You have most likely viewed a webinar or two or three. Webinars are an excellent way of sharing information with prospects and customers. The use of webinars for sales and marketing purposes has increased significantly since the initial pandemic in 2020 and there is good reason for the increase. Webinars are an excellent way to reach prospects and customers in lieu of face-to-face meetings. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 58% of marketers use webinars to promote their products and services. 66% of marketers said that webinars were one of the most effective tactics for B2B marketing.
What is the formal definition of webinar marketing? Webinar marketing is a set of streaming techniques aimed at promoting specific goods and services, improving brand awareness, and educating your audience. Hosting webinars helps your brand show its expertise and nurture leads.
According to SendPulse, there are four reasons for including webinars in your marketing arsenal.
1. Webinars retain viewer attention. Unlike advertisements, webinars are not intrusive at all. People willingly tune into your webinar to learn the knowledge you share. According to MakeSocialMediaSell, 40% of users watch webinars from start to finish. This allows you to take your time and sell the idea that your products and services can solve problems.
2. Webinars help you warm up leads quickly. Users who attend webinars are interested in the topics you plan to discuss. Perhaps, they are in the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, which means they know about a problem, want to learn more about it, and find a fast solution. If you guide them through solving their issue, they are likely to remember your brand. According to ReadyTalk, between 20-40% of the webinar attendees become qualified marketing leads.
3. Webinars bring conversions. While hosting a webinar, you can show your thorough expertise and prove how helpful your products or services are. Some people will be ready to order from you right after the webinar, especially if they need to quickly solve the problem. Branded Solopreneur claims that around 2-5% of webinar attendees will purchase something from your company.
4. Webinars generate leads. You can use webinars as a lead magnet to attract new subscribers and leads. To do that, you need to place a lead magnet on your website and tell people about the value you are going to share. If this value is significant enough for users to share their email addresses and other data, they will join your webinar and become leads.”
Good reasons to include this marketing tool in the tactical side of your marketing plan, for sure. In today’s selling arena most sales and marketing personnel recognize how difficult it is to reach your customers and prospects to schedule a face-to-face meeting. Informative webinars allow customers and prospects to listen to your solutions to specific issues via a webinar on a voluntary, no-pressure basis. It is the perfect environment for sharing information and stimulating lead generation.
The simplest way to conduct an entire webinar is with a single speaker. Of course, the use of two or three speakers can be readily organized as needed. The webinar can be an interview, a moderated discussion by various speakers, or a Q&A session. Pick the format that will assist you in delivering your message in the best and most effective way.
There are various options for hosting a webinar. The most popular one is Zoom. Its free plan allows you to create webinars with up to 100 participants, though the time is limited to 40 minutes. The paid plan for a 100-member audience without time limitations costs around $150. You can also consider using GoToWebinar, BigMarker, Adobe Connect, or WebEx. This decision is yours and depends upon your access to any of these options. The cost to you is minimal when you compare webinars to paid advertising whether print or broadcast.
Just like any other event, to ensure the number of prospects and customers you desire you must effectively promote the webinar. There are many vehicles you can use to drive webinar registrations. They include email and social media posts. You can also use personalized direct mail targeting specific prospects and customers that you really want to be included in the webinar audience. Many will appreciate the personal invitation and if the messaging is exciting, they are most apt to register to attend.
Webinars position you as an expert before you even start covering the content. To attend a webinar, your prospect has to register, put the date in his/her calendar, set aside time for the event, show up at the right time, and then give you one to one and a half hours of his/her time. The prospects and customers are doing all of this just to listen to you talk about a certain subject. Not bad. You have a leg up already with prospects and customers accepting your position of knowledge. Take advantage of this by presenting an informative and exciting webinar to encourage prospects to take the next step whether you are trying to drive them to your website with encouragement to conversion or some other call-to-action.
According to Demio, “Webinars are special for two main reasons. First off, they’re one-time events that happen LIVE. If your audience shows up late, they miss part of it. If they don’t show up at all, they miss all of it. This is the power of scarcity, and it’s the foundation of any webinar campaign. With a video, the viewer knows that he/she can pause it and come back at any time. That’s not the case with webinars. If your prospect leaves or misses the webinar, he/she will feel the pain of missing out.
The second reason is conversational engagement. With webinars, your audience gets a voice. They can chat, vocalize opinions, asks questions, answer questions, and more. When someone is asking questions and chatting about what they’re being taught, they’re more focused and engaged by default.”
Webinars are a great way to attract new prospects, generate new leads, and ultimately convert new customers. With webinars, some type of registration is always expected. Attendees are familiar with submitting their name, email, and sometimes other information to register for an upcoming webinar event. They’ve highlighted themselves as a lead that is interested in whatever you’re presenting, and they’ve opted in to hear more about it. What better way is there to complement your prospect database than a webinar. The webinar is non-intrusive and provides value to attendees. It is the perfect win-win situation. You can accomplish the webinar from your office chair eliminating travel and one-to-one meeting logistics. This makes webinars a most effective marketing tool.
Leedfeeder asks “when should you host your webinar?” According to Gilles, Tuesday afternoons are the best days to host a webinar. It makes sense — on Mondays everyone is getting started for the week, making sure they know who they need to touch base with and what meetings they can’t miss. By Fridays everyone is checking out — they might even take a long weekend. The second-best times are Thursdays at noon or late afternoon, depending on your audience. According to BloggingX, the best time to run a webinar is 11 a.m.
You might think that video is the most important thing when it comes to webinars, but actually, Gilles says that audio is more important. If you go to YouTube and have a poor connection, you might not notice the grainy video quality that much, but you cannot watch a webinar with poor sound. It is super annoying. While hosting, make sure that you wear headphones to reduce echo as much as possible. Close all of your apps such as Skype, GChat, and Slack. Also, turn Google Chrome or Dropbox synchronization off. Those programs eat up a lot of bandwidth. When you are done screen sharing, turn it off. This is super important, as it eats a lot of CPU. Make sure your computer can focus all its bandwidth on delivering high-quality sound, and sacrifice video over sound if you must.
The use of webinars in your business, whether for lead generation, sales, training, or all of the above is a most effective and economical means of reaching prospects and customers in today’s marketplace. If done right, you can keep your audience engaged for an hour or more and that’s something that videos for example struggle to do. Not only that, but your audience can also ask questions and get real-time feedback. The interaction is most effective. Let’s not forget the return on investment as well. Webinars can accomplish your sales and marketing objectives at an economical cost for a much appreciated, positive return on your investment.
For additional information on webinar marketing, contact your Think Patented account executive or call 937.353.2299.