The value of education permeates all levels of society. When it comes to having an online marketing strategy, sharing knowledge, and being willing to educate your customers is an important way to build and nurture relationships. Webinars provide a cost-effective marketing strategy to reach a wide audience and connect with new and existing customers.
Although sales webinars have their place in online marketing, you should never underestimate the power of hosting educational webinars for your business. In fact, just concentrating on sales during any webinar will most likely push customers away rather that entice them to make a purchase. The majority of people attending webinars are looking to gain some unique insight into your product or business services and educational webinars can fill that need.
How to Host Educational Webinars for Business
Historian Carter G. Woodson is quoted as saying: “The mere implanting of information is not education.” To make sure that you host a webinar that is truly educational for your audience you should make sure and deliver high-quality content that is of use to your audience.
Educational webinars need to focus more on how to apply the concepts of a product or service rather than just offering list of many different ways on to use the product with a snappy sales pitch at the end. If your webinar provides extensive information on your product, your attendees will view this as something of true value and will come to view you as an authority in your industry.
What are some of the best ways that you can use webinars as an educational tool to promote and market your business?
The Best Educational Webinar Ideas for Business
There are many ways that you can use webinars to educate your customers. You should not worry that by focusing on educational webinars you will be missing out on sales. When your audience see that they receive something of value, they will be more inclined to buy your product.
Product Demonstration
Product demonstrations are the most obvious way to educate potential and existing customers about your services. However, just promoting your webinar as a product demonstration may not entice many to attend the event.
One way to enhance the product demonstration webinar is to invite a respected industry authority to your event. This adds a great amount of value to your presentation and the advice and training that your authority figure offers will do much to enhance the educational value of your webinar.
You should also make sure that your demonstration webinar focuses on in-depth solutions to common problems that your audience faces. You can then show how your product can be used to benefit your audience.
“How to” Educational Webinars
Knowing insider industry tips are always viewed as valuable to your audience. Everyone loves to know how they can do things better. So, can you organize a series of webinars focusing on a step-by-step “how to?”
Of course, the type of topics that you choose will depend greatly on your product and type of audience. However, seeing a “hands-on” educational presentation will provide value to your audience. Also, because the “how to” webinars are promoted as a step-by-step series of webinars, you will almost guarantee that attendees will sign up for the next educational webinar.
Regular Q&A Educational Webinars
It is difficult to know what the needs of your audience are and what issues they are facing with your product. That is why regular Q&A webinars are excellent educational tools for both you, as a host and for your audience.
If you decide to use Q&A webinars as an educational tool, have your customers send in their questions beforehand. This gives you time to research solutions to their problems and come up with valuable content as a solution.
You can also dedicate 10 minutes of free-time at the end of the webinar session so that those who are really interested in the product can ask extra questions or provide their own insights into your product. This can help you develop better products in the future or give you topics of interest for forthcoming webinars.
Online Training
Online training is an excellent way to educate an audience in a webinar because it provides a great amount of value to your audience and keeps them coming back for more. In each educational webinar, you can provide personalized and specific training suited to the needs of your audience.
It has been said that a great teacher is one draws out information from students, not imparts it. One of the best ways to do draw your audience out is to ask many questions. Very often, they come up with the practical solutions themselves. For example, you could ask: “Here is a common problem that many find with What would be your solution to solve it?”
Case Study Webinars
Hosting case study webinars can be of great educational value to your audience. You can ask some of your clients if they would be willing to share their stories in a forthcoming webinar presentation.
The advantage of this in an educational webinar is that your audience gets to hear different points of view from real users. Additionally, the information comes across and unbiased because clients are offering their own viewpoint and tips on how to use the product.
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