The case for webinars has never been stronger. Over the past few years since we started getting hard data on viewership and attendee data, everything from registration count to viewership duration has been steadily climbing. Being that we focus primarily on the Canadian market at The Streaming Network, the comment we often get from Marketers is:
“Is that Canadian Data? Because I am sure we don’t do that well in Canada ….”
Weather it is the general inferiority complex felt by Canadians or the fact we are literally one tenth the size of the American market, the customers and prospects I talk to seemed to believe the data was not a true representation of what their webinar program could expect to see.
I would generally argue ….
“Do you not target the US market with your webinar program?”
That would get many on board but some still needed convincing.
This year we had enough data to extract from the larger Webinar Benchmarks report, a Canadian Index that took a sampling of 1900 webinars run in our great country from Victoria Island to Newfoundland and all spots in between. The webinars were all marketing in nature and spanned all a number of verticals including Legal, Accounting, Technology and Financial Services.
The findings have been included in this infographic.
Key Finding # 1 – We are not that far off the index
In some of the key spots (i.e. viewership time and registrant to live viewer conversion) Canada is performing right at the index. The place where we find the biggest discrepancy is in live viewership where the Canadian index is 166 viewers and the North American index is just over 200. Still pretty good and no-where near the 10% of the US market argument we often get!
Key Finding # 2 – A successful webinar is a successful webinar program no matter where you live
The top 9 percent of our customers are getting over 1000 live viewers, aligned with the North American average. When done right it doesn’t matter if you live in Moosejaw or Manhattan if you do the right things, build an audience and provide a great program – people will show up!
Key Finding # 3 – We like us some on-demand
In the on-demand viewing category Canadian webinar programs out-performed the North American index with more viewers and higher view times. The value of on-demand has been steadily rising but these stats indicate that if you are running a program in this country you need a strong focus on what you do with your webinar recordings.
Crazy Stat – The Rich Get Richer
All of our top performing customers who already get more than 1000 live viewers on their webinars are getting more viewers watching the recording than attended the live! Where the index is 38% in Canada these guys are at 50%! Our top performing webinar of the year drove 5300 + live viewers and 6400+ on-demand viewers! Crazy.
Interested to know other key findings from our top performers? We are working it!
Matt
