5 Benefits of Event Marketing for Driving Customer Engagement
Emily Astorobi
If you've ever had to conduct a product demonstration then you know how exhausting and time-consuming they can be. An automated deminar program offers the opportunity to do 100x more demos than you’re doing now, increase attendance to them, and get more conversions — all while actually saving time and energy in the process.
This guide will give you an in-depth look at:
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What a deminar is
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How deminars work
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What their benefits are
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Tips and best practices to follow
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How to automate your deminar (and choose the right software)
Disclaimer: Our product, eWebinar, is an automated deminar software platform that lets people offer pre-recorded events on demand without sacrificing the two key things that make deminars effective: interactivity and live chat.
If you would like to experience an on-demand deminar, join our 20-minute product demo now — which uses eWebinar to demo eWebinar, so you can see our product in action.
Let's dive in!
What is a deminar
A deminar is a combined product demonstration and webinar. This lets companies create engaging demo content for their product or service while reaching a wider audience.
How does a deminar work?
Deminars work by combining the interactivity of webinars with the detailed overview of product demos. Deminars can be presented in a few formats such as live, automated, or hybrid. Hybrid deminar formats combine elements of pre-recorded content with live functionality, such as chat.
During a deminar, the presenter gives an overview of the product/service, explains its benefits while highlighting key features, and answers any questions from the audience. This approach to interactive selling is what makes recorded or live product demonstration webinars effective at driving virtual sales.
What are the benefits of deminars?
Because deminars have the reach and interactivity of webinars alongside the in-depth presentation format of demos, they have multiple benefits. In fact, a successful virtual deminar can accomplish numerous business goals simultaneously including:
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Building a brand
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Nurturing leads
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Driving sales
An effective demo webinar could also be used to re-engage customers who have gone inactive.
As such, deminars can be used as valuable tools beyond just sales, including for customer onboarding, activation, and education. They give companies the power to guide users through products/features, proactively answer frequently asked questions, and show customers how to get the most value out of complex solutions.
Below are the three core benefits that deminars have to offer:
Benefit #1: Reach
At the most basic level, a deminar can show more potential customers how a product functions than 1-on-1 demo calls ever could. This makes them a more scalable lead generation tool with better reach. This is why they're such an effective way to drive prospective customers into the top of your sales funnel.
Keep in mind you won’t be able to maximize your reach without automating your deminar and sales funnel. Doing live deminars will only take you so far because it’s impossible to scale it beyond the amount of time you personally have.
To learn more, read our full guide on How to Build a High-Converting Automated Webinar Funnel!
Benefit #2: Engagement
Deminars are dynamic presentations that are better equipped to engage attendees and answer questions than a standard demo. Most platforms have at least a few interactive features. that you can use to engage your audience. We'll go over how to leverage these interactions further below.
If you want to learn more right now, you can read our full guide on How to Make a Webinar Interactive!
Benefit #3: Conversion
The ability to hear audience feedback in real-time during the product demo flow and address objections during the customer demonstration itself will help you garner higher conversion rates. Deminars can even be automated to drive conversions on autopilot but without sacrificing direct communication with prospects (more on this later).
If your deminars aren't converting as well as you'd like then check out our full guide on Webinar CTAs!
Deminar tips and best practices
Here are a few best practices to adhere to when creating a deminar:
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Two-way communication. Having live chat functionality enabled on a deminar is crucial so you can answer questions, build rapport, resolve objections, and close deals. Bonus points if your webinar platform lets you respond to chat messages after the deminar ends so you don't miss out on any leads.
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Interactive presentation flow. You'll be able to keep deminar attendees engaged longer by letting them participate in the presentation. An interactive deminar format could include polls, quizzes, and other types of audience participation.
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Flexible schedule. Because most deminar formats are presentations for multiple users rather than individual-focused customer training sessions, it's crucial the deminar occurs at a time and day when your prospects are free to attend.
Because figuring out the best time and day to host a deminar is virtually impossible (due to the variance in availability and time zones), the next best option is automating your deminar — which will increase attendance by letting people watch it on-demand at their convenience.
We’ll dive deeper into four reasons why you should automate your deminar later in this guide!
