Scaling webinars for international audiences

Tell us a little about your company and your role, what does your work look like?

We are VSM AG. With over 155 years of experience, we are one of the leading companies in the global abrasives market. We develop sophisticated abrasive solutions adapted to the special needs of industry, specialist trade and retail. Our focus is clearly on the foreground. With subsidiaries and sales partners, VSM is active in 70 countries around the world.

Briefly about me: My name is Marcus Dietmann, I have been responsible for VSM's social media since 2022 and together with our training manager and webinar host, Michael Lang, I manage our webinars. My focus is on the technical support and the organizational concept. I lead and direct the live webinars.

What are the primary objectives of your webinars and what goals does VSM hope to achieve with them?

During the pandemic, our existing customers were unable to attend the on-site events, so we had to look for a solution. We decided to host webinars. This allowed us to continue to offer on a small scale what was suddenly no longer possible on a large scale.

In addition, we wanted to use the webinars to introduce potential new customers to our wide range of services and solutions. Webinars are an accessible way to get in touch with new contacts.

What was your most successful webinar? Were any specific goals or desired outcomes achieved?

We are proud that all our webinars met our goals. We have found a very good tool in Webinargeek, which makes organization, implementation and monitoring extremely easy for me.

At the moment we offer four different subjects in two languages. We limit ourselves to a maximum duration of 30 minutes. The feedback from our viewers is very positive and shows that this type of webinar works well.

What interactive possibilities do you offer your audience? For example, a public or private chat, polls or other interactions.

For the sake of privacy, we only activate the private chat and the evaluation form at the end. For example, questions can be forwarded to the host by the moderator during the webinar, or answered in a Q&A session at the end.

This works very well and our customers appreciate it.

What are your future plans for your webinars?

In the future, we want to host our webinars for a wider audience and offer them in different languages. An important tool for this is the registration form, which is available in various languages. This option makes it easy for us to internationalize our webinars.

Which features are most important to you?

We make extensive use of the statistics and reporting function. We can export and process all available data via CSV. These features are essential.

Are there particular reasons why you chose WebinarGeek for your webinars?

As mentioned earlier, WebinarGeek allows us to communicate with our customers in different languages. The registration page, live environment and interfaces are displayed in the relevant language.

The evaluation options mentioned above were also a driving factor why we chose WebinarGeek.

The third factor is obvious. As a German company, we are subject to the GDPR law. That is why it is extremely important to us that the data is hosted on servers within the EU and processed in a country that also falls under GDPR legislation.

Do you have any tips for someone who wants to start hosting webinars?

Sure! My tip is short: do it!

In my opinion, hosting a webinar requires three steps:

1. Think of a webinar worthy topic

2. Prepare registration forms and send invitations

3. Get professional, reliable technology and get to work.

And if it didn't work out the first time, it just shows that there's still room for improvement. So start!