Webinars are a great way to interact with your audience on a personal level. People attend webinars because they are looking to learn about a specific topic. By teaching them about this topic, you give them a lot of educational value, and build trust.
Webinars tend to be most helpful in converting prospects or free users into paying customers.
As a bi-product, you will also create awesome content that you can use to attract more users.
When should I consider using webinars?
Webinars are a high effort, high reward marketing activity, so it is important to use webinars at the right time.
If you have a followers list of a few hundred people or more, webinars can be very effective.
Your followers list can be made out of users who signed up with their email, subscribers to your newsletter or followers on LinkedIn or Twitter. It doesn’t really matter as long as you have a good way of reaching them online.
If you are looking to build your email list or followers list, I would suggest starting with other marketing strategies, for example writing content, engaging with a community or offering a free product your audience finds valuable.
Why live webinars and not just video content?
You might be thinking: Live webinars are dead, everyone consumes content in video.
Videos are definitely more popular, but webinars are still used by the best companies, and for a good reason. Some people just prefer the extra hand holding. These are the people who will prefer a personal demo or onboarding call.
I see 3 main advantages to live webinars over video content:
Live webinars have a deadline, and deadlines help people to commit. You can always postpone watching a video. This is why limited “free trials” work, and this is also why webinars work.
Live webinars allow for a Q&A session. In my opinion, this is the most important part of the webinar. People who attend the webinar will get expert advice for free. And if you answer their questions well, you will gain their trust.
Live webinars are a great “excuse” for multiple touchpoints, where you can share more about what you are doing, and provide additional value.
Can I run webinars with a small budget?
The good news is that you don’t need a large budget to create and run webinars. Even the most basic Zoom package allows you to host up to 100 attendees, which is already a large event.
To promote your webinar you will need a form to collect webinar registrations, an email tool to webinar reminders, and a channel to promote your webinar, either through an email list or through social networks.
If you are running an online business, most likely you will have all of these tools already in place so you won’t need to allocate any additional budget for your webinar.
How can I get started with webinars?
Generally speaking, hosting a successful webinar requires going through the following 7 steps. In my next posts, I will deep dive into each of these steps.
- Choose your webinar topic and speaker
- Choose your webinar steaming platform
- Promote your webinar
- Prepare the content for the webinar
- Prepare the after-webinar followup
- Host the webinar
- Analyze the webinar results and iterate