Businesses often dedicate a significant portion of their budget to tradeshows and conferences. These were once the only methods available to have live conversations and interactions with your potential customers.
Webinars offer the same value yet allow to you take it much further than trade shows. Rather than a passing glance before moving on to the next booth, you get to capture the attention of an eager-to-learn audience for an extended period of time. They know you’re going to be there to provide them with value relevant to their particular needs – so they’re listening and attentive. In other words, there is no better audience that’s likely to become your customer than those that come willingly to your webinar.
Attracts an Audience of Qualified Leads
Anyone can click on a promoted webinar link to get more information, but only those whom are truly interested in what you are offering will go as far as to provide their name and email address to sign up. These are qualified leads who have now given you permission to contact them and eventually pitch to them; and the webinar hasn’t even started yet!
To ensure you get the best quality leads, make your webinar topic one that will be relevant to the persons most likely to buy your products and ensure your title conveys this. For example, a marketing agency might host a webinar entitled ‘10 Things Small Businesses Should Consider When Hiring a Marketing Agency‘. Only small businesses interested in an agency (or wanting to find out if their current one meets the criteria) will be tuning in.
Helps to Build Brand Equity & Credibility
Customers buy from brands they trust. One of the best ways to build this trust is to offer as much value as you can while proving that you are an authority in the field.
The first few minutes of a webinar are usually dedicated to providing background information about a speaker and why they are qualified to speak on the topic they are presenting. Viewers welcome this.
Additionally, some webinar tools, such as ClickWebinar, let businesses brand the screen so that viewers will be seeing your logo throughout the entire session and connecting it mentally with the expert information they are receiving for free.
Forges Connections Through Live Engagement
The ‘live’ element is an important one – it allows the customer to give automatic feedback or ask questions as they come to mind, while being assured of an immediate response from the salesperson or expert in front of them.
One of the biggest reasons persons join webinars is to get answers to their burning questions from someone more knowledgeable and experienced. This can often provide an excellent opportunity to show the group of listeners how your product can help with the issue they are having; not something you could simply achieve with a pamphlet.
Allows You to a Welcomed Opportunity to Pitch Your Product
Everyone who joins a webinar expects a product pitch. Some will welcome it and hope it comes with a special offer, others won’t mind and a few will try to skip out before that point because they’re only interested in what’s free (don’t worry about them, Freebie Hunters tend to be horrible customers anyway).
The key to making this element of your webinar as successful as possible in turning prospects into customers is to ensure that your offer is specialized and targeted directly to the audience you have in front of you. If your offer could double as a national television advertisement, it’s probably not a good idea.
Traditionally, webinar pitches are placed at the end. Recently, experts such as Stephen Beck recommend you “design your webinar presentation with the pitch in the middle and your best points at the end. That way, they will remain on the webinar through the pitch in order to get to the best points at the end.”
Gives You the Ability to Build Relationships
Not everyone that signs up all make it to your webinar, and not all those that do make it will be ready to buy your product right away. They may still be interested but simply didn’t have the time or still have a few concerns.
Since you’ve already captured their contact information in the beginning, this is a prime opportunity to reach out and offer an opportunity to watch the webinar if they missed it and convey that you, or a salesperson, are available to answer any additional questions they have. You can also invite them to other webinars that might help them even further.
As you can see, webinars are packed with sales opportunities. They have the unique ability to convert your audience into fans and customers within 30-60 minutes – it typically takes 7 brand interactions to do that!
So now that you know just how beneficial webinars can be to your bottom line, take the next step by checking out this Income Diary article with a few specific tips on how to sell with webinars.
Cover photo credit: Stephan Ridgway
