There are several marketing strategies you can choose to grow your business. Webinar marketing has proven to be particularly effective in the B2B sector. In this article, you’ll learn what are the 5 best webinar strategies to sell more products, gain larger coverage for your brand and yourself and create mutually beneficial partnerships.
Webinars for Establishing Domain Expertise and Thought Leadership
Webinars are essentially interactive online seminars. So, they inherently include an educational component. Educating others and sharing your expertise is such a powerful way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
Teachers, gurus and mentors are in a position of power and authority, because they teach. But bear in mind, you should actually have years of practical experience in the field if you’re hosting this type of webinars. For example, people experienced in AI and Machine Learning host webinars about artificial intelligence in marketing.
The magic of creating authoritativeness and respect for yourself or your brand is that your attendees and followers actually listen to your advice. It becomes much easier to suggest products and services if your audience already trusts and respects you.
If you don’t have one specific topic you’d like to take up, you can discuss tips & tricks or future trends in your industry or niche. For example:
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After you’ve created your webinar event, you should promote it. Your first go-to channel should be your email list. If you don’t have one, a great source for potential attendees are LinkedIn and Facebook Groups around the same niche.
If you’re not in 3-4 groups already, go join them right now. I’ll wait.
Now, create a post sharing the link to your webinar registration. Include 3-4 sentences to introduce the topic, create some hype and give a teaser to make people click and register for your webinar.
A useful tip is to make sure you’re using one of the best webinar platforms so that you can record your webinar session and create a video out of it. Upload it to YouTube and share it in these same LinkedIn and Facebook groups to further establish your authoritativeness.
If you consistently put out this type of content, you’ll soon be known as the industry expert and people will start finding you for advice or to buy your coaching or service.
Webinars to Generate Industry Insights and Data
Data is the new gold. Creating content with unique and insightful data is one of the best strategies for SEO and organically boosting your Google search result rankings. The reason is that original data-backed content will acquire backlinks organically. Content marketing managers and bloggers want to link to data sources.
But how do you get unique and insightful data?
That’s where webinars come in.
Webinar platforms like WebinarNinja allow you to pre-configure and launch multiple polls for your audience. Let’s say your audience is around 100 people from your industry. If they all vote, it would categorize as unique industry-specific research.
You could run 5 polls though-out the webinar, share each result with the attendees, discuss the results. Basically, you’d take the facilitator role in this webinar. Make your attendees feel engaged and excited.
These 5 poll results along with the insights and backstory from the discussions are enough to create a blog post article around that topic, sharing those unique insights. That’s how smart marketers create content. In fact, 90% of marketers say that repurposing their content is a better use of their time than creating new content.
To add icing to the cake, you could also allocate 10-15 minutes at the end of the webinar for a Q&A session. That’s an amazing opportunity to hear what else is on your attendee’s minds regarding that topic. Add that to your blog post as a FAQ section or expand a couple more paragraphs based on those questions.
Webinars for Targeted Lead Generation
If you’re selling a product or service, it’s hard enough to find people who fall under your target segment. They could be Facebook Marketing Specialists with a budget over $ X. Or they could be HR specialists for remote companies.
Targeting and finding people in roles and companies that match your criteria for a qualified lead, is quite hard. Luckily, webinars do a wonderful job in attracting these people.
For example, if you host a facebook marketing tips webinar titled “Facebook Ads – Advanced Targeting & Tracking”, it’s likely you’ll attract:
- Facebook marketing managers
- who consider themselves to be advanced level
- and interested in leveling up their skills
That’s an ideal combination and exactly the type of lead you’d want to attract. In your webinar, you could discuss the problems with targeting and tracking with Facebook Ads. Why it’s a problem and introduce a better alternative. Perhaps you’re selling a service for making explainer videos. Or you could be a Facebook Marketing agency looking to sell your services.
Either way, you’ll be talking to a lot of industry professionals who are very likely to experience the same problem and interested in solving it. Hey – they’re interested enough to:
- Register to your webinar
- Show up at a specific time
- Attend the webinar for an hour
If they’re willing to do that, the problem is big enough for them. If you could portray yourself as an authoritative expert, who they trust, then making a sale during the webinar becomes a lot easier.
Co-Host a Webinar and Invite a Guest Speaker
What if you’re not an expert yet? Or you just don’t feel confident enough to appear as an expert in front of an audience?
There’s a workaround for that. Invite someone authoritative to your webinar. Co-host the webinar with them. It’s a lot easier to pack an hour worth of knowledge if there are two presenters doing it.
Deciding on a co-hosted webinar and agreeing on the agenda should be done even before scheduling the webinar. Ask your co-host about the topics they’re most comfortable talking about.
Odds are, they’re very busy and can’t find the time to prepare for the webinar. Expect that you’re going to be scheduling and promoting the webinar. Also, during the webinar, you’ll be the one facilitating the meeting and sticking to the agenda.
You could agree that it’s going to be an interview-style webinar where you ask them questions and pick their brain. Prepare to do some research about their work and background to prepare your interview questions. Make sure they’re interesting and insightful to your audience.
Be prepared to let them advertise their product or service to your audience. Most likely your guest speaker’s incentive is to tap into your audience and gain some new fans or customers.
It’s perfectly appropriate to ask your guest speaker to promote the webinar to their audience as well. That way, you’ll be gaining a lot more webinar attendees. It doesn’t even have to be a separate campaign to promote the webinar. Often, an email to their list with a clear call-to-action to join the webinar will do just fine.
If your guest speaker agrees to promote the webinar to their channels as well, it could result in getting more customers or fans for your product/service as well. So, it’s a win-win collaboration.
Boost Your Sales and Marketing by Hosting Webinars
It’s no secret that oftentimes the real intent behind webinars is to market a product or service and ultimately boost sales.
Thanks to the live interactions and personal connections between the host and the attendee, webinars have proven to be especially effective for high-ticket product and service sales.
Make sure your webinar platform allows you to create an eye-popping call-to-action that is always visible. You can also leverage scarcity with live webinars by offering a discount only until the end of the webinar. This often helps with boosting sales. For example, WebinarJam allows you to create an attractive call-to-action with a countdown timer. Also, you can include a “Sale count” that counts how many sales have been made.
Another way to leverage social proof to boost your sales is having one of your satisfied customers in the webinar. When you’re done presenting the webinar content, give them webcam and microphone access and let them share what benefits your product/service has bought them.
Attendees see the host speaking live, they can ask questions that the host can answer right then and there. This can alleviate any blockers and doubts that the attendees might have. Make sure you allocate 10-15 minutes for answering your audience’s questions at the end.
Key Takeaways and Next Steps
Now that you know that webinars can be leveraged for so many different marketing strategies. You can use webinars for targeted lead generation campaigns and create mailing lists. This usually works in conjunction with other strategies like hosting webinars to market your product or service.
However, always remember that you audience is expecting to learn something. They want some type of insights or educational value out of your webinar. And that’s a good thing. By teaching them something or sharing your expertise, you’re going to be seen as an authority in that field. Use that to your advantage.
If you’re just starting out with webinars, it’s a good idea to invite a guest, who would co-host the webinar with you. An interview style webinar is a great choice. If you’re an advanced content creator, you can use webinars to host multiple polls. Use those poll results to create unique content. Also, you can edit the webinar recording video and use it in your marketing materials. The possibilities are endless.