Looking for the best way to promote your business and generate high-quality leads in 2021? Then let us introduce you to webinar marketing!
In this article, we’ll explain what webinar marketing is, why your company should use it, and a simple, 4-step webinar marketing strategy you can implement right away. Sound like a plan? Then keep reading and we’ll dive right in!
Table of Contents
What is Webinar Marketing?
Let’s start with the basics!
A webinar is an online seminar that allows marketers, salespeople, educators, and other professionals to interact with leads/customers/students/etc. in real-time.
Webinar marketing then is the act of using online seminars to better promote a company and its product and/or services to its target audience.
In most cases, webinars are held to generate leads, build brand awareness and authority, and develop relationships with prospects. But webinars can also be used to demo products, educate high school and college students, and even stimulate cash flow.
We’ll talk more about the benefits of webinar marketing in the next section.
Why Your Company Should Use Webinar Marketing
We’ve covered the what, how about the why? As in, why should you invest in webinar marketing? Simply put: because it will benefit your business. Here are four awesome advantages you’ll experience once you start hosting webinars.
1. Greater Content Generation
We all know that content is king. The question is, how do you create enough quality content to move the needle for your business? Webinar marketing can help!
The online seminars you host can be recorded, post-edited, and then repurposed into additional pieces of content. For example, you can post clips of your webinar to your Instagram stories. Or upload the entire event to YouTube. Or save specific sections and add them to the customer training section of your company’s website.
But it doesn’t stop there. The transcripts of your webinars can serve as the foundation for future blog posts, social media updates, and more. The options are nearly limitless!
2. Improved SEO Performance
Experts predict that online videos will make up 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022. That means that your target audience is actively looking for video content. Because of this, search engines like Google and Bing reward websites that publish high-quality videos with higher rankings in their search engine results pages (SERP).
By reposting your webinars to your website and social pages, you’ll be able to drive a consistent stream of targeted traffic to your online properties for free.
Videos can also help your business build its backlink portfolio.
Because modern consumers LOVE video content, they’re more willing to link to the videos a brand creates than to the blog posts. This leads to more backlinks for the companies that invest in video content like webinars and greater SEO performance.
3. Increased Brand Awareness
A recognizable brand that stands out from the competition is one of the pillars of a successful business. Webinar marketing will help you get your brand in front of more people, thus increasing your brand awareness every time you host a new online event.
More than that, webinars allow businesses to build authority in their niches. What good is it if your target audience knows about your company but doesn’t respect it?
A well-crafted webinar (don’t worry, we’ll show you how to host a successful webinar later in this article) will enable you to introduce your brand to more people and boost your standing in their eyes. That way, they feel comfortable buying from you in the future.
4. Better Audience Engagement
Finally, webinar marketing will help you engage with your audience in real-time. This is a benefit that only a few other marketing channels can claim.
Sure, you can respond to blog and social media comments as soon as they’re posted. But it’s not the same as interacting with prospects in a face-to-face manner. With webinar software, you’ll be able to see and hear each other, almost as if you’re all standing in the same room.
This level of engagement will lead to a better understanding of your target audience, deeper relationships with them, and greater customer loyalty.
A Simple, 4-Step Webinar Marketing Strategy
Webinar marketing is obviously beneficial—but only if it’s used properly. Fortunately, the 4-step strategy we outline below will have you crushing webinars in no time flat!
1. Plan
The first step is to plan your webinar properly. Doing so will ensure you have your technology requirements on lock, craft detailed and engaging content, and present the information you wish to share in a concise, timely manner. Don’t try and wing it!
Pick the Right Software
Here’s the thing, you can’t just host a webinar. You need a software tool to connect you with your audience in real-time. There are free options that offer bare-bones features. Then there’s ClickMeeting, which will give you every feature you need in a simple to use, affordable package.
Our solution has custom branding, screen sharing, in-app polls and surveys, webinar recording, analytics, and many more tools.
Try ClickMeeting for free for 30 days. If you like it, sign up for as low as $25 a month.
Craft Your Webinar Content
What will you talk about during your webinar? Better question: what does your audience want you to talk about during your webinar? Always keep your viewers in mind when creating webinar content. They’re the ones that have to consume it, after all.
If you’re not sure what your audience wants, do a little research. Which blog and social posts do they engage with most? What videos get the most views? If you’re still stuck on content topics, send a quick email to your subscribers and literally ask them what they want.
Design a Schedule
Now that you know what you’re going to talk about, you can create a webinar schedule. Just make sure to leave a bit of wiggle room in case things don’t go exactly according to plan. Because when does anything ever go exactly according to plan?
