Promoting your business with the help of a webinar is a fantastic idea. Webinars have been around since the early nineties, and lately got significantly more popular.
Nearly 75% of marketing leaders say that webinars are one of the best ways to generate quality leads. If you need some convincing why, keep reading. We’ll be discussing the 9 reasons why webinar should be part of your business today.
1. They are convenient
One of the biggest selling points of a webinar is its convenience. Anyone who has an internet connection is free to access your webinar. This means that you can easily get a hold of a large audience.
Webinars take away the difficulty of arranging an in-person event. There’s no need for organising a venue, suggesting dates, sorting travel arrangements. You don’t need to think about how your audience or speakers will get to the event. They can do so from the comfort of their own homes.
This also increases the range of topics that you can discuss. While you would not hold a 100 people event for a less interesting topic, with webinars you totally can. As the cost is close to zero and there is a possibility to generate leads or make high ticket sales (depending on your webinar goals).
2. They can speed up your sales
When it comes down to it, your revenue is what will make you grow as a company. That means that the faster your sales processes, the more successful you’ll be.
You can speed up your sales using a webinar by merging the early stages of this process into one. You can use your webinar to introduce yourself to potential customers and gain trust. You can then deliver the value of your product and encourage an immediate sale. There’s no need to split this process up – it’s easy to combine it all in your webinar.
Pre-sale stage
Webinar allows you to invite a big audience, cold leads that have not interacted with your business before.
Strategy that is gaining in popularity is getting a lot of leads through giveaways and various referral contests. When you have the information, you send out an invitation to a free webinar, tailored to your audience.
On the webinar you will have the opportunity to present your product and service, answer questions and present a much more comprehensive picture of what you are offering.
Upsell and high ticket products
It is very challenging to sell a more valuable product or a high-priced product with landing pages and emails. Even if you made a small sale with a client, these steps ups require a personal approach.
Webinars allow you easily access your most valuable clients, separate them into smaller private groups and have a detailed conversation about their potential purchase.
While few things can substitute for the personal meeting, having a webinar is the next best thing.
3. They increase brand exposure
The best webinars are presented as completely non-promotional. They’re there to provide advice or support to viewers, which often can’t be found elsewhere.
But, of course, usually the main aim of a webinar is to sell. And this is, in large, done through brand exposure. Even an informal webinar can promote a business’ location, logo, or name and most importantly product or service. If you know how to pull off an exceptional webinar, it won’t feel like you’re forcing your brand on your audience.
4. You can attract affiliates
There’s so much that we could share about the benefits of affiliates for your business. But that’s for another post. If you know that affiliates are good for you, webinars can help you attract them.
Affiliates are looking for ways to make the easiest sales, just like you are. If you can prove to these people that your products deliver true value to a customer, you’ve caught their eye. They’re after means of making the most commission with a quality product, so find a way to show that to them on your webinar.
5. You can offer education
Many webinars offer some sort of free education or training to the viewers. Because of the interactivity of webinars, you can make each session more immersive. This means that your viewers are more likely to find value in your sessions.
As a business, if you can offer value to your viewers, they’ll keep coming back for more. They’ll grow to appreciate, trust and respect your brand. Once you become a well-known name to them, it won’t take them long to become paying customers.
Training Your Employees
Has your company hired new people? Is it difficult to have them all in one room for their corporate training? Webinars can solve it.
Skype interviews are already a normal appearance, and employee training webinars are becoming one too. All of the employees are seeing the same presentation and hearing the same information, no matter where they are.
Educating Your Suppliers
In case there is information that you want to communicate to your suppliers. Here webinars will also help. No need to communicate with each separately. Get them all on a webinar and present the new approach that your company is taking or talk about your expectations from this collaboration.
If there is a crisis upcoming, this is a very efficient way to communicate to your suppliers how you will operate during the challenging times. During a crisis it is critical to keep everybody informed and conducting a webinar is a great way to do it.
6. It’s easy to invite guests
We’ve already highlighted the benefits of hosting a webinar versus a public event. One of the biggest advantages is that you can invite interesting guests from all over the world. You don’t need to pay for travel – all that’s needed is to arrange a suitable time based on their timezone.
Having access to a broad range of industry speakers offers a high potential for success. You can entice your subscribers with big names who are true experts in your field. The more people you can appeal to, the bigger your webinar’s audience.
This widens the speakers list significantly. As they do not have to plan in advance to travel to your location, suddenly there is no problem to have people from the USA, Asia, Europe etc. present on your webinar. Though you have to still keep the time zones in mind.
7. They establish your credibility
You might know yourself that you’re one of the best businesses in your industry. But when there’s so much competition out there, how can you convince your customers of the same thing?
Simple: you prove it to them. And hosting a webinar is one of the easiest ways to do so. You can give credibility to your concepts and ideas through live discussion. You have the greatest opportunity to present and share your values. Those who agree with what you have to say will label you as an industry expert.
8. They build customer relationships
One of the biggest setbacks of having a business that operates online? Customer relationships. It’s hard to build that personal connection with people who only visit your store every now and then. They may not read your emails or follow you on social media. Then what?
Try hosting a webinar. You can speak directly to your customers, letting them know that you’re real people. If your customers attend more than one of your webinars, they’ll get to know you personally. There is no simpler way to encourage repeat sales than this. Your customers start to trust and respect you more. They value who you are and what you stand for.
The biggest difference? Your business/product/service starts having a face, a real person behind it.
9. They’re cost effective
No matter in what business you are, spending money is always painful. That’s what makes webinars so appealing: they cost almost nothing to run. You only need to pay for the tools that allow you to go live.
Since webinars are gaining in popularity quickly, now there are many companies which offer webinar platforms for various prices, even allowing you to test the software for several days before actually paying. So even if you did not consider webinars before, now it is a buyers market so why not give it a shot.
Your first few webinars don’t need to be anything too fancy. Providing you have some seriously good stuff to say, you’ll sell yourself, no problem. You can start considering paying for guest speakers later on the line, when you have a big audience.
Conclusion
With all this in mind, it’s clear that webinars are worth considering by any business. By hosting your own webinar, you can:
- present and validate your ideas and build loyalty;
- save a lot of resources on marketing and organization;
- reach customers that you could not before;
- significantly expand all the parts of the sales funnel;
- Increase conversion rates on high end products;
- communicate to your employees and suppliers;
And many other options. Ultimately, you can establish your brand presence and build huge customer awareness. And the best part of it is, you only need an internet connection to succeed in conducting your own webinar. So don’t wait another moment and get planning!
