Webinars have become a highly effective B2B marketing and sales strategy in 2020. Moreover, ~70% of marketing and sales leaders say that hosting webinars is the best way to generate high-quality leads.
Establish Your Brand As An Industry Thought Leader
The main reason people want to attend webinars is to learn something new. Webinar attendees want to learn new skills, gain new insights, or generally be up-to-date with the latest industry trends.
If you’re the one giving the webinar presentation, you’ll be seen as a thought leader in that industry. This is extremely important for creating trust and respect within your audience.
Once you’ve established yourself as an industry thought leader and created trust, it becomes much easier to sell online courses and products.
Create Brand Awareness
Brand awareness gets a bad rep in the performance marketing industry because it’s hard to measure. Also, awareness campaigns usually take a lot of time to materialize into brand recognition and sales.
Nevertheless, 60% of people are more likely to buy new products from familiar brands. That goes to show that once brand awareness is achieved, it becomes much easier to launch new products that are successful right off the bat.
If you start hosting webinars frequently, you’ll start creating an association with the industry and your brand. It’s important to note that brand recognition helps not just one of your products, but all of them.
Generate Highly Targeted Leads
Webinar topics are often revolving around solving practical problems or teaching new skills. That means nearly every webinar signup is a quality lead. Nobody has time to sign up for a webinar, show up at a specific time, and listen to it for an hour if they don’t experience the same problem.
The desire to solve a problem or learn a new skill is so high that they’re willing to give out their email by signing up, show up, and attend a 1-hour webinar regarding the topic. Their desire to achieve this might even be so high that they’re willing to pay top dollar for solving it.
Highly Effective For Acquiring Paying Customers
Webinars are built to be engaging and interactive. The best webinar software in the industry has very smart and useful features to keep the audience engaged and interested.
Some of the features that you can use to keep your webinar attendees engaged are:
- Responding to their chat messages and greeting them
- Launching polls and drawing conclusions from the results, live
- Launching a Q&A session at the end of the webinar
- Switching between slides and webcam to emphasize points and keep it interesting
- Launch video testimonials of your previous satisfied customers
- Launch a pre-configured call-to-action to make your offer attractive
I’ve found that the built-in call-to-action features help to boost sales immensely when it features a product image, a CTA button and a countdown timer.
The countdown timer creates a scarcity effect and increases sales.
Increase Customer Activation and Reduce Churn
Webinars are not only about sales.
If you’re a SaaS company, especially if your product/service is more to the expensive side, you should definitely host customer onboarding webinars.
Expensive products are typically flooded with features and neat things it can do. You can’t expect your customers to dig through your “knowledgebase”.
They want to see the product in action, they want to see how it solves real problems, they want to ask specific questions. Host webinars to give them that and you’ll see customer activation shoot through the roof.
The same principle applies to churn.
People are leaving your product because:
- It doesn’t appear to solve their problem efficiently (i.e. confusing)
- Its cost is higher than the perceived value (i.e. expensive)
In both cases, the gained value / cost ratio is off. Help them realize the value of your product and they won’t leave you.
You’ll also be talking to your customers, which is priceless. Getting frequent customer feedback about the product and the industry problems should be your compass when building a SaaS product. Webinars provide the perfect platform to do that.
Create Partnership Opportunities And Guest Appearances
Once you’re hosting webinars regularly, you’ll start getting partnership requests. The value in educational partnered webinars is two-fold:
- It’s so much easier to generate content when you have a guest speaker. For example, you can go interview style and ask your guest some industry-specific questions. It’s just easier to create content when there are two or more hosts.
- You’ll have amazing opportunities to tap into your guest’s audience. Typically, guest webinars mean that your guest will promote it to their audience as well. If their audience is in the same niche, they’ll likely subscribe to you as well.
By either appearing as a guest or inviting a guest to your webinar, you’ll generate loads of new marketing opportunities and unlock new audiences. It’s also easier to come up with and deliver the webinar content.
On-Demand Webinars Run On Autopilot
Once you become skilled at hosting webinars, you can start experimenting with hosting automated webinars.
They’re basically webinar sessions that are pre-recorded and made available on-demand and instantly. However, they still require registration, so you’ll still be generating leads.
Pre-recorded webinars are usually generated from exceptionally successful live webinars. That’s why hosting automated webinars is an advanced marketing strategy. But it essentially means that your webinars take your time out of the equation. They’ll start generating revenue and leads 24/7.
In Conclusion, Webinars Are Essential For Your Business, Because…
They gather a highly targeted audience, who are interested in learning about a skill or solving a specific problem. As you’re showing or explaining how to solve these industry-specific problems, you’re starting to establish yourself as an authority in that industry.
As you’re generating trust from your audience, you’re also creating hours and hours’ worth of video content. Once your webinar delivery is spot on, you can export the webinar recording and turn in into an automated webinar.
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Erkki Muuga
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- Why Webinars Are Essential For Your Business In 2020 - August 25, 2020
