Should I be hosting medical device webinars?

Webinars are all the rage these days—it seems like companies in all industries are running them, but are they worth it in the healthcare industry? Are you wondering if webinars are something you should be investing your time in as a healthcare company?

We’re here to talk about everything related to webinars so that you can decide whether they are worth investing your time and energy in.

We’ll cover how healthcare webinars could help you achieve your business goals, as well as the work involved in making them happen.

What are the benefits of healthcare webinars?

Reaching a wide audience

Healthcare webinars are a great opportunity to expand your reach quickly and get in front of new people to build your own audience.

Whilst your social media, website, and email efforts can take a while to build momentum, webinars are relatively short, concentrated campaigns that can build momentum quickly.

Your panellists should be key opinion leaders (KOLs) in your industry, in which case, they will have their own audience—something that you can take advantage of by asking them to assist in promoting the webinar.

As webinars are ultimately about educating viewers, rather than trying to sell products or services (because realistically, who would register for that?), you could also work with organisations or charities to promote the event. This extends your reach even further, getting in front of people who aren’t yet familiar with your company.

Positioning yourself as an expert

At Podymos, we believe that marketing boils down to one thing: building trust. People need to trust you before they feel comfortable buying from you. To do this, you need to show them that you care about their problems and provide them with value.

Healthcare webinars are a chance to delve into what interests your audience, including their problems and the solutions, to provide viewers with genuinely valuable information and demonstrate your connections with respected KOLs.

Through webinars, you can start to build a positive reputation through brand association, becoming a trusted partner in your industry.

Unbiased promotion

There is nothing more off-putting than a company that prioritises promoting itself and its products over everything else (unless you’re at a product showcase, in which case, this would be absolutely acceptable).

A constant stream of promotion is like continually asking for something from your customers without giving anything in return.

Hosting a webinar gives you the opportunity to give back. You educate your audience on a subject they care about (they have already demonstrated that by registering), portraying your company positively in their mind. They may feel naturally more inclined to do business with you.

Building engagement

Webinars offer plenty of opportunities to engage with your audience. Polls and Q&As allow the audience to interact whilst attending the live webinar. You can also ask them to fill out a questionnaire once the session finishes.

This type of engagement is beneficial because it helps you to understand your audience better. You gain a better understanding of their knowledge gaps, their problems, and the topics that they’re most interested in.

Not only will this provide you with ideas for future webinars, but it will also inform your wider content creation—think social media posts, website articles, and email campaigns. Everything you create will be more relevant to what your audience is particularly interested in.

Furthermore, you can use this information to brief your sales team on the feedback from the attendees. This may help them when meeting customers, as they’ll have a better understanding of what matters to them.

Repurposing content

Healthcare webinars are gold mines for content. A one-hour session can generate weeks, or even months, of content so that valuable information isn’t only reserved for those who attended—it can be shared with your wider audience as well.

Not only could you write articles on the topics that arise, but you can also record the session and break it out into short videos to post on social media. Short videos are easy to consume and have a huge impact.

As well as portraying your company as a knowledge leader, having a backlog of social media posts ready is super helpful in creating a consistent cadence. When it comes to social media, consistency is the key to growing your following. Hosting webinars is one way to ensure that you have plenty of content.

Lead generation

Lastly, the biggest benefit of hosting webinars is undoubtedly lead generation. Recent studies have shown that 20-40% of webinar attendees turn into qualified leads—this can potentially have a huge impact on your ROI.

Beyond that, hosting a webinar is also a great way to collect contact information from your potential customers. During the sign-up process, you can ask users to fill in multiple questions, such as their role, company, location, and so on.

These could be contacts that you follow up on directly, or, during the sign-up process, you could ask if they would like to be added to your mailing list (ensuring it is GDPR compliant), so that you can follow up that way.

Either way, sign-up forms provide you with a treasure trove of leads.

What goes into hosting a webinar?

We’ve discussed the benefits of healthcare webinars, now let’s talk about the effort involved in hosting them, because it isn’t as easy as it may seem. Planning and hosting successful healthcare webinars is a team effort.

Month(s) of planning

Although it may seem as though webinars are over and done within an hour, they actually require weeks, maybe months, of strategic planning.

Firstly, you need to ensure that you have a topic your audience is genuinely interested in, and then you need to gather engaging speakers who will ideally be Key Opinion Leaders in your industry. We talk about this more in our article on maximising webinar attendance.

Getting to the initial stage where you have a topic, date, and panellists can take a lot longer than you might think, before you begin to factor in promotion. You need to give yourself ample time to get all of this in place.

Gathering and organising panellists

Once you have decided who your panellists will be, you’ll need to manage them and keep them informed at all stages of the webinar.

You will need to collect promotional assets from them, including their photos, bio, title, and any slides they are planning to present.

Oftentimes, webinar promotion schedules end up running behind due to delays in response from panellists. That is why it is so important to keep on top of chasing panellists so that the whole campaign can run smoothly.

Pre-promotion

Promotion is probably the most time-consuming area of running healthcare webinars. It requires posting across multiple platforms to gather momentum and maximise registrations, and it needs to begin at least 3 weeks before the live event.

You may also wish to collaborate with your panellists or an organisation to promote the event to extend your reach, in which case someone will be required to manage that, ensuring people know what they should be posting and when.

Post-promotion

As we stated before, webinars are great for generating several weeks’ worth of content to keep your social media feeds rich and engaging.

Creating these materials can naturally be quite time-consuming, as it requires video planning, editing, and copywriting. That being said, it’s totally worth it to make the most out of your webinar.

When you come to promote your next webinar, you’ll already have a number of people excited to sign up as they have already seen highlights from your last webinar and potentially signed up from a post-webinar email you sent out.

Should you be hosting healthcare webinars?

The true answer here is ‘it depends’.

Webinars are proven lead generators, and they can also elevate your brand awareness to new heights, but it depends on your company and your industry. Your webinars would need to be on topics highly relevant to your potential customers, and if these topics aren’t appropriate for webinars, then they may not be the best choice for you.

If you need any help deciding if webinars are right for you, don’t hesitate to get in contact to discuss how we can support your future webinars to help you hit your business objectives.