How to run successful deminars
Now that you're familiar with the benefits and best practices of deminars, let's look at what you need to do to run your own successful deminar. There are many ways to do this but following a proven process is the most reliable way to get a return on your investment.
The deminar framework below will help you set goals, identify your audience, make your deminars interactive, and automate the presentation so you can generate conversions on autopilot. Let's take a closer look at each of these steps!
Note: To get a more in-depth walkthrough, read our ultimate guide on How to Create a Killer Webinar Strategy!
Set clear goals
Before anything else, you'll need to define the goals or objectives you have for your deminars. For most product demos, the goal is to show a prospect how the software works and get them to sign up for a free trial or become a paying customer.
Other deminar goals besides conversion itself include:
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Customer education
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Brand awareness
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Lead generation
Ultimately, knowing what your goal is will be more important than choosing the perfect one.
Define your audience
Every successful virtual deminar strategy starts with knowing your target audience. After all, you can't meet (or exceed) your audience's expectations if you're not all that familiar with who they even are and what problems they're struggling with.
This will also help you answer the questions that most people have before deciding to attend a deminar:
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Is this deminar for me?
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Who's behind the deminar?
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Can I trust their information?
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When/where can I watch it?
The first three can be addressed by agitating pain points and building credibility — both of which are far easier when you know who you're targeting. As for the fourth question, there's an optimal approach that we'll cover in the last step of this framework.
Make it interactive
Interactivity is one of the main advantages deminars have over a run-of-the-mill product demo. As such, you need to double down on this competitive edge and make your demo as interactive as possible (without distracting from the core presentation).
Having live chat is the best way to make your webinar interactive so that you can answer attendee questions and get them over the hump to convert. Adding interactions like questions, quizzes, and polls is also important as it lets attendees participate in the deminar.
This not only keeps them engaged longer but also makes them more likely to convert into a customer at the end of the deminar. Most platforms have at least a handful of interactions to choose from so just work with what you have and see how your audience responds.
Here's an example of the 20+ interactions that those using eWebinar, our product, get to choose from:
Automate it
The final step is what transforms your deminar from a one-time event to a reliable source of conversions.
Automating your deminar will save you time while increasing attendance rates and the total number of conversions. We'll dive deeper into why you should automate your deminar, when the right time is, and show you exactly what that looks like in the next section below.
If you want to see an automated deminar right now then join our on-demand and come back to this guide after watching it!
4 reasons why you should automate your deminar
An effective automated deminar strategy needs to be scalable if you want to maximize its reach. Automating your deminar will increase attendance, drive sales, provide consistency, and save you a ton of time in the process.
Here are 4 reasons why you should automate your deminar (and how they work):
1. Higher attendance
The first benefit is that automated deminars get significantly better attendance rates compared to live presentations. This is because they answer the question of "when can I watch?" with "anytime you want!" by letting attendees join the presentation on demand.
Using automation to run deminars 24/7 eliminates any scheduling conflicts between you and your target audience while making sessions more convenient to attend. This leads to attendance rates as high as 80% to 100% compared to the industry average attendance rate of 40% for live presentations:
Our automated webinar platform, eWebinar, lets you choose from three scheduling options:
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On-demand deminars. On-demand sessions let attendees join the deminar right after they fill out the registration form. You can also use "just-in-time" sessions so deminars are scheduled to begin within a few minutes of a visitor reaching your landing page.
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Recurring deminars. Running deminars on a recurring schedule will ensure you're able to capture leads that aren't ready to watch the presentation yet. You can even use our dynamic time zone feature so that the schedule of the sessions adapts based on where the attendee is joining from.
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Deminar replays. Replay links retain the live chat capabilities and let you use the same 20+ interactions so attendees still get the full interactive deminar experience even if they miss a session they signed up for. Attendees can also pause, play, or skip around the replay video.
Last but not least, we are one of the only platforms that let you enable all three options at once!
2. More sales
Because automated deminars can run non-stop (even while your entire sales team is asleep) they're able to generate sales on autopilot day in, day out, year-round. One of our customers reported a 136x return on their investment after generating $27,000 with our webinar platform over the first six weeks!
Automated deminars have higher attendance rates which means that more leads show up in the first place. In other words, you're bound to get more sales even if the same conversion rate stays the same just by virtue of how many more people will watch the deminar once you've automated it.
