Webinar marketing is all about hosting online workshops to build a relationship with attendees and to promote and increase credibility for your business.
What’s great about webinars is that they are a win-win for both parties: attendees learn valuable content and, if you do it right, it markets or achieves a sales outcome for your business. Sounds good, right?
While webinars are a great tool to use to win business, if you don’t do it right, it can end up costing you a lot of time and effort for little reward. So this is the point of this short article. We want to show you the 3 essential steps for how to use webinars to win business.
Step 1: start with the end in mind
If you think about what you want to achieve from your webinar before you start, you can make sure that it is relevant and that it is a topic that is in demand. Before creating your webinar, explore these 4 questions:
- What is the purpose of my webinar? Is it just to inform clients, to stay front of mind or to sell an additional service?
- Who do I want there? Is it for existing clients or potential clients or both?
- What pain points are my audience motivated to solve? What are their biggest challenges at the moment?
- When will they attend a webinar? When is the most ideal time for them?
Step 2: get people to sign up, turn up, stay till the end, and to buy from you
For your webinar to be successful and for it to win you business, you will need these 4 essential processes in place:
- How I will get people to register – your webinar needs a catchy title and objectives that promise value and raise curiosity. You also need to pick a time and day that is best for your audience and use an email marketing tool to assist with registrations.
- How I will get people to turn up – streamline a process for sending email reminders to attendees (we send a total of 5 reminders to ours) and call warm prospects or people you want there.
- How I will get people to stay to the end – keep your attendees engaged and make them want to stay. You can do this by making the webinar highly interactive (especially at the beginning); tell them the agenda, promise something for those who stay to the end, and make it about your audience and their issues.
- How I will get people to buy – you need to show your audience their ‘ideal’ scenario and position your product/service as the solution to getting them there. You can do this by including case studies of clients who have had the same or similar issues and how you’ve helped them to take action and resolve them. You can also include statistics, show them the different options available to them, and have clients actually on the webinar to advocate for you in real-time.
Step 3: use the right technology
Technology can make or break a webinar, so make sure you are using the right tools. Tools that will assist you and make your life easier rather than tools that limit you. If you want to win business from your webinars, you need to be using the following technology:
- Webinar or online meeting software (e.g. Zoom, Microsoft Teams etc)
- Decent broadband and ideally a webcam
- Automated diary booking system (e.g. Calendly, AcuityScheduling etc)
- Registrant data collection tool (e.g. Eventbrite or the other event software)
- Bulk email marketing tool (e.g. Active Campaign, MailChimp etc)
Webinar marketing is a great way to win new business and to stay in front of your existing clients. You just need to know how to create a relevant and engaging webinar that your audience is interested in and you need to make it as easy as possible for people to remember to turn up and buy.
