How To Plan, Execute & Market An Evergreen Webinar

Digital events of all kinds, especially in the workplace, expanded more quickly than anyone would have expected due to remote work during the recent pandemic. Now that webinars are an expected feature of the business landscape, producing evergreen webinar content is a great way for you to communicate with potential and existing customers online as well as create durable on-demand content that will serve your business over time. In some cases it can become a veritable automated sales engine. Curious? We’re going to lay it out point by point below.

• Definition of an Evergreen Webinar
• Why Should Webinars be Evergreen?
• The Difference Between “Evergreen Content” & “Evergreen Webinar”
• Evergreen Webinar Types
• Evergreen Webinars Basic Features and Format
• How to Plan an Evergreen Webinar Topic
• How to Execute an Evergreen Webinar
• How to Market & Promote your Webinar
• Top Evergreen Webinar Software Tools
• Kaltura Webinars
• Conclusion

Definition of an Evergreen Webinar

An “evergreen” webinar is a webinar that will remain relevant no matter when it was originally posted or broadcasted. It’s so named for evergreen trees which keep green leaves in all seasons.

To take it one step back and cover all bases, a “webinar” is a type of virtual event based on a seminar. They’re designed to engage with larger groups of participants, and allow hosts to share audio, documents, or slides with them. All attendees and hosts are participating remotely, meaning they can drop in from anywhere in the world.

An evergreen webinar is designed to stay fresh and remain relevant for a long time. Often they are automated and available on-demand. Evergreen webinars are less of a big, splashy event and more suited to educational content and use as a learning tool, or in building an overall content library.

Why Should Webinars be Evergreen?

The webinar was originally geared toward live events–the big, splashy events we mentioned above. Partially due to its novelty, businesses and organizations were less likely to flinch at the prep time required for creating regular webinar events. That is, all of the script-writing, slide decks, rehearsals, marketing emails, content revisions, etc. that would be required to put together a one- or two-hour event, where information would inevitably end up lost because there was no way to rewatch.

Evergreen webinars are a way to reuse and extend the life of your content as well as create resources for potential and existing customers. Webinars are also an excellent time- and cost-effective tool for generating leads and converting them into paying customers.

The Difference Between “Evergreen Content” & “Evergreen Webinar”

“Evergreen content” refers most broadly to content topics that will remain relevant always, or at least for a fairly extended period. For example, generally speaking, news, statistics, pop culture, or current events are not strong topics for evergreen content. Content with these types of topics will quickly become dated as they are of short-term interest. Evergreen content are topics that are less likely to change over time: training procedures, customer care tips, frequently asked questions, and similar.

However an “evergreen webinar” refers not just to the content (which, yes, should be evergreen), but the ability of the webinar to be recorded and reused.

So technically, you could have a “one and done” live webinar featuring evergreen content. But an evergreen webinar both consists of evergreen content and also is repackaged and published in an on-demand format so it can be used and viewed over and over again.

Evergreen Webinar Types

There are a few types of evergreen webinars that everybody should be aware of. Maybe these don’t need to be in your repertoire right now but at some point almost every person, business or organization can benefit from:

How To’s

“How To”s are a staple of online content, ranking highly in searches. If you can demonstrate how to do something perennially useful with your webinar, it’s definitely worth making it available on demand.

Expert Advice

Advice on demand; not only does this offer thought leadership but it makes the most of guest speaker/C-suite executive time by creating content that can be replayed and reused.

Tutorials

Learn how to use new products, product updates, or integrations with this quick evergreen webinar content.

Frequently Asked Questions

A  great strategy for creating an evergreen webinar is to provide information that people are already asking for. Head off hassles and support calls by putting your FAQ onto video.

Educational Content

The best-known evergreen webinar content to most people: training and class content are geared towards a particular task or topic and, not unlike a textbook, are expected to be reused.

Evergreen Webinars Basic Features and Format

Your format in a webinar could vary: Interview, Q&A, panel discussion, presentation–just keep in mind whatever format you decide on should have some rewatch value and be viable for the long-term in an on-demand format.

However a quality webinar should include a strong introduction, an outline of (ordered) main points to address, and a motivating close which if possible should contain a relevant call to action.

How to Plan an Evergreen Webinar Topic

Webinar topics that are commonly searched will be excellent for driving continuous traffic. When determining what kind of content and topics to pursue that are appropriate for an evergreen webinar, check for top keywords related to the subject matter. This will increase your exposure once the content is available on demand.

