To build or enhance your personal brand, nurturing close relationships with your audience is mission critical. Becoming an expert in the marketing, PR, or growth hacking worlds all require finding new and better ways to communicate. Providing valuable webinars is a great way to start and continue conversations. Although webinars can be challenging when you’re just starting out, we’ve compiled some great solutions to common obstacles experienced by most newbie hosts and business owners.
If you give your audience new ideas, you instantly become a credible source for your chosen subject. Customers, new and existing, can benefit from the many tips you have on latest trends, industry development forecasts, and your own analysis of report data.
Whether they’ve been involved in the industry for decades or they’re just starting out, everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow in their field. As a result, you can use webinars to interact with and suggest new perspectives on topics they can improve on.
Here’s a deep dive into how using webinars to generate and nurture needs from your target demo.
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What are the main uses for webinars?
Webinars are a multi-faceted tool with a lot of great uses. Here are some of the ways you might want to use a webinar when building your thought leader status:
- Sharing Ideas
Even if you don’t have any completely original ideas, your unique brand provides an interesting perspective for viewers. It’s been scientifically proven that learning a familiar concept in a new way (whether you hear it, write it, or watch it) increases retention by allowing the mind to process the lesson on a deeper level. By giving your audience another opportunity to learn with your webinar, you’re increasing their capacity to incorporate the ideas with their work in a meaningful way.
- Inspiring Attendees
Sometimes all it takes is a little spark of genius. Whether your webinar audience follows your advice or takes their own creative spin, your creative examples and tips could be the catalyst for significant change.
- Generating New Needs for Your Prospects
Ever hear the saying, you don’t know what you don’t know? Sometimes all it takes is a little guidance to show attendees that there are hidden roadblocks to their goals they might not have considered before. You can use a webinar to interact with them directly and present your knowledge and experience. There’s a great chance that your webinar could open their eyes to a whole new world of growth possibilities.
And by providing them with free and valuable information now, that same audience has a high potential for becoming hot leads and eventually clients down the road.
5 Ways to Generate and Nurture Needs with Webinars
Webinars present many opportunities to capture leads during and after the event occurs. These are the most popular and effective methods for supercharging your presentation:
1. Make the Most of Chat Mode
The point of hosting a webinar is interacting with your audience so chat mode is essential. They can interact with you and with each other directly in one location you can review and monitor. Brainstorm some conversation starters ahead of time to keep things moving if there’s a lull.
One great way to get a little extra mileage out of chat modes is by using Facebook or YouTube live streaming. Your webinar will reach a wider audience and engage with followers who are already interested in what you have to say. When the presentation is done, you can easily post the webinar and continue chatting or answering comments with your audience right on your social profile.
2. Include a Q&A Session
While you’re chatting way during the webinar, keep track of questions your viewers ask and make sure you address them during the Q&A at the end. Call our contributors by name, thank them for the question and answer it as best you can. If you’re really stumped or would like another group member to help out, just ask! Remember that at this point, it’s all about facilitating the conversation so the pressure is off of you to get it all right the first time.
Bonus tip: keep that list of questions from the webinar handy. It’ll serve as great content marketing fodder as you continue to establish or enhance your brand. Use it to inspire blog posts, Facebook polls, or even more webinars.
3. Maximize the Effectiveness of Follow-Ups
If actually having the webinar is the first step in hosting one, following up would certainly be the second but equally as important step. Make sure to use the following three follow ups for every webinar you host.
Include a call to action. Say it out loud in the video, write it in the chat thread, and remember to link it when you include it in the recording description when you repost it later.
Use email marketing. Now that attendees have willingly shared their emails to participate in the webinar, you can send direct messages to your warm leads through weekly or monthly inbox blasts.
Include your afterthoughts and summary of the latest webinar along with a new on-demand webinar that they can use to further drive home the point of the event. To share an on-demand webinar, simply record a free seminar and your email list of registered attendees will instantly receive access. Double your content visibility by enabling social sharing options so viewers can send it to their networks as well.
And finally, use your webinar contact list to personally invite previous attendees to new events. Customize your communication to remind them how much they enjoyed the last one. Then include a pitch for how this new webinar relates to or enhances the last one. If you chose to create another webinar based on questions asked in the previous Q&A this should be an easy sell.
Final Thoughts
Remember, you don’t have to the very best in your field to host an amazing and valuable webinar. Engaging with your audience is cornerstone action for brand building. By sharing the knowledge you do have, you can attract new leads and convert more followers with just a few well-executed webinars.
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