Although webinars have existed on the Polish market for more than a dozen years, it was only two years ago that they became one of the more important marketing tools for many brands. The pandemic and the confinement of Poles to their homes made them look for new ways to develop and sources of learning. Webinars – whose main purpose is precisely to educate – were therefore a hit. This pandemic trend continues in Poland to this day. How can webinar marketing be used to promote a brand on the Polish market? Here is a guide from a Polish advertising agency!
Table of contents:
- Webinar marketing for B2B and B2C
- Define your business objective
- Choose a webinar topic
- What else to look out for when planning webinar marketing in Poland?
- What do Poles like and dislike about webinars?
- Promoting your webinar in Poland – without this there is no success
Webinar marketing for B2B and B2C
Does webinar marketing in Poland work equally well in B2B and B2C models? According to the ‘State of Webinars 2022’ report conducted by LiveWebinar, more than 33% of surveyed webinar participants in Poland are self-employed. The main sectors in which they operate are services, business services and the education industry. As we can therefore see, not only in B2C communication, webinars in Poland can be a powerful tool for customer acquisition and image building. You just need to know how to use them, as well as the business objectives to be met.
Advice from a Polish advertising agency:
Keep in mind that in B2B the purchase path will be longer and requires careful planning of the purchase funnel even before you consider implementing webinar marketing into your brand’s operations.
Define the business objective
In Polish marketing, nothing can happen by chance. If we expect measurable results, we need to define beforehand what we want to achieve with webinars, how we want to achieve it and how we plan to measure these results. Webinar marketing should be part of a brand’s overall marketing plan and cannot exist in isolation from the overall strategy.
When planning a webinar marketing strategy, it is worth adopting a maximum of 2-3 main objectives:
Content marketing
Our practice shows that the best converting webinars are those which focus on transferring knowledge and good practices. This experience coincides with the results of market research – according to a report by home.pl, as many as 54% of brands use webinars precisely to educate customers. Of course, educating should not be an end in itself. We need to think about why we want to educate customers and what they should do next with the knowledge gained. Webinar marketing can be a great part of a long-term content marketing strategy, especially in the B2C sector. After years of working with our clients, we notice that Poles analyse a lot of material and look for information about products or services in various sources before making a purchase decision. This is especially true if they are facing a large expense.
Lead nurturing
Webinar marketing is a very effective way to nurture relationships. In this case, webinars are used to explore the needs of potential customers and then provide them with the information they need to build trust in the brand.
Building an expert image
Knowledge-rich, expert-led and content- and formally interesting webinars are one of the most effective tools for building a positive image. This applies both to brands themselves and to specific individuals (e.g. the owner). There is a lot of trust in experts in Poland, so if you build it, you are well on your way to increasing sales.
Increasing visibility
Webinars can be another important point of contact between customers and the brand. If they go viral online, they will improve a brand’s online visibility and, therefore, brand recognition. And the more visible the content, the potentially more leads. Especially since excerpts from webinars can then be successfully used on other platforms via content recycling.
Strengthening customer relationships
Are you looking for effective ways to build a loyal audience in Poland who will systematically come back for more and become natural brand ambassadors? Webinar marketing can be a hit. Thanks to Q&A sessions, customers have a sense of close contact with the brand, get involved in discussions and actively participate in the webinar. Research shows that as many as 38% of companies in Poland conducting webinar marketing use this tool to build community.
Lead generation
Of course, webinars can also be successfully used to sell products or services directly. Some of the webinar tools (e.g. ClickMeeting) even offer features dedicated to sales, such as a personalised bouquet to encourage people to go to the purchase page. This makes it very easy to sell, especially when the webinar is dedicated to a product presentation.
Advice from a Polish advertising agency:
Our experience in organising webinars on the Polish market has shown us that it is most effective to combine a sales objective with other business objectives. Strictly sales webinars (without a customer education element) are perceived as too pushy a form of advertising. If we do decide to use them, we should only target customers who are at the last stage of the purchase funnel.
Select a webinar topic
A study of Polish webinar marketing clearly shows that 97% of customers who regularly watch webinars consider the topic of the webinar to be the main deciding factor. The person of the speaker and the brand itself are mentioned by 15% and 12% respectively. So how do you choose a topic that will interest your potential audience? The key is to know your customers and their expectations. When building your webinar marketing strategy, ask yourself:
- Who is the target audience?
- What information and knowledge is it looking for?
- What value do we want to convey to the audience that they will not find anywhere else?
- What is the competition missing?
It is worthwhile to continually talk to customers, follow industry trends and analyse what Polish audiences are talking about and what content they are looking for. Analytical tools such as Brand24 or SentiOne are great for this.
Advice from a Polish advertising agency:
There is no more valuable tool for finding valuable topics for webinars than…. the customers themselves. Dialogue with your audience is the best way to get to know them. Sometimes a simple mailing or post asking them what they would like to hear about is enough here. This method works particularly well when communicating to the B2B sector.