How to Execute an Evergreen Webinar

If you want to learn more about how to create webinars in general, then read our post “How to create a webinar in 12 steps“. Meanwhile, here’s how to set up an evergreen webinar:

• Write a script: Great content starts with great ideas and a great script. Make sure you pre-plan.
• Set up and host a live webinar: Whether you want to go for a full virtual event or just a good-quality recording, you’ll still need some people to deliver the content in person. If you want to build the evergreen version from a full-scale webinar, don’t hesitate to include all of the bells and whistles like a live chat box, Q&A, and other engagement features.
• Repurpose your recording/upload a video: Whether you ran a virtual event or just recorded a video to build into an evergreen webinar, now you’ll need to get your content set up on a video platform and use your software tools of choice to put together and possibly automate your long-lasting presentation.
• Include special offers or call to action: Even though this is evergreen webinar content you can maintain a sense of urgency. A CTA near the end can prompt your audience to engage further or help you sell your services.
• Schedule your webinar: You can host it as often as you want: every other day. Once a month. Schedule sessions or make it on-demand. Customize it to different time zones.
• Enhance the experience with live interaction: If time and resources permit, you can also create live chat rooms for your attendees, and even join in the chat yourself for a more personalized experience.
• Go live (again?): Set your content live, start promoting it, and connecting to your target audience.

How to Market & Promote your Webinar

Remember, you can promote an evergreen webinar repeatedly without having to repeatedly update your content because it will always be relevant to your core audience! It can be helpful to promote somewhat continuously to keep a steady and consistent flow of new attendees.

Once your content has gone live, you can promote your webinar link to your desired audience. The registration link can live online forever–but remember people won’t be able to find it and register for it if you don’t make it as visible as possible. During the first launch, use the same means you would to promote a real-time virtual event: email blasts, posts to social media, and any other reliable promotion techniques you use.

As time passes, you can continue using promotion to keep your evergreen webinar relevant: release some of the evergreen content on your social media or YouTube, include the registration link on the header and footer of your website, and continue to run social media ads. You can even connect the webinar to topically related email campaigns.

Top 5 Evergreen Webinar Software Tools

Here are our top picks for putting your evergreen webinar content together:

5. Demio

Demio offers cloud-based webinars built with businesses in mind. It’s a relatively full-featured solution that runs from a browser and makes it easy for anyone to register and attend a webinar and revisit content. Similarly, it has webinar hosts and creators ease of use in mind as well as the ability to easily brand and customize. Best of all (if you’re looking for evergreen webinar options) it offers strong automation features that allow prerecorded content to run on autopilot.

4. Webinarjam

Webinarjam describes itself as a powerful and flexible all-in-one webinar platform. It works in tandem with counterpart app Everwebinar. With Webinarjam you can brand and record your content, while Everwebinar automates your content so you can set it up on demand. Using the two services at once also offers some excellent functionality such as prescheduling the webinar(s) to play at specified times during the day, week or month; adjusting to time zones; and organizing a library or collection of recorded content.

3. GoToWebinar

GoToWebinar is brought to you by the same company that created GoToMeeting. While GoToWebinar is not the BEST POSSIBLE webinar software product, it has fairly wide adoption so it’s the one users are most likely familiar with. It has evergreen webinar capability, is a stable platform for large webcasts, and provides high-quality screen share recordings. GoToWebinar has a solid set of features and can scale with your business.

2. ON24

ON24 bills itself as a “digital experience platform” and do webinars notably well. ON24 is most helpful overall for mid-to-large sized businesses or orgs with small events teams who tend to produce a lot of webinars—the platform is noted for being well-documented, and making it simple to template and update specific webinars. Additionally, ON24 is well set up on the back end to record presentations and audio in-system without the need to time slides, etc. It’s also equipped with continuing education credit features, making it highly useful for courses and training.

1. Kaltura Webinars

Naturally, we feel strongly about our own solution for evergreen webinars: Kaltura Webinars. Kaltura Webinars is a video-based tool for creating interactive presentations or workshops for a large audience. We also make it easy to create cloud recordings to share with attendees of live events as well as repurpose for on-demand content.

When working on evergreen webinar content, you can take advantage of Kaltura’s persistent rooms which retain whatever setup you’ve made. You can prepare a room with notes on the virtual whiteboard, presentation slides, and content playlists and then leave it as is for when webinars commence. Further, Kaltura’s platform offers a seamless video viewing experience integrated into the session flow. Additionally, we offer one-click set-up interactive polls, as well as detailed analytics that can evaluate the performance of your sessions and allow you to measure participant engagement.

Kaltura Webinars offer multiple payment plan options as well as a free trial version, so you can get started with all of the standard features and decide if we’re the right fit for you!

Conclusion

As you can see, evergreen webinar content is an excellent way to keep your brand relevant, promote your products and services with information that is useful to your target audience, and be able to generate leads and customer engagement practically on autopilot. Make sure you have a quality video platform and the right software tools, and who knows? The sky’s the limit!