Since the early 2000s, webinars have become downright commonplace in the business world. They’re a convenient way to share information with a lot of people regardless of their location, plus they’re inexpensive to produce. Now, they’re a ubiquitous part of the landscape. You might feel like everyone offers webinars, regardless of their industry or the size of their organization.
Webinars are an effective tool for teaching, sharing information, and carrying on a conversation with a targeted audience— but how can they be used as a tool for lead generation? Let’s take a closer look at webinars and their different uses.
Why Webinars?
If you’ve ever had to travel to a professional development seminar, you know what a hassle it can be. You have to arrange airfare, car rental, accommodations, and meals— these costs are all in addition to the cost of the seminar itself. And when you return from being out of the office for days, you’re greeted with a mountain of emails and work to sift through. Yes, it’s nice to network with other people in your industry, but does this benefit outweigh the tremendous cost and inconvenience?
Your audience feels the same way.
They want to hear what you’ve got to offer, but they’d prefer to hear it from the comfort of their own office. And, to be honest, it’s more convenient for you. You can speak from your own familiar conference space— or even your desk. You won’t have to hire a venue, decide on catering options, or spend valuable time away from your office.
How Can Webinars Benefit YOUR Business?
What else can webinars do for you? Here are 4 benefits of webinars:
Benefit #1: Build up your brand and establish you as an authority in your field. What better way to let your audience know that you understand their pain points and that you have a solution to resolve them than to speak to them directly about your product or service? A webinar gives them the opportunity to ask you questions and get the answers directly from you.
Additionally, your passion about your product or service will be visible to your audience. When you’re excited about what you have to offer, it builds more enthusiasm among the webinar attendees.
Benefit #2: Improve your search engine rankings. Video is more popular than ever and Google has taken notice. When you offer your audience high-quality content and video material, your search engine results will rise accordingly.
A webinar offers you the opportunity to add more video content to your website. Say, for instance, your webinar is an hour long. You can cut it up into several short video clips and use it across your social media channels, blog, and website.
Optimize the videos with long-tail keywords to further enhance your search engine optimization (SEO) and create backlinks, sending more visitors to your site. The opportunities for this video footage are endless.
Benefit #3: Educate your audience. Who knows better how to best use your product or service than you? A webinar can offer customers tremendous added value. It’s a simple way to increase customer satisfaction and ensure that they fully understand the product or service, which can significantly reduce the number of negative online reviews.
Why should you care about your online reviews? Well, a whopping 84% of consumers trust the reviews they read online as much as they trust recommendations from friends. Making sure that your customers have a good understanding of your product and service can make the difference between a glowing review and a hatchet job.
Benefit #4: Generate additional leads. And now, we’ve reached our main point: webinars are an incredibly effective method of lead generation. Lead generating begins well before your webinar kicks off; just ask everyone interested in attending the webinar to give their email address (and permission for additional contact, if you want to be compliant with the EU’s new GDPR) as they register.
This practice will build up your email list in no time, which will be a big help as you plan additional marketing campaigns down the road. If these people are interested enough to sign up for your webinar, you can safely assume that they’d like to learn more about what you have to offer.
Webinars also offer a great opportunity for social media promotion; you can post about the upcoming webinar on all of your social media platforms. Have you snagged an industry expert to speak during your webinar? Ask them to advertise it across their social media platforms, too. You’ll reach an entirely new audience; this is an excellent way to show them what you’ve got to offer.
What are the Challenges of Webinars?
Like any marketing tactic, webinars are not without challenges. Here are just a few of them, along with the ways to avoid them!
Challenge #1: Technical difficulties. The best way to avoid technical difficulties is to have a good working knowledge of the technology prior to the date of your webinar. Get familiar with the platform you’ve chosen.
Say you’ve decided to use the platform WorkCast to broadcast your webinar. At least a few days prior to your webinar, log on to the platform to get a good look at the interface. You can choose a template, ask questions using their live chat feature, and generally get comfortable with the platform.
If you can, pull in a couple of coworkers to log in ahead of time to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Do an audio and video check so that you’ll have the lighting and sound down pat prior to the big day. Preparation will make you feel better and eliminate the possibility that you’ll be scrambling during the webinar.
Challenge #2: Poor promotion. If you broadcast a webinar and no one is there to see it, did it really happen? Well, yes, of course it did, but that’s a lot of effort to undertake for no audience. How do you prevent this nightmare scenario? Good promotion before the event.
By far, the most popular method of webinar promotion is email. If you’ve collected an email list, send an invite to your upcoming webinar to everyone on the list four weeks in advance. Webinar platform GoToWebinar has found that their registrations spike between 8am-10am, so be sure that your webinar-related emails go out first thing in the morning.
As you get closer to the date, increase your promotion. 69% of webinar registrations occur a week prior to the event, with close to a third of all registrations coming in the day before the webinar.
Challenge #3: Keep it interesting. Ok, your audience is present, you’ve got your technical difficulties smoothed out… but are you keeping your audience’s attention? If you’re planning to lecture to your audience for the whole hour, you might reconsider that.
Audiences have become far too savvy to want to sit through that. They want to interact with you. Fortunately, many platforms offer tools that allow your audience to engage in real time. For instance, you could create a poll to be deployed at a certain point in your discussion.
If nothing else, save time for an audience Q&A. Give your audience the floor and allow them to ask questions to make sure they get the opportunity to learn about the products or services that they’re most interested in.
"5 Ways To Make Your Webinars Rock With HubSpot"
Are you know to Webinars? Are you trying to find the right solution? Watching one of our recent webinars below, might be helpful. Reach out with questions!
Is a Webinar Right For You?
In a word, yes.
Webinars are inexpensive, they’re accessible, and they’re an easy way to boost your lead generation. Your audience has very likely already experienced a webinar at some point, so you won’t have to do a lot of extra work to get them to buy in.
Are you a HubSpot user? They are partnered with webinar platform WorkCast, making it simple to deliver a live or on-demand webinar directly from your HubSpot account. You’ll have instant access to the data you need to conduct a successful webinar.
If you’d like to discuss webinars or any other method of lead generation, we’d love to chat. Schedule a complimentary 30-minute strategy session with our team today!
