Running webinars to promote engineering products
21 May 2020
In a guest column, exclusive to Connectivity, Richard Stone, Managing Director of Stone Junction – the first ever PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution – explains how to use webinars in engineering PR and marketing campaigns.
“Everybody is stuck at home, right? So now must be the perfect time to get those webinars we’ve been talking about up and running? It’s just a matter of bashing out an invite and then doing a PowerPoint online somewhere! Get it going,” said the CEO of every engineering company, everywhere.
“Erm, OK, well, definitely, great idea, let’s work on a plan…” whimpered the marketing person, knowing full well that said webinar could take weeks of work to get up and running.
“No? I’ll just get started now then, in that case…” she sobbed as the words ‘the CEO of every engineering company, everywhere has left the call,’ flashed up on her screen; Teams, Zoom, Whereby and WhatsApp, all dying simultaneously as the same scenario was enacted in back-bedroom offices across the UK.
They might be tough to organise, but webinars are an important part of technical marketing and PR, all they need is time and planning. At Stone Junction, we’ve found that three or four different kinds of content have proven particularly popular recently and I thought you might like to hear about them.
Seminars for product marketing or training
When someone signs up for a webinar, their commitment is minimal. They know they are only giving you an hour of their time. They know they can leave the webinar, most likely without offending anyone, and they know that if they are busy on the day, they don’t have to turn up.
It’s a virtual event, so they don’t need to feel guilty, safe in the knowledge that there isn’t a room somewhere, empty but for a table of vol au vents and group of people let down by no-shows.
Partly because of this minimal commitment, direct product marketing works in webinars. It doesn’t need a pretext. You don’t have to add the words, ‘Industry 4.0’ or ‘collaborative’ to the start of your webinar description; people will come along just to see how your widgets work. You are offering them a bitesize introduction to a technology they might need to buy, so why wouldn’t they want to attend?
A good example of this in practice is a webinar Stone Junction is running for one of our clients on Tuesday May 26. It’s promoting a product called the Inspekto S70, which is an autonomous machine vision system for parts inspection, that can be installed by a QA manager, without expert help, and costs just €14,700. You can sign up here – hundreds of other people already have.
See, it works huh? And one thing that makes it work even better is turning your webinar into a collaborative session with a customer, presenting a case study or use case. This is what I would call social evidence if I were a marketing numpty. Which I am…
Round tables and panel discussions
Just because straight product marketing is very effective, it doesn’t mean that your customers don’t also want to understand the currency of the debate, and chew over its implications for the wider world of automation and engineering.
Round tables and panel discussion, as well as unbiased and product free seminars, are also a big attraction – especially if your business fits nicely into a popular theme in the arena your work in. For example, additive manufacturing for those of you in the production sector for instance or mass customisation for designers.
A good way of thinking about it is by considering the two methodologies as if they were part of a printed trade magazine. You remember those right? You used to get them in the office? You remember the office? You do?
Round tables and panel discussions are like the features you pore over during your coffee break, while product marketing webinars are the pages full of widgets at the back. Case studies are, well, case studies and product launches and announcements are the news section. You even have the Q&A section to fill the role of a letters page.
Virtual press conferences
Speaking of media, nothing will fill the role that it has in our lives; as trusted advisor, as industry analyst and as telegraph, keeping us up to date on the world around us. Even the most biased newspaper or magazine is less of an echo chamber than your email inbox or social media feeds.
The great news is there is no need to forget the media when you are planning your webinar strategy. Virtual press conferences have a role to play, with most journalists much readier to give up an hour to find out about a great story, than they would be to trek all the way into London, only to be dragged around the Shard, London Zoo or the Science museum for the 500th time, before you PowerPoint them to death. And that was before trekking anywhere and going inside anything put you in mortal danger!
At Stone Junction, we’ve launched a regular, monthly virtual press conference, called The Rascal Club, which will feature three companies, unveiling their most exciting stories every month. One of these will always be a start-up, to guarantee something new to journalists and one will always be a trade body – to ensure that the media gets insight from an unbiased source.
Everybody is stuck at home, right?
The truth is that our intrepid CEO from way back in paragraph two of this article, is kind of right. Lots of people are stuck at home. But, and it’s a big but, lots of people involved in production engineering and manufacturing are still commuting every day and those people who are working from home are incredibly busy. The people who are furloughed are much less likely to want to join a webinar.
So, yes, the new normal is a great reason to build more webinars into your campaign, but you might find that your captive audience is not quite as captive as you first thought. The key, as always, is to create a long-term strategy, with sound foundations and then implement it as well as you can. That would make even the most demanding CEO happy.
Richard Stone is the founder of Stone Junction, a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies. He loves vol au vents and the Science Museum and was just kidding earlier. He’s even sad that Vineopolis is shut.
If you are as well, or you want to discuss building webinars into your technical PR and marketing campaign, or would like to get involved in The Rascal Club, email richards@stonejunction.co.uk. He loves a chat.
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