Outside the Box: How to Use Marketing Webinars to Promote Your Business

How to Use Marketing Webinars to Promote Your Busines

Webinar are fantastic tools that can be used for a variety of purposes in your business. But more than anything, they’re great for promotion. Click here to learn how to use marketing webinars to promote your business.

How common are webinars? As it turns out, quite common; 61% of content marketers use them. Webinars that convert can be a boon to any business, but you need the right strategies and tactics before, during, and after the session.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to create, promote, deliver, and follow-up on a marketing webinar in order to attract and convert sales leads. But first, we. have to answer the question, “What is a webinar?”

What Is A Webinar?

The term webinar comes from two other words combined: “web” and “seminar.” A seminar is a meeting designed to train or educate attendees. It’s important to keep this in mind as you develop and host your webinar because focusing on educating your audience is key.

Webinars are successful for a number of reasons:

• You have a captive audience
• They’re scheduled events
• Webinar promotion gets more attention than less interactive content
• You’re the teacher, the trusted authority

As you create your webinar in the next section, think about hosting a party. What type of food do your guests enjoy? Would they have fun getting dressed up for a formal affair?

This will focus your attention on your audience. Keep reading to learn how to create your webinar.

Create Your Marketing Webinar

There are decisions you need to make before you even open Keynote or PowerPoint. We’ll focus first on the choices you need to address regarding your content, then look at logistics.

What Should Your Webinar Be About?

The key here is to find a unique selling proposition. A selling proposition is the benefit you’re offering, or maybe a promise you’ll deliver within the webinar itself. You’ll want to hook your readers in with a topic selected from:

• Your blog
• FAQs you’ve received via social media or through customer service
• Other webinars on the internet that you can present better

No matter what you choose for your topic, your offer should be the ultimate solution to the pain point you’re addressing.

What Goes Into A Webinar?

Now that you have a topic in mind, and maybe even a title and hook, it’s time to think about what you’ll say to your audience and what you’ll show them. Overall, the first three quarters of your webinar should be presentation, and the remaining quarter should be left for questions from your attendees.

With an average length of 39 minutes, plan to have about 30 minutes of presentation and leave the rest of the time for input and questions. You should structure your presentation in thirds:

1. Tell your audience what you’ll tell them
2. Tell them
3. Tell attendees what you’ve told them

This comes from Aristotle, who, while an Ancient Greek philosopher, is as relevant in education as Socrates, his philosophical grandfather of sorts, from whom we derive the Socratic method. Basically, you want to whet their appetite and excite them by telling them what they’ll learn, then teach it, and finally recap it to drive home key points.

You’ll want to present slides within your webinar. Slides exist to keep the event on track. Don’t distract or lose attendees with bad slides.

Aim for:

• To-the-point slides
• Text-light slides
• Visual slides
• Slides you can move through quickly

It’s better to have more, leaner slides than a few dense ones.

Webinar Logistics

Choosing how you’ll host and present your webinar is just as important as choosing what you’ll present about. Here are some features to look for:

• Free dialing
• Registration opt-ins and options
• Chat
• Automatic recording
• Multiple hosts if applicable
• Screen share and video presentation
• Integrations with other software (like email marketing)

There are a number of paid and free webinar services out there that you can choose from. The key is knowing what you want to present and how you want to present it, and then finding the service that best matches those needs. See more about features like webinar recording.

Now that you know what goes into creating your webinar, keep reading to learn how to promote it.

Promote Your Webinar

You can have the best webinar in the world, but if no one knows about it, you won’t convert any leads from it and promote your business, so now it’s time to dive into ways you can promote your webinar to get it some traction.

You’ll want to start with a registration page. Create this page three to four weeks before your scheduled presentation. Make sure you include an opt-in form, as well as:

• Title and description of webinar
• Bullet points outlining what attendees will learn
• Bios and highlights of presenter(s)
• Length of the webinar
• Cost of the webinar (or that it’s free)
• Social proof such as testimonials

You should plan on two to three email marketing updates before the webinar to drum up interest and remind people on your email list to sign up. You can also post on social media to garner interest. Countdown opt-in timers are also useful because they create urgency.

Promotional videos, guest posts, and banners on your website are other ways you can promote your webinar. Make sure you practice your presentation a few times during this time as well.

Following Up

You’ve created and presented your webinar. You’re done, right? Wrong.

There’s one more step to get the most out of your webinar, and that’s following up. Start by turning your registration page into a replay page. Here, you can share a link to the video of your webinar and invite viewers to sign up for your email list, download resources, or purchase your product or service.

You should send a few emails, too:

• Remind participants about the replay link and any downloads
• Send a discount or other offer to participants who haven’t converted
• Invite participants to take a brief survey about the webinar

Now you can pat yourself on the back and call it a job well done. Just don’t forget to analyze your webinar’s success and learn from it to keep improving in the future.

Conclusion

Creating and presenting a marketing webinar is an exciting step for you and your business. Why not start to build up some interest by sharing this article with your social media audiences? You can even ask them if they’d like to attend a webinar hosted by your brand.