Should You Outsource Webinars to a Third-Party Provider?

Thinking of hosting a webinar? You should — they’re an easy way to interact with potential customers, increase brand awareness and generate leads.

It’s possible to do it yourself; there are plenty of platforms you can choose from to host webinars. But what happens if you run into a technical error, you can’t reach your target audience, or your content is perceived as biased?

Consider outsourcing this task to a third-party webinar marketing and production service provider. They have the expertise and experience to execute your webinar needs.

Here are six benefits of outsourcing to a webinar service provider.

Access to Expertise

Over time, you and your team can become proficient with a webinar production platform, but a third-party provider is already equipped with years of experience and expertise. Not only can they help troubleshoot technical difficulties, but they can advise on best practices to optimize the audience’s experience. This can take the form of coaching speakers, formatting PowerPoint presentations, designing graphics and leveraging all features of a webinar platform to make your presentation engaging.

Third-party webinar marketing and production providers can also share their webinar marketing expertise through content creation, social media marketing, graphic or web design, search engine optimization and more. Small firms, in particular, may not have the capacity or technical expertise to complete these tasks in-house.

Access to a New Audience

You can also gain access to a large database of industry-specific professionals who could potentially become leads. Accessing a new network can help increase your company’s visibility in a given market or help you break into an entirely new one. This is your chance to become an established thought leader by putting on forward-thinking, provocative webinars that engage the key opinion leaders of the field.

More Credibility

While your in-house team might know the company’s products inside and out, they may have a hard time capturing the needs of the customers and potential clients who are attending the webinar. A webinar hosted by in-house staff could easily come off as a sales pitch, which can alienate your audience.

In contrast, the same webinar hosted by a third-party provider may lend your organization more credibility. Attributing more credibility to a third-party source is a well-studied phenomenon in business communications. According to the implied third-party endorsement effect, consumers tend to consider news sources as more credible, more accurate and more believable compared to advertisements.

A third-party webinar marketing and production service provider’s sole job is hosting webinars — they do not endorse or sell your products and their primary goal is to service the needs and wants of the webinar audience or community. As a result, attendees are more receptive to a hosting provider’s webinar content than webinar content that is presented and organized by the same organization. Webinar marketing service providers should also help ensure that your webinar is educational in nature, yet showcases your organization’s expertise, product or service, After all, the best performing webinars provide content shaped from the perspective of the prospective customer.

Cost and Time-Savings

On average, B2B companies dedicate 9 to 11 percent of their overall budget to marketing (which includes staff salaries, advertising costs, customer relationship management and so on), leaving little room for additional spend on webinar production and promotion.

Between equipment (computer, headset, webcam), software (high-quality webinar platform), and webinar promotion a single webinar session can cost you thousands of dollars to run. Add to this the cost of staffing, training, technical support and special marketing tools required to reach your target audience, and you have a significant financial and tedious undertaking for your company.

Hiring a third-party provider could provide way more bang for your buck. Not only will you gain access to their technical expertise and marketing services, but you can tap into their membership database for lead generation. This could save you thousands of dollars in business email list purchases, which do not always give a good return on investment.

By outsourcing webinar marketing and production to a third party, you can dedicate more resources to enriching your business. This will take the load off your marketing team and increase efficiencies in-house.

Access to Latest Tech & Marketing Trends

Just like you, third-party providers are constantly searching for new ways to serve their customers. That’s why they are keen to explore the latest webinar platform technologies or test new digital marketing tactics.

Some webinar platforms boast webcam features, audience engagement tools (live chatroom, poll questions, instant pop-ups throughout the webinar), automatic webinar recording and upload, as well as livestreaming capabilities on multiple channels. Third-party providers are dedicated to optimizing the experience for you and your target audience, saving the time and energy of doing this task yourself. This way, your webinars will keep up with current trends while adapting to the needs of your business as a whole.

Similarly, third-party providers also strive to keep up with marketing trends to maximize their reach to your target audiences. By combining the latest marketing trends with advances in webinar production, third-party providers can maximize the value of each webinar as it suits your business. Again, this will leave you more time to focus on developing the right content for your target audience and transforming leads into customers.

Increased Brand Awareness

According to a report by Demand Wave, 60 percent of B2B marketing professionals produce webinars and 50 percent drive leads for them. You can’t expect all webinar attendees to become leads, but at the very least, a targeted marketing strategy can significantly increase brand awareness.

Hiring a third-party provider will augment your existing marketing efforts by reaching those untapped audiences around the world. Brand awareness will continue to grow as you release more webinar content, attract thought leaders in the industry and maintain a robust digital marketing strategy.

If your company has not allocated resources to webinar production and marketing, now’s the time to take action.

Hiring a third-party service provider can elevate your webinar marketing and production efforts by granting you access to experienced professionals, the latest technologies and dependable marketing. What do you get in return? Cost and time savings, increased brand awareness and new potential leads.

This is not to say that successful webinar production and marketing cannot be accomplished in-house. However, by not optimizing the process, the risks of doing this yourself (lack of technical expertise, hiring new staff, long-term upkeep) can outweigh the benefits.

Whether you choose to outsource your webinars to a third party or not, take the time to develop a strategy that works for you. Do you know the recipe to a great webinar? Here’s ours.