Hosting webinars can be very effective for your business in numerous ways. In this article, you’ll learn the most impactful webinar marketing strategies and practices to grow your audience and increase sales revenue.
Webinars are often used for financial services, consulting and coaching. However, the purpose of a webinar can vary greatly. It can be purely educational, aiming only to teach useful tips and share industry knowledge. Or, it can be purely led by sales, focusing only on the promotion of a service or a product.
Even before creating your webinar topic title, you should decide what’s the purpose of your webinar and then choose a relevant webinar marketing strategy.
Strategy 1: Webinars for Quality Lead Generation
Webinar topics usually focus around sharing industry-specific insights and knowledge. They focus on teaching a practical skill or solving a specific problem in an industry.
Webinars also have a very engaging format. The host is giving the presentation live, which gives an opportunity to the audience to ask questions that are specific to them.
All attendees are required to sign up with their emails and attend the live webinar at a certain time. That means you’ll be gathering email leads from people in the industry, which your webinar covers. For all the attendees that have showed up in your webinar, you’ll know 3 things:
- They’re in the same industry as the webinar topic describes
- They’re currently facing the same problem that the webinar topic describes
- The problem is big enough they’re willing to give out their email and show up at a certain time and invest their time in learning about the solution
These 3 criteria convert these attendees into qualified leads. They’re looking for a solution and if your service or consultation could provide it to them, then you’ve just hit the nail on the head.
The educational value of the webinar attracts them in. Your service or coaching can be the ultimate solution to their problem.
Strategy 2: Webinars for Establishing Yourself as a Thought Leader
The second entirely viable webinar strategy is hosting purely educational webinars in a topic that you’re an expert in. This works best if you actually have tons of experience in a field.
The ideal topics for these kinds of webinars are trends and tips, for example:
- Top 10 Predictions for Cryptocurrencies in 2021
- 8 Photography Tips and Tricks Amateurs Don’t Know
- 5 Hottest Graphic Design Trends Right Now
After you’ve come up with a topic and created the webinar event, promote the webinar in relevant Facebook or LinkedIn groups. Give a teaser about the topic and encourage them to attend the webinar. Emphasize that you’re not looking to sell anything, just to share the knowledge.
Giving out free knowledge will establish yourself as an authority and boost the credibility of yourself and your brand.
A great tip here is to use a professional webinar software to record the webinar and create an on-demand webinar from it. The webinar content doesn’t have to end when the webinar is over.
You can host the webinar recording on your site and on YouTube to make it discoverable to more people.
If you consistently put out this type of content, you’ll soon be known as the industry expert and people will start finding you to buy your services or coaching.
Strategy 3: Invite Guest Speakers to Create a Wider Audience
It might be the case that you wouldn’t call yourself an expert just yet. Or the thought of hosting a 1-hour webinar might feel intimidating to you.
A great solution to both of these problems is inviting a guest speaker. This way it’ll be two of you talking. You’ll have at least twice as much material to talk about and share.
The webinar can be in an interview format. All you’d have to do is prepare a handful of questions that are potentially exciting to your audience and try to throw in your own 2 cents now and then.
To completely leverage the guest speaker, ask them to promote the webinar in their channels as well. That way you could get the word out to a lot larger audience, who are likely in the same industry. This could result in more subscribers or even more customers for you.
Just be prepared to accept your guest’s invitation to their webinar or podcast when they invite you.
Strategy 4: Webinars for Marketing and Sales
The number one reason for hosting webinars is to promote a course, service or a product. If your goal for the webinar is to get as many people signed up for your coaching session or a service, there are a couple of best practices you should know about, for example:
- Engage with your audience early on – when people join the webinar room and the webinar hasn’t started yet, greet them and talk to them. Make them feel welcomed and try to establish a connection.
- Share your webcam – People will trust you 10x more if you actually show your face when you’re talking, not just the slideshow.
- Share customer testimonials – You can invite a previous satisfied customer to join your webinar. At a certain point, give them temporary presenter permissions to vouch for you and tell your audience how life-changing your service or product was for them.
- Launch a Call-to-Action – Most webinar platforms allow you to customize a Call-to-Action, which you can launch at any time during the webinar. Make your offer look attractive.
- Take questions at the end – Your audience will always have questions. Answering those roadblocks could be the only thing stopping them from buying from you or signing up for your course.
After you’ve managed to sound like a trustworthy expert and you’ve delivered your webinar presentation in an engaging way, your attendees are likely to want to buy your course, service or product.
Strategy 5: Webinars for Collecting Insights and Data
The final clever webinar marketing strategy is hosting a webinar to gather insights and data from the audience. If that’s your strategy, then your primary goal is to come up with an attractive topic. Something that people in that industry really care about.
Start by painting a picture and introducing what you’re going to discuss and why it’s important. Explain why they’re the most suitable people to answer these questions. Be generous with compliments.
Launch polls to get their answers. Almost all webinar platforms have a polling feature. Prepare a dozen polls at least. After launching and getting the answers for every poll, share the results with all of the attendees and discuss. It makes them feel more engaged.
After the webinar, you can use these answers to create multiple pieces of data-driven, industry-expert blog posts and articles. This can further establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
About the author: Erkki Muuga is the creator of WebinarSoftware.org, a blog dedicated to help marketers, coaches and start-ups leverage webinars to grow their businesses. Having over 5 years of experience in building award-winning software either as a founder or a product manager enables him to give deep and thoughtful insight in his blog. After having travelled the world, Erkki currently lives in Estonia, the start-up paradise.
