Is a Webinar Worth Your Time?

There are so many ways that you can reach out to your target audience, it can be difficult to decide where to focus your efforts. Should you emphasize keeping your blog updated with regular content, or get your e-mail marketing campaign off the ground and running? You can’t do it all, at least not all the time, so you have to set priorities when it comes to reaching out to potential customers.

Webinars are one tool in this tool belt – but they’re not right for every job. Some circumstances are better matched with a webinar than others. If you really want to try out a webinar, go for it! Just consider the following situations that are ideal for webinars before choosing it over other forms of customer outreach.

Your Topic is Conducive to a Live Q&A

One of the cornerstones of a good webinar is a quality Q&A. Consider whether your presentation would best be explained in a live Q&A, which is a format that can only be achieved with a webinar (as far as virtual communication goes, anyway). If your topic will likely generate a lot of questions that you want to be able to answer directly, then a webinar would be a good choice of medium.

Your Product is Best Explained in a Demo

Some things can be easily understood by your customers when they read about it on your website or in an e-mail. Others are more complex, and it pays to give some human attention to clarify processes and details. Customers would much rather listen to a 1-hour webinar and have the opportunity to ask their specific questions, rather than read through a lengthy description and try to find the information they’re looking for. When you suspect that this would apply to your audience, it’s best to opt for a webinar.

You Need Interaction with Your Audience

Audience participation is a great way to get your potential and current customers to fully grasp the value of your product. Live webinars are an ideal way to get audience participation. However, there are other ways to engage your audience, so consider first whether social media might be a good alternative rather than putting the effort into a webinar. If you think that audience interaction will help create a conversation around your brand generate buzz, a webinar will do the job.

You’ve Formed a Partnership

Collaborating with another business with a similar but not exactly related brand can expand your reach and appeal to diverse markets. Such a symbiotic relationship is ideal for webinars because you can create content to attract new customers you might not be able to convert. The trick is to create a webinar on a topic that meets your two brands in the middle and emphasizes the expertise of both speakers. If you can pull this off, you have the makings of a winning webinar.

You Have an Expert Guest Speaker

Having a guest speaker can add credibility and grit to your brand’s presence. A guest speaker can offer your customer base a more neutral, unbiased perspective on your product or service and tie it into their area of expertise. If you’re lucky enough to find someone who’s an expert on a topic related to your brand’s message and goals, then take advantage of the opportunity to set up a webinar with them as a guest speaker.

Between marketing, coordination, and production, webinars are hard work. Any endeavor to create a webinar should be worth the time and effort of everyone involved. In the end, you’ll have to be the judge of whether a webinar is the best approach for your brand at this time. Doing a webinar just for the sake of doing it could be a mistake. Weigh your options first, and if you do opt for a webinar, use a high-quality video conferencing software like ClickMeeting to present it.