What else to look out for when planning webinar marketing in Poland?
Of course, just defining a target and finding interesting content is only part of the success of Polish webinar marketing. So what else should you pay attention to when planning webinars aimed at Polish customers?
Time of day
As many as 32% of webinar participants in Poland indicate that the date and time of the webinar is of key importance to them. The best times of day for a webinar are in the morning (from 8 am to 12 noon) and in the evening (from 6 pm to 9 pm). Afternoons, on the other hand, are the least popular.
Length of the webinar
The length of the webinar should be adapted to the industry, the audience and the chosen topic. However, it is worth knowing that the average length of webinars in Poland conducted using the LiveWebinar tool is 71 minutes.
A tool
There are plenty of tools for webinars. In Poland, Facebook live is popular (less so on YouTube). However, no social media platform will give us as many possibilities as the dedicated webinar tools do. The most popular ones include: ClickMeeting, Zoom, Google Hangouts, GoToMeeting, GetResponse, StreamYard or FreshMail.
Advice from an advertising agency:
When supporting our clients with webinars, we try to match the right tools to their objectives. There is no point in investing in paid platforms if you do not plan to use their extensive features.
Type of publication
Although it is commonly thought that a webinar is a real-time meeting with an audience, in practice this is not entirely true. In addition to the classic live model, brands sometimes choose to pre-record a presentation and then play it back live at a selected time.
Form of content presentation
A simple presentation with chat is the most popular form of presenting content on webinars in Poland. But is it the most effective? It depends. It is worth experimenting with tools and testing what works for our audience. We notice that the use of whiteboards, or interactive whiteboards, is becoming more and more popular. An obligatory element of a webinar should also be a Q&A session (e.g. in the last 15 minutes of the meeting) or answering questions on the fly. An interesting – although not recommended for beginners – solution is also to include the audience in a voice discussion.
What do Poles like and dislike about webinars?
The biggest advantage of webinars, as pointed out by Poles, is their recording, which gives the possibility to return to the recording at any time (or for several days after the end of the transmission). An equally interesting lure influencing Poles is the access to free training materials, which will supplement or systematise the transmitted knowledge. Every fifth Polish webinar participant also appreciates the possibility of acquiring a certificate confirming participation (however, this applies rather to paid meetings).
What can discourage your Polish customers? The main disadvantage indicated by webinar participants in Poland is pushy and direct selling. It is also important to take care of technical issues (fast connection, sound quality, synchronisation of image and sound, smooth conversation between participants if the webinar is an interview). As many as 42% of people surveyed by home.pl point to technical problems as the biggest webinar deterrent.
Promoting the webinar in Poland – no success without it
It is difficult to talk about the success of a webinar without gathering an audience interested in the topic. And it is difficult to gather a satisfactory audience without a strategy for promoting the webinar (or a series of webinars, in the case of a longer campaign). What methods of webinar promotion work best for customers in Poland?
Dedicated landing page
If you are preparing a webinar series, a landing page should be at the heart of the activity. There should be sales-oriented content, a social proof element and a convenient form to sign up for the event.
Mailing
This method only works if the brand has an appropriate base. E-mail marketing in Poland is still an effective marketing tool, especially when we are talking about the B2B sector. A dedicated mailing with the possibility of signing up for a webinar can also eliminate the need for a landing page altogether.
Social media
Informing people about the webinar should be included in the social media communication calendar (preferably on all the channels on which the brand is present). It’s also a good idea to create a Facebook event to gather interested people and send follow-ups to remind people of the upcoming webinar.
Source: https://www.facebook.com/AltimetrikPoland/posts/133852932423181
Advice from an advertising agency:
In addition to classic social media posting, themed Facebook groups are also great. Unfortunately, many of them prohibit such direct promotion. It is therefore a good idea to build up in advance your own group of people interested in the content that your brand is sharing. This is why webinar marketing should only be an element of a larger strategy and not a single way to promote a brand in Poland.
Paid advertising
In the case of webinars that require a large financial outlay (for technical facilities, support of an advertising agency or payment of the performing experts), we want to see a return on the investment. In this case, it is worthwhile to go for appropriately targeted advertising. Paid campaigns on Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Ads are the fastest way to attract precisely defined traffic to a landing page. By implementing Google Analytics tracking codes or Facebook pixels on the website, we can immediately measure where traffic sources come from and what their quality is.
Although the very idea of webinars seems simple, practice shows that many brands operating on the Polish market still do not use their potential in 100%. Many webinars are created without a plan, strategy, thorough research into the needs of customers or adequate promotion. If you are planning to implement webinar marketing into your brand’s activities, it is worth asking for help from specialists who have experience in organising webinars aimed at Polish customers. If you would like to speak to experts from a Polish advertising agency, contact us today.