When developing a webinar, many steps are critical to the success of the webinar.

You must choose the right topic, speakers, timeslot, and tools to power full-funnel revenue growth, set up your pre-flight checklist, and create and promote your webinar.

After all of these steps, the 7th best practice for creating growth-driven webinars is ensuring your webinar content is educational. It is important to consider whether your content adds value, and whether or not you would pay for a webinar similar to yours.

To balance educational content with your revenue goals, your first step is to put away your sales pitch.

Throw Away Your Data Center Sales Pitch!

Inbound marketing has drastically changed how people sell or attract their buyer personas. Creating a live webinar event can only add value to your business and potential customers due to the educational content it provides to interested prospects.

When your business educates people, you are expressing to the buyer personas that you are knowledgeable, you care, and you want to help solve their issues or give them advice throughout the entire buyer's journey.  Leave the infomercials at home if you want your webinar to be a hit. President and Co-Founder of SP Home Run, Jennifer Feinberg, warns, “You don’t want to sound like an infomercial; you want to educate.”

When your business educates people, you are expressing to the buyer personas that you are knowledgeable, you care, and you want to help solve their issues or give them advice throughout the entire buyer's journey.  Leave the infomercials at home if you want your webinar to be a hit. President and Co-Founder of SP Home Run, Jennifer Feinberg, warns, “You don’t want to sound like an infomercial; you want to educate.”

How Data Center Webinars Educate and Build Trust With Your Buyer Personas

When you provide well-researched or expert knowledge to your market, you are increasing your growth revenue goals. People do not want to be bothered with aggressive sales tactics; when you provide educational content that actually sparks an interest, they will come to you.

Joshua Feinberg, Vice President and Co-Founder of SP Home Run, says you must “think more like a teacher, a professor, a subject matter expert, or a guru, rather than a sales professional.”

Even if you do not feel you are a subject matter expert or guru, when you speak to others who have limited knowledge about data centers, you will realize you have more knowledge than you think. Another tip is always to continue educating yourself within your profession to build your confidence in educating others.

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Receive Feedback from Your Attendees

After your live webinar event, you will absolutely want to gain feedback from your attendees and viewers. One way you can do this is through surveys. As Jennifer Feinberg mentions, “You definitely want to survey people afterward to see what they thought about your content and include a call-to-action that is relevant to the content you were providing.”

Conducting surveys is a good way to gain feedback, find discrepancies, and improve future webinars. Critical questions you must carefully consider are:

  • Would people pay to listen to the content and education you are providing?
  • How much is your expertise worth?

Joshua Feinberg mentions, “There was a shift 5-6 years ago due to the rise of inbound marketing. Across all industries, they got smart, realizing these tactics are great for lead generation, lead nurturing, educating, and building trust.”

Establishing an online webinar presence will only help you reach your revenue growth goals. Once you have established an answer to both the above questions, build an educational webinar, get it into the right hands, and get feedback. 

Do you have experience creating growth-driven webinars for your data center? Let us know in the comments below.

If you're in the data center, mission-critical, or cloud services industries, or you sell to the data center industry, don't miss our weekly update newsletter -- Data Center Sales & Marketing Institute (DCSMI) Update Newsletter. Get notified about new reports, events, podcasts, and blog posts.

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