One of the biggest mistakes that webinar hosts can make is to turn the webinar into a sales pitch. Most people will register for a webinar so that they can learn something new. Therefore, if you want to provide value to your customers, you should always schedule educational webinars.
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What is an educational webinar?
An educational webinar is one that designed to highlight problems and issues that your customers may face with your niche or industry. They usually don’t focus on sales, although some soft sales pitches can be made in them.
They can also include training on using a particular product or service. Educational training webinars are particularly useful for your audience. These types of webinars can help customers see how a product works and allow them to ask questions. Educational webinars also emphasize that you care enough about your customers to provide them value for free.
What are the benefits of educational webinars?
There are many benefits of hosting educational webinars.
- Brand building. Educational webinars are great for brand building. The webinar will allow you the chance to showcase your skills and expertise in your industry. This can have a positive impact on sales in the long run because customers are more likely to buy products or services from authorities.
- Build relationships and trust. When customers see that you make their needs and problems a priority, then they are more likely to keep engaging with you. Over time, this can build up more interest in future webinars because they know that they will get something of value.
- Less customer service calls. You can actually reduce the amount of customer service calls if customers have received instructions and training on using the product. In addition, educational and training webinars can be edited, repackaged, and sent out as short training videos to customers.
How to provide value in a webinar
For an educational webinar to be truly valuable, various factors should be taken into consideration.
- Keep a clear goal of its purpose. If you start trying to push sales after 15 minutes then you will lose your audience. Therefore, when planning for an educational webinar, make sure that each topic has something of value.
- Focus on quality content. This is why your attendee registered in the first place ñ they want to hear quality content. Quality content can come in many forms. First of all, make sure that your attendees really learn something. Slides and visual aids are also great ways of providing value. Slides should be used to reinforce your point or message, don’t use them to repeat what you said.
- Give something away for free. You could repackage some of the content you created into a PDF training guide. This can be offered as a handout during the webinar. Alternatively, you could have a webpage with a recording of the webinar and useful links to other material. If you password protect the content, then this can be an exclusive offer to attendees.
- Provide solutions to problems. The most valuable thing for each attendee is to learn solutions to problems that they face.
- Use a soft sales pitch. If done properly, it can be possible to include a soft sales pitch at the end of an educational webinar. To do this effectively, you need to make sure that the main goal of your webinar was to educate. If you plan a soft sales pitch at the end, make sure that you offer material for free and provide great solutions to common problems throughout the webinar. At the end, the audience could be offered something of even greater value for a price.
- Use interactive sessions. Educational webinars don’t need just to be a one-way affair. Make sure and interact with your audience. This can be done by using polls and surveys as well as question and answer sessions. Don’t just leave the Q & A time to the end, but provide opportunities throughout the webinar for this. Polls and surveys are good ways to elicit feedback on products and services. Questions allow for the audience to get involved and let you show your expertise about your product or service. If a common problem is identified, then this can also give you material for a future educational webinar.
Educational webinars are an important part of a marketing strategy. They allow a business or marketer to provide true value to their customers. In turn, customers will appreciate the care that has been taken to prepare valuable material. Other types of webinars also have their place, but you can provide awesome value to your customers by presenting an educational webinar.
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