Are you searching for an alternative means of marketing your business, one that can generate tons of new leads in just one hour? In this article, we’ll explain why webinars have been so successful, as well as give an overview of webinar marketing. At the end of this lesson, you’ll understand why webinars are so effective for marketing your business and how to use them for selling.
Table of Contents
What is Webinar Marketing?
A webinar is an online seminar that is used to promote your business and connect with a broader audience. It is derived from the words “web seminar”.
Marketers use webinars as a way to generate leads by giving away free, valuable information in the hope that the audience will see the need to upgrade to paid products and services provided by the company.
Lead magnets such as webinars offer even more value and more prospects than a downloadable checklist or eBook.
A webinar typically involves a presentation followed by questions and answers. The visual nature of webinars enables presenters to establish a quick connection with participants. Also, most people will be able to comprehend the information faster if it’s spoken.
Webinar marketing is used by companies to:
- Demonstrate your products and services
- Incorporate blog post content into your writing
- Provide a showcase of their skills
Attendees can also get interested in buying products and services through webinars. A webinar is not intended to serve as a sales pitch, if you plan to use it for lead generation. The focus should not be on you. It should be about providing value to the participants.
In addition, webinars provide an excellent platform for selling, because they demonstrate that value.
Keep reading if you have trouble believing that you can sell without a sales pitch. This guide will explain later.
Webinar Marketing Statistics
Here are some statistics that demonstrate the benefits of webinar marketing for your business before we get started.
By way of example, did you know that 58% of marketers promote their products and services using webinars? In addition, about 32% of respondents said webinar marketing will be crucial for their success in 2019.
In fact, there’s even more data to prove that webinar marketing can be effective when you go deeper into the statistics:
- Almost 40% of viewers pay attention to webinars, according to MakeSocialMediaSell.
- A webinar can yield qualified leads to between 20% and 40% of attendees, according to ReadyTalk.
- Most webinar attendees will not buy anything from you, says the Branded Solopreneur.
Attendance at webinars is only half as high as the registration rate.
In spite of this, webinars are still a powerful marketing tool.
- MakeSocialMediaSell’s Jeff Molander had a 29% close rate from a single webinar.
- Using a webinar, Scott Britton made $11,286 from his course.
- In her webinars, Ilean Harris has a 20% conversion rate
Webinars are excellent for generating leads and for making sales, as well as these other benefits:
- Pre-sales objections can be handled easily face-to-face.
- Boost traffic, authority, brand awareness, and your email list with them.
- By reaching out to people wherever they are in the sales funnel, they speed the sales cycle. If you can find a way to effectively reach out to them, your sales will increase.
Finding a Webinar Topic
You must first decide on a topic for your webinar marketing campaign before beginning your campaign. To do this, follow these steps:
- You might find good webinar topics by mining your blog. Questions and comments can indicate that people may be interested in subsequent webinars.
- Find out if you keep receiving questions on your social media profiles and contact customer service.
- Look for webinars that you can do better and try to improve on those.
Finally, you should write a catchy title. A webinar’s title is key to capturing people’s attention as with all content marketing. Good titles are informative and interesting.
Creating a Webinar
Have you ever heard us say that webinars are a great way to sell without actually pitching? As you begin to create your webinar, remember to keep this in mind.
The goal of a webinar is to get attendees to either purchase a product or service or take action after the session. Then you will be able to target your webinar so that your webinar participants are more likely to purchase your product or service.
Here’s what’s worth repeating: ensure your webinar offers your customers the absolute best solution to the problem they’re trying to solve. Focus on helping others rather than self-promotion. On one of the slides, you can always say how great you are.
There are most often 60 minutes left over to ask questions at the end of the webinar. The presentation lasts 45 minutes and the question section lasts 15 minutes.
You should create webinars that focus on a single topic that is of immediate concern to your audience. Making your webinar useful, urgent, unique, and ultra-specific is what MakeSocialMediaSell says.
Your webinar should be timed carefully. There is no point in holding it in the evening for most of your customers who are in Eastern time. When scheduling your webinar, choose a time when the majority of your targets can attend.
Webinar Presenters’ Best Practices
Unless you’ve attended a webinar that was really good, you’ve probably experienced some mediocrity in the webinar. What are the best ways to ensure that your webinars rock? Straightforward. Here are some guidelines for webinar presenters.
Structure is important. It really works two ways. Here are some sage words from Aristotle (yes, really). In a time long gone, he said: tell them what is going to be said, tell them, tell them what you will be saying. Also, you should introduce, discuss, and summarize your topic.
You can also approach this by outlining the issue your clients face, telling them about your experience with it, demonstrating its value to them, and describing how they will benefit from it. A low-key pitch should be made between the last two sections.
In any structure you choose, at the beginning, you describe the value participants will receive, in the middle, and at the end, you highlight that value.
How to Deliver a Great Webinar
A webinar’s success depends on technology. It’s important that you deliver high quality audio and video during your webinars if you use them regularly. Keep your eyes straight ahead. You’ll feel as though you’re looking at each attendee directly, and this will strengthen your connection to them.
To ensure you can switch seamlessly from presenting, showing slides, and screen sharing as needed, you should run a test first. Considering slides, they function a bit differently from slides in a training setting where they might stay up for several minutes.
If you move through slides too slowly, participants will stop paying attention, says Mary Jaksch of Smart Blogger. Just like with any online presentation, slides need to be short and sweet, without too much text. You can see this pattern in Hubspot’s presentations.
Meanwhile, Hubspot maintains easy-to-understand graphics. Make your on-screen text big enough so your audience isn’t squinting at small print.
Considering webinar attendees could be anywhere, keep your language easy to understand.
