It’s easy to overlook many of the benefits that can come from running a webinar for business. The purpose of this post is to showcase what I think are the most important reasons why webinars are valuable for every business.
These may or may not all apply to you, and frankly, there are tons of different kinds of webinars that you can run. In this article, we’ll stay more on the “marketing and sales” side of webinars.
1: You Can Deliver Tremendous Value
One of the main reasons that you might start doing a webinar for business in the first place. If done correctly, webinars are unlike anything else; you can keep your audience engaged for long periods and that’s something that videos put simply, struggle to do. Not only that, but your audience interact and get real-time responses during the broadcast.
Even better, you can ask your audience questions and tailor your content in real-time to better serve your audience. You can get your audience to take action and have some small micro-wins of their own. This leads to transformations throughout the content, and it can happen within a super short period of time. This explains why webinars are some of the highest converting forms of marketing.
2: They Position you as an Expert in your Field
It’s a free webinar… Who cares? Well, your audience does. And just because it’s “free” doesn’t mean they’re not exchanging anything for the content. To attend a webinar, your prospect has to register, put the date in her calendar, set aside time for the event, show up at the right time, and then give you their commitment of time. They’re doing ALL of this just to listen to you talk about a certain subject; this positions you as an expert before you even start teaching the content.
3: You Can Make Sales without Selling
With the right kind of content, your webinars should soft-sell your prospects without ever having to “hard close” anybody. A lot of businesses make the mistake of teaching and THEN selling, when in reality, the best webinars teach AND sell at the same time.
Effective webinar content should showcase problems, kills objections, and deliver value without teaching too much. The content should teach your audience WHAT to want. The “what” is your product, and by the time you make the offer, the entire audience already wants it. This makes the sale much more natural, and no hard selling is required.
4: You Can Communicate with Hundreds of People from Anywhere, to Anywhere
This is one of the greatest reasons why webinars are great. The ability to have a conversation with hundreds of people… virtually, right over the internet. Oh yeah, and your audience never even have to leave the comfort of their chair!
It’s no question that having a 1-2-1, in-person conversation with a prospect would be the most effective way to earn your business a new customer. But is the traveling that can put people off. If you’re doing bid deals, tat’s another story of course. But doing a remote webinar allows you to connect with hundreds of people in any location a 1-2-hour timespan.
5: Keeping Your Audience Engaged
Webinars are fantastic for two reasons. First off, they’re one-time events that happen LIVE. If your audience shows up late, they miss part of it. If they don’t show up at all, they miss all of it. This is the power of scarcity, and it’s the foundation of any webinar campaign. With a video, the viewer knows that she can pause it and come back at any time… that’s typically not the case with webinars. If your prospect leaves or misses the webinar, they feel the pain of missing out.
The second reason is conversational engagement. With webinars, your audience gets a voice. They can chat, give opinions, ask and answer questions, and more. When someone is asking questions and chatting about what they’re being taught, they’re more focused and engaged. That’s gold right there!
We’ve used Demio for a number of our other projects. A great product with great support.
6: Generating New Leads
Almost every business is driven by leads. A business with more than enough leads will never struggle to grow. Unfortunately, most businesses lack high-quality lead-generation, and webinars are a great way to attract new eyes, generate new leads, and ultimately convert new customers.
With webinars, some kind of registration is expected. People are familiar with submitting their name, email, and sometimes other information in order to register for an upcoming webinar event. They’ve highlighted themselves as a lead that is interested in whatever you’re teaching, and they’ve opted in to hear more about it.
There are many ways to actually promote a webinar and drive registrations, but we won’t go in too much depth on that in this article. To name a few, you can run paid advertising, you can feature webinars on your home page, you can get affiliates to promote, and you can leverage the audience of guests. Of course, you can promote webinars internally to your existing audience with emails, but we’re mainly talking about generating new leads here, not qualifying existing ones. We’ll save that for the next reason…
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7: Qualify New Leads and Build Relationships
There’s no better way to build a relationship than by giving value first. Generally, the first step in making a sale is related to education. Webinars give us the opportunity to teach our leads and help them understand why our product is valuable in the first place. Webinars will allow your audience to place a name with a face and a voice with a name. They allow you to build personal relationships and have real-time conversations.
Just short of visiting your prospect in person or jumping on a personal phone call, webinars are the best way to build personal relationships with your leads. The best part is that it works with new leads just as well as it works with “seasoned” leads. You can leave a great first impression on people who are hearing from you for the first time.
Reason 8: Invite Guests and Leverage Their Audience and credibility
When you invite an industry influencer or specialised guest to your webinar, they’re usually more than happy to help leverage their audience to drive attendees. You can effectively borrow your guests’ credibility! Bringing on an industry expert will position you further as an expert, since that person is associating their name with your brand. It will increase overall excitement, attendance rates, and social media sharing.
Reason 10: Speed Up your Sales Process and Get an ROI Faster
As a company, it’s revenue that helps your business grow. Companies live and die by cash flow, especially if you have a bootstrapped company like we do. So, the faster you can convert a lead into a customer, the better off you’ll be. Webinars can really help speed up this process. Why? Simply because they take all of the initial funnel-steps and merge them together; they let you build trust, deliver value, and kill objections in a small period of time.
In Conclusion…
Webinars are powerful, and certainly there are a lot more than 10 reasons to run them. Hopefully this list inspires you to get out there and use webinars in your business, whether they’re for lead generation, sales, training, or all of the above.
Can you think of any reasons that were missed? Let me know in the comments below!
