A webinar’s lifecycle should not be cut short after it’s presented to an audience. However, many presenters are not doing it right from the moment they plan for a webinar.

Cutting the lifespan of your webinar is simple as presenting it to a targeted audience only at a specific date and time. This limits the reach and your desired ROI because you spend money and time without expanding the value of your webinar.

The usual lifespan of a webinar starts with planning, followed by promotion, preparation, live presentation, and archiving. Of course, after archiving a webcast it goes obsolete and forgotten.

While it is common for webcast presenters and organizers to go this route, prolonging the life of a webinar can help improve your marketing and audience reach. You can do this by having on-demand versions of your webcasts.

Reasons to Take Advantage of On-Demand Webinars

On-demand webinars are increasing because people have different schedules. It’s often difficult for would-be viewers to squeeze in some free time during the day, particularly on a workweek. And more often than not, webinars are usually scheduled during office hours.

Take a look at these scenarios:

• The flexibility and mobility of devices are also changing the habits of online users, including your prospective attendees. People are always on the go, so they find mobile devices quite convenient whenever they could find and squeeze in some free time.
• Your competitors usually share the same timeslot since office hours are considered to be the best time to run a webcast.
• Your prospective audience is everywhere – they’re all over the globe!

Having an on-demand webinar in place, you can eliminate possible loss of attendees and even encourage more to register and participate.

Develop Your On-Demand Strategy

On-demand webinars are still interactive since you still have branding, multimedia tools/features, user-control capabilities, downloadable content, social media features, and interactivity.

Archiving

In developing your on-demand strategy, you must archive your presentation first. Here are the best practices:

• archive webinars if products/services are still available
• if the webinar doesn’t conflict with new information
• if you still have current presenters, format, images, and information
• if your webinar still has value for the target audience

Webinars should be accessible on-demand within 48 hours of the live event. Setup on-demand notifications with links sent to all of your registrants. You’ll know your attendees and non-attendees through this process.

Keep all of your interactive tools active, such as polls, Q&A, social media, and surveys. Then, send a link to the on-demand webinar to your sales and marketing team with a brief description of the presentation.

Build your webinar channels

Make sure to create webinar channels on your website, so you could catch more attendees from your visitors. Archived webinars should be placed in central locations for easy retrieval.

Create a single sign-up for registrants to view all of your webinars. This is quite convenient for your attendees as it enables them to search for content easily.

Syndicate your webinar channels

To capture new attendees, you need to publish your webinar channels to partner sites, blogs, forums, and other online publications.

Continue promoting your archived webinars

Note that your on-demand promotions and strategy are based on the business relevance of your webinars.

Use various marketing platforms in driving registration to your on-demand webinars. You can use sales pages, search engine marketing, emails, your other webinars, social media, online advertisements, and your own website.

Use campaign tracking to help you refine the process and to find out which method works best.

Stagger your promotions to prevent over-saturation. This means promoting an archived webinar every four months, for example. This also prevents your other archived webinars from competing with your other promotions.

Promote on-demand webinars based on the results of live webinars

Use the results of your live webinars in promoting archives. Take the results from polls, surveys, Q&A, and speaker comments.

Promote on-demand webinars during live webinars

Have presenters promote on-demand channels during a live webinar. You can upload the URL to on-demand channels to the resources widgets of new webinars. You may also create connections between webinars.

Integrate marketing automation and sales software

This allows you to capture data for analytics and you can do this easily with built-in features that most marketing platforms have.

Your key metrics would include: registration data, viewing time, downloaded content, survey and poll results. These are available through your on-demand webinars. The automated marketing tools will enable your sales team to get data for analysis.

On-demand webinars are crucial in increasing the value of your webinars and audience reach. Like their live counterparts, you can still make them as dynamic and interactive. By developing an on-demand strategy, you can achieve these benefits while prolonging your webinar’s life for as long as it’s relevant to your audience.