the business.

Do you have a takeaway from our December webinar? Let me know by tweeting at us at @getbanzai.

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