How To Outsmart Your Competitors Using Webinars

Outsmarting Your Competitors Using Webinars

Webinars are just like online seminars. While it takes practice and good preparation to deliver an effective webinar, a webinar can become a powerful tool for businesses to market their product or services and to increase the brand awareness metrics within a new market or an existing one. Aside from enabling you to build thought-leadership in your domain, they can provide healthy fodder for a pipeline of leads to keep coming in. Webinars offer your audience the opportunity to understand your business more deeply. 

There is little need to manage and arrange the logistics for it to make it possible. Webinars, if done well, allow you a chance to have a meaningful, detailed and helpful conversation with your prospective buyers at less cost. 

Now, if you are wondering how webinars are different from video marketing, then you need to understand the principle of scarcity. While with a video, the audience can conveniently pause and resume, and then (maybe) forget about it altogether, in the case of a webinar, the attendee makes an effort to mark it to the calendar, show up at the scheduled time and anticipate his takeaways.  

The webinar serves as a cash cow even after it is over. You can repurpose the content into a blog, videos, infographic, etc. and this will keep serving you in many different ways.    

Despite the known advantages of webinars, many companies are doing an inferior job with their webinars. We are going to cover tips for you about how to go about to design and deliver the perfect webinar. Nowadays, most of the webinars are with one person mostly running a set of slides, or in the worse case a pre-recorded narration. That is a recipe for disaster. 

The Types Of Webinars That You Can Create:

1. Lead Generation Webinar – This is a highly popular webinar format today. Here, you invite your prospects to sign up for your webinar free of charge. Here, the secret is to deliver value so that they become really aware and begin to trust your brand. You work with other aspects of your marketing to push your lead into sales funnels. As they say, a qualified lead is priceless. That’s your benefit from doing this type of webinar. However, to become successful with this type of webinar strategy, you need to provide real value and build relationships with your audience. Over time, you will develop a good lead database. 
2. Paid Webinars – Here, you charge for the webinar. Your offer is so valuable that people are willing to pay to attend the webinar. Here, since you are generating direct revenue from the webinar registrations, you can promote your webinar with paid advertisements, or even enroll influencers to reach a bigger audience. 

The first secret to a good webinar is that you need an excellent strategy, irrespective of what webinar format you choose to go ahead with. You must answer the ‘why’; why are you choosing this topic for your webinar? What audience persona are you targeting? How is it going to help them? 

Decide whether you aim to generate leads for your business, or you want to build upon your existing relationship with your customer. Then, you will be better able to design how you should execute and promote it.  

You can also design webinars to build hype around your upcoming product launch. It is so amazing because you can build up your entire business, taking feedbacks along the way and also nurture a bunch of eager prospects who are more than keen to check out your product as soon as it launches.

However, you need to avoid presenting yourself too sales-y during your webinar as your audience may not like it a lot. Lastly, it would be best if you got organized since there will be a lot of moving pieces. 

Some Tips To Help You Build a Good Webinar Strategy. 

1. The first thing to keep in mind is to choose a good topic for the webinar – The title is more like a first impression. If you decide to address an issue that people are interested in, then they would more readily sign up for it. You can use Google’s keyword planner to gauge the popularity of the topic that you are addressing. 
2. Do not make your webinars too frequent – Remember that quality trumps quantity, truer in the case of webinars.  
3. Use more visuals in your slides – You need to create more impact. Visual content is better retained and more quickly processed by the brain 
4. Use Email Blasts, Re-Marketing – And remember, personalize, personalize and personalize 
5. Use poll questions – it helps to push for an offer and engage with the attendees through-out.
6. Post-webinar, Send out the recording immediately – Do not forget your webinar attendees. Keep the engagement on, and keep reaching out regularly.  
7. Engage with the non-attendees as well.
8. Keep your webinar conversational & interactive.
9. Include Co-Presenters.
10. Leave plenty of room for Q&A
11. (You can) Ask an Industry Influencer to Promote Your Webinar – But remember, they will do it for two primary purposes – To make money and provide value to their audience. You need to satisfy both. Including industry influencers in your webinar promotion or hosting can increase the overall excitement, attendance rates, and social media sharing among the participants.

Finally, You Need a Good Tool/Platform To Deliver The Webinar

You need a reliable set-up to host your webinar and manage your invitees. 

Wezone is a free and easy solution to reach out to your audience, melting Medianova’s proven CDN infrastructure and a SaaS platform in a single pot. Wezone allows you to easily create and publish your webinar and send out the invitations to your attendees, from a single platform. It enables you to host your event at any scale, from personal to global web conferences, at just a click away.      

Conclusion

Webinars have become an excellent strategy to expand your market reach, captivate audience and pull them into your sales funnel to convert them into paying customers for your business eventually. You can invite your audience to take small actions during your webinar, which will provide you with a more in-depth insight into their motivations and how you should engage with them. Webinars can be a powerful way to demonstrate your expertise and authority without bragging. And you can even make compelling sales pitches during the webinar.  

Webinars, working together with other content marketing tactics, will help your business to scale by utilizing a reliable and proven framework.

Content-rich webinars that provide a high-value to the audience and which come with a call to action at the end can convert exceptionally well.