You’ll need to make your pitch near the end, but don’t push too much, because this isn’t about selling hard, and you don’t want to break the flow. Rather than just presenting information, it’s more about showing participants how to act on that information with the help of the solution you offer.
Among the 55 slides of a Hubspot presentation we’ve been looking at, slide 48 and 49 contain the pitch. As a result, Hubspot gets right back to providing attendees with value.
You can sweeten the deal for webinar participants in a few different ways. The following are among them:
- Attendees will receive a free gift.
- Offering them a discount on the service you want them to buy (or a service that might lead to them buying later)
- Scarcity is used to motivate people to act. People might feel compelled to act quickly if the discount is only available for a week after the webinar.
Promoting Your Webinar
As reported by ReadyTalk, most webinars are promoted at least three weeks prior to their start date. Thus, you must begin preparing even earlier.
You need to decide which webinar hosting service to use. You have a lot of options. Several webinar hosting companies offer discounts if they are billed annually for hosting a webinar with 100 participants.
Paid providers offer a variety of services, but watch out for:
- Integration with other software you use, such as your email marketing service
- Participants from different parts of the world can dial for free
- You can share your screen and show videos
- Registration options
- Recording automatically
- Chat
To ensure that your webinar can be hosted by more than one person, make sure the solution you select supports multiple hosts. You will need the analytics data you will receive from your webinar for future webinar marketing, so you should assess what kind of data you will get.
You can try these webinar hosting platforms:
- GotoWebinar
- Cisco WebEx
- ClickMeeting
- Anymeeting
- Instant Teleseminar
- Zoom
- WebinarJam
- EasyWebinar
Actually, I also found an amazing software for streaming live webinars, which is called StreamOut.
You will be able to broadcast live events on social media with StreamOut, which includes customizable registration pages, email and SMS notifications, instant screen sharing, and so much more – and build your subscriber base while doing so. You can check out my StreamOut review here.
You might prefer a free webinar option if you’re just getting started with webinar marketing. In late 2016, YouTube Live replaced Hangouts on Air and can be enabled through your Google account. To create an interactive webinar using social media, you will have to find a workaround.
For more information on starting with YouTube Live, read Social Media Examiner’s guide, and learn about Meet, Google’s enterprise alternative to Hangouts on Air. If you’re doing a small webinar, it may also be worth checking out.
A video hosting site is also essential after the webinar ends. There is always YouTube, but other options include Wistia and Vimeo.
Planning Your Webinar Marketing
Your webinar is now ready for promotion. Creating an opt-in form on your registration page is the first step. It will also include bullet points that show what attendees will learn from the webinar.
A brief biography of each speaker is necessary, as well as details about their expertise. In addition to the length of the webinar, you can also provide an expected duration:
Some people use their website or registration page to mention that their webinar is free.
Likewise, if your company or speaker possesses social proof, you should include it as well. Testimonials, endorsements, and even your number of social shares will reassure prospective attendees that your webinar will be a good fit for them and that you are an entertaining speaker.
Email is the main promotional tactic, followed by social media, that you will use for your webinar. Approximately 70% of Unbounce’s webinar signing-ups are done through email. The importance of email opt-ins to promote your webinar can’t be overstated.
There should be an optin on the main registration page so you can stay in touch and send reminders before the webinar. Sending at least one reminder is good practice, says ReadyTalk. Most people send three email updates.
You can create a sense of urgency by using a Countdown Timer optin in place of a conventional optin.
Additionally, a registration page can include an exit intent optin to attract those who may still be on the fence. In your emails as well as on your primary website, you can use these optins. A popup and sidebar opt-in at the end of the webinar is recommended by Razor Social to increase conversion rates.
A yes/no optin allows people to make a distinct choice about how they want to sign up. Conversions increase with these optins.
Your webinar invitation and email series will need to be created with the help of an email marketing service. Approximately two weeks prior to the webinar date, ReadyTalk’s research shows most signups will occur.
In addition, you’ll want to get your social media campaign started. It might be as simple as posting about your webinar on social media or posting regular reminders of the webinar in your ads. Using this method, you can drip feed teaser content to attract more attention.
Among the other promotional tactics are:
- By publishing guest posts or appearing in interviews, you can enhance your authority and promote the topic of your webinar
- Making a promotional video for your webinar
- Promoting your website with banners
- Adding a link to your webinar registration page to your regular thank you message to subscribers
Additionally, to measure webinar success, you will need to create custom URLs for tracking and use a Facebook pixel to track the results of your email campaign.
You might want to invite an influential speaker to your webinar or have them co-host it. You can reach twice as many people this way.
How to Market After the Webinar
Your webinar audience still has other opportunities to convert after the session is over. All participants should be sent a link to the replay video, and those who did not take the next step should receive an email message. Time-limited discounts can persuade customers.
Final step: make your registration page a replayed webinar signup page so people will not miss your next webinar.
Checklist for Webinar Planning
Here’s a quick recap to help you plan your webinar correctly:
- Consider the topic that will be most effective for your existing content marketing.
- Titles should be both informative and appealing.
- Organize the text and bullet points on your registration page. Social proof is important.
- There should be 15 minutes for questions during a 60-minute webinar.
- Make sure the slides are easy to read by going through them quickly.
- Don’t forget to include a call-to-action in your webinar.
- A website of your choosing should host the webinar videos afterwards.
- Promote your webinars with sign-up forms and email marketing campaigns.
- Use social media to promote your webinar.
- By following up with webinar leads afterward, you will convert more leads into sales.
It’s clear that webinar marketing can be very effective, not only for promoting a business, but also for selling products and services. Email marketing is key to success in webinar marketing, so if you’re interested in improving your open rates read these tips.