Debra Helleren shared with me an innovative approach to promoting a public webinar. She produces a webinar series targeting real estate agents around the country. They often bring in noted experts in their field to talk about best practices and techniques.
They decided to have some fun creating a video promotion for one of their expert webinars. Instead of the usual email copy filled with bullet points about “what you will learn,” they created a promotional video and posted it on YouTube on a custom channel (that’s a YouTube concept that lets you brand and group your videos on a single page). It’s tongue in cheek, using a spy motif to tease the audience about getting top secret information.
It’s basically a set of slides or screen shots, a little bit of cute and simple overlay animations, some background music, and some voiceover narration. It’s not television network production work, and it’s not meant to be. But it does an excellent job of building anticipation, promising value, and making it seem like the event is going to be engaging and fun to attend.
You can do this too! If you have the right technology, you can even embed video directly into your email blasts. For instance, I regularly get emails from Gary Anderson at Netbriefings using their Proclaim Messenger technology. It captures a short audio-video message from your webcam and wraps it straight into an email.
If video production scares you, you might try audio-only. I see that KRM Information Services is using AudioAcrobat to embed sound clips on their webinar landing pages.
Please feel free to add comments with techniques and products that you use to create audiovisual webinar promotions. I’ll allow self-promotional comments on this post, so do include links to your solutions if you sell related products.