Leads who attend an automated deminar are also more likely to convert because of all the interactions that you can use to keep the audience engaged. You can insert questions that gather insights on your audience, contact forms that push potential customers toward sales calls, or clickable CTA popups.
These interactions increase watch time and make the attendee more likely to convert once they reach the CTA at the end of the deminar. Getting a willing customer who's already watched the deminar into a sales call or free trial also makes them more likely to convert at the end of the sales process.
To learn more, read our full guide on How to Craft High-Converting Webinar CTAs!
Suffice it to say that deminar automation can boost sales strategy ROI by automating the sales funnel. Of course, you'll still need sales funnel strategies like compelling copywriting, representatives capable of demonstrating good listening skills, and an attractive offer.
However, what an automated webinar funnel does is turn cold traffic into a steady supply of warm leads.
3. Consistency
There's usually a fixed budget for deminars, webinars, and other presentation formats that are used as live one-time events. After all, it's harder to justify a high webinar cost if people will only be able to attend it once before it's discarded.
In contrast, automated deminars play on a recurring schedule. This lets you use a higher budget and increase the production value knowing that the dynamic presentation will be an evergreen asset for months, years, or decades to come.
It also means you'll only need to get it right once to be able to reap the benefits forever:
You can even combine platform tools like different interactions and welcome messages to keep things from getting stale. This lets you further improve the quality of the presentation without any necessary changes to the deminar recording itself.
4. Time saved
Experienced virtual event planners will tell you that for every hour spent presenting, days on end were spent on preparation and production. With all the time and effort that goes into creating a presentation, it only makes sense to use it as an ongoing business asset instead of discarding it after one use.
Automated deminars save time across multiple teams in different ways:
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Event planning. Automated deminars develop engaged interest amongst your audience in the same way that in-person product launches do — while taking up a fraction of the time. Furthermore, they can be used to continuously generate hype long after the launch date.
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Customer support. Pre-recorded deminars that go over the technical specifications of your product will save your customer success and support teams from having to answer the same frequently asked questions over and over again.
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Sales qualification. It's no secret that sales teams have to disqualify multiple leads to get one sales-qualified lead (SQL). Automated deminars help prospects to learn about the offer before booking a call — weeding out anyone who isn't the right fit before they take up a sales rep's time.
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Conversion time. Deminars can leverage interactions to speed up the average conversion time and get leads to convert without the need for human intervention. Exclusive offers reward viewers so inserting a special offer popup in your deminar can save the time it takes to close deals yourself.
These are just a few of the ways that automated deminars can save you and your team a ton of time.
In fact, eWebinar even shows you how many hours you've saved on our analytics dashboard:
As you can see, the cost of producing or automating a deminar is negligible compared to the time saved.
When should you automate your deminar?
Knowing when to transition from a live deminar to an automated deminar is a delicate decision. Automating too soon can make producing the presentation challenging while automating too late leaves a lot of money (and lost leads) on the table.
Generally, there are three things that need to happen before you automate a deminar.
Deminar automation criteria:
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You’ve given a particular product demonstration over and over
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You find yourself mostly saying the same things during each demo
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You've been able to identify and proactively answer most questions
If your deminar meets these criteria then you should likely be automating it.
Most people worry that automated deminars will lead to flat and passive experiences but that's only true if you automate the product demo before honing your presentation script. Any online event that's meant to be streamed once (and doesn't have replay value) is not typically worth automating.
Events with different content each time — such as thought leadership webinars with guest speakers — aren't a suitable fit either since the presentation keeps changing. Automation should be reserved for deminars that you give repeatedly without changing the script much.
Last but not least, the software you choose will have a big impact on how interactive your automated deminar will be (and thus how many conversions it can generate).
Here are our top 5 choices for best on-demand deminar software:
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eWebinar (our product)
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Demio
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BigMarker
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WebinarNinja
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EasyWebinar
To understand the criteria we used when making our list, check out our full guide on the 5 Best On-Demand Webinar Software Platforms (In-Depth Comparison)!
Conclusion
Deminars are an effective way to engage your audience, show them how your product or service works, and generate leads for your sales team on autopilot. We hope this guide has been helpful but the best way to gain valuable insights on automated deminars is to attend one for yourself!
Join our on-demand deminar to experience it firsthand:
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