We suggest making your webinar 45 minutes to 1 hour long and setting aside about 15 minutes of that time to answer audience questions.
2. Promote
Is your webinar planned out? Great! Now you can start promoting it. Here are a few tips:
Start Marketing Early
If your webinar is scheduled for tomorrow, you better have been marketing it for the last few weeks, at least. If you haven’t, nobody will show up.
Give yourself plenty of time to get the word out about your webinar. That way, more people will be able to adjust their schedules (if necessary) to participate.
Choose Your Channels
How do you plan to reach your target audience? There are A LOT of different channels available to you. Here are a few of our favorites:
If you have an email list (and let’s be honest, EVERY business should have an email list), now is the time to use it. Message your subscribers and tell them about your upcoming webinar, what topics you’ll cover, and why they should attend.
Social Media. Take advantage of social media, too. Post about your next online event on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and every other site your business is on. Consider giving your followers a “backstage pass” and updating them on the planning process.
Paid Ads. If you feel confident in the information you plan to share during your webinar, and that said information will lead to future sales, try running paid ads (Facebook ads, AdWords campaigns, etc.) to get the word out.
Influencer Marketing. One of the best ways to market anything is to tap into pre-established audiences. Connect with influencers in your niche and ask them to promote your webinar to their followers. Just be prepared to offer them something in exchange, AKA money, a shoutout on your company blog, etc.
You don’t have to use every channel listed above. Choose the ones you know you can use effectively and consistently and forget the rest. Speaking of consistency…
Prioritize Consistency
Lastly, make sure you consistently promote your webinar. This is key! If you send an email announcing your webinar in four weeks, then don’t mention it to your subscribers until the day before you go live, you won’t have many attendees.
Humans need to hear a marketing message at least seven times before they take action on it. So, make sure you promote your webinar on a regular basis.
The trick is to market your event in creative ways that feel fresh. In other words, don’t send the same exact email, or post an identical tweet on Twitter, seven times and call it a day. Change things up to reach peak effectiveness.
3. Engage
The day of your webinar is here—it’s a go time! After all the planning and promoting, you’re finally going to get the chance to engage with your audience in real-time. This is what webinar marketing is all about! To get the most out of the experience, keep these things in mind:
Know Your Material. Study the content you plan to share so that you know it like the back of your hand. That way, you can speak confidently during your webinar. We even suggest practicing your presentation in the mirror before going live.
Ask the Audience Questions. The best way to engage your webinar audience is to ask them questions. This is easily done in ClickMeeting via our tool’s polling feature. But even simple questions like, “Does that make sense?” allow for audience input.
Include Visual Aids. Do you know what’s NOT fun? Watching someone talk for an hour. Make sure your presentation includes charts, graphs, videos, or other kinds of visual content to keep attendees engaged and help them internalize the info you share.
You may have planned the best webinar content. But if you don’t deliver it in an engaging way, you won’t experience the benefits of webinar marketing.
4. Follow Up and Analyze
Your webinar just ended and it was a smashing success. Congratulations! But don’t kick up your feet just yet. You still have more work to do.
The post-webinar follow-up process is vitally important to webinar marketing. Here’s a quick checklist to make sure your follow-up is as effective as possible:
Send a Thank-You Message. Your attendees didn’t have to come to your event. Shoot them a message and let them know how much you appreciate them.
Conduct a Post-Webinar Survey. What did your viewers like about your webinar? What drove them crazy? A post-webinar survey will let you know what to improve.
Contact Absent Leads. Just because someone registered for your event doesn’t mean they attended. Send absent leads a link to your webinar recording.
Study Webinar Analytics. Solutions like ClickMeeting give users insight into the success of their webinars. Analyze the metrics these tools provide.
Read Through Feedback. Take a look at the feedback you receive from your post-webinar survey. Then use the information to craft a better presentation next time.
Repurpose Your Webinar. Now that you have a recording of your webinar, you can repurpose it into other pieces of content as we talked about earlier in this article.
Plan Your Next Online Event. If one webinar was good, wouldn’t two webinars be better? Start planning your next one ASAP to take advantage of webinar marketing.
Wrapping Up
Webinar marketing is one, if not the best, way to promote a business and generate leads in 2021. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to do if you follow the 4-step strategy listed above.
Need an easy to use, yet powerful software to supercharge your webinar marketing efforts? ClickMeeting is the platform you’ve been waiting for. Sign up for a free trial and get access to all of our industry-leading tools for 30 days—no credit card required!
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