How To Create On-Demand Webinars With Livestorm

A while back, we wrote about the distinction between live webinars, on-demand webinars and automated webinars.

On-demand webinars are pre-recorded webinars, always open for new registrations that anyone can join 24/7, to get evergreen content.

Last week we just published our own on-demand demo webinar. We wanted to provide a better recording of a pre-recorded demo in a gated space to capture and qualify leads at scale.

It's better than having just a video behind form because you can centralize questions, chat, capture polls answers, etc.

Who can benefit from on-demand webinars?

On-demand webinars are great for different situations and types of companies. It depends on your situation and marketing goals.

Small teams can do customer training and lead qualification at scale using on-demand webinars. You don't need more resource or budget to start hosting gated pre-recorded videos.

When you have too many one-on-one calls, webinars are great to pre-qualify or generate top-of-the-funnel leads. Now, with on-demand webinars, you can even split that audience and add an additional stream of pre-qualification.

When in my customer lifecycle should I include on-demand webinars?

Due to its automated nature I would suggest to bring it to the top of your funnel either for leads or recent trials.

For inbound leads

You can push traffic from your paid campaigns, website traffic, nurturing campaigns to this inbound channel to capture valuable information and qualify your contacts before moving them to MQLs.

For trials

Some trials may want to have a full self served experience. This has two benefits. First, they get served asap, you don't lose time with scheduling calls or waiting for the webinars, increasing your time to close a deal. Second, it enables you to collect engagement data and buying intention on your new trials.

For customers

Keeping your customers up to date with the platform is an everyday struggle. To scale your customer success, on-demand webinars are great because they are 24/7 and self-served. It can even be part of an onboarding process for each new person on your customer's team.

Doing on-demand webinars with Livestorm

To continue, you will need the following: a Livestorm account (create one here for free), a video hosting platform such as Wistia or YouTube, a pre-recorded video (of course)... and 10 minutes of your time.

In this example I will use a pre-recorded demo (recorded using Screenflow) hosted on Wistia. We went with Wistia because they provide additional analytics on the views and advanced controls on the iframe mode. But you can do the same with YouTube.

To begin, grab the iframe code of your video.

You can add the autoplay parameter to the iframe so that the video starts when people jump in the webinar room.

In Livestorm, create a new webinar, and under general settings > stream settings add the iframe to your Livestorm webinar room:

Now start the webinar and that's it. Don't end the webinar, leave it open. People will be able to register and watch your pre-recorded video.

Bonus: additional customization

In our custom code integration (account > integrations > custom code), you can add this snippet of code to customize the landing page and remove things that don't make sense when running an "always-open-webinar-room" like the date, duration etc:

<script> document.querySelector('.registration-content__meta').style.display = 'none'; setTimeout(function(){ document.querySelector('.registration-header__date').style.display = 'none'; }, 200); </script>

Also, we can turn off manually our automated confirmation email (which contains the time, duration etc). Then you can use Zapier to reproduce it using your own emails.

In our example, I just hooked Livestorm and my Gmail with Zapier. For each new registrations for that webinar: I send an email using Gmail that contains the unique link to connect (our Zapier data provides this link) to the on-demand webinar room.

What's to improve?

First, having natively in Livestorm would be a huge plus. This way no need to rely on another third-party. The Wistia player is visible and people can interact, I personally don't bother, but I can understand you may want to have a white label experience.

Then, having notifications from interactions (new questions, messages, etc.) would be great. We still have not found a workaround. I gues we'll have to find a way ;).

Conclusion

This is still an experiment but it's a cool way to host gated video content and collect new leads on auto-mode. With our Zapier integration you will able to integrate this new inbound channel to your marketing automation workflows.