Adding Multimedia Options To Your Content Marketing: Webinars & Podcasts

According to FlowApp, more than 50 percent of marketers had planned to increase the number of webinars they created in 2020—it was the perfect year for it!

As Zoom meetings replaced in-person meetings and educational and promotional events were canceled around the globe, webinars just made sense to step into the space that might have been filled by training conferences or welcoming prospective customers to your place of business.

Other marketers are increasingly turning to audio, with podcasts that can be downloaded and listened to anywhere and anytime. 

Which of these options might be right for your content marketing strategy? Read through the pros and cons below to pick your next multimedia project.

Webinars have a lot of advantages, with their combination of audio, video, slides and interaction, all of which increase engagement and how much viewers or participants remember. After all:

• 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
• When people hear information, they are likely to remember only 10 percent of it three days later. But if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retain 65 percent of it three days later. (Source)

Real-time interaction also provides greater engagement than passive viewing, providing opportunities to deepen the information being presented or address challenges and objections.

Webinars can be either live or prerecorded, or both—offered live with real-time interaction, then available for later access to be viewed at a later point.

The challenge of a webinar can be in the amount of preparation time required, both to develop the webinar content and to promote the webinar and encourage registrations for the live event.

Podcasts lack the visual and interactive elements, but offer the convenience of being available anytime, anywhere with a lasting impact similar to that of compounding blog posts that continue to reach audiences for an extended time. Podcasts also require little equipment to record and can be polished in post-production, unlike a live webinar.

Each can play a role, though, in complete content marketing campaigns, and can be ways of repurposing content already developed for other channels.

Our client Avanti uses webinars regularly for lead generation, including both the initial live events and an archived library of past webinars that are gated behind landing pages for lead capture. See how webinars are included in their complete content marketing campaigns here: Creating a Winning Inbound Program.

If you’d like to chat about how to incorporate multimedia channels into your content marketing strategy, schedule a time on my calendar. JONES is here to make your marketing program the envy of your industry.