Webinars have been around for some years now and they are becoming more popular for generating new sales leads and improving customer retention. They are particularly effective when you are selling and marketing an intangible service. You may be running webinars now, you may have just started to use them or you may be considering it. So for some this article may be a refresher and for others it may be a prompt to investigate further.
It is widely acknowledged that companies of all sizes are using webinars as part of their sales and marketing activities and that a properly run webinar can generate vital sales leads and engage existing customers. Research carried out by Marketing Profs Research in 2008 shows trends that are still valid today. Those participants who were asked “why your company conducts webinars?” 67% said to generate leads, 57% to build loyalty, 40% to drive website visits, 28% to drive offline business, 37% to build in house database and 69% to increase brand awareness. In terms of frequency, when asked how often they ran webinars over 50% said between one and five per year and the rest quoted six to ten per year.
So what makes a good webinar? Most important of all is the matching of the subject and content of your webinar to your targeted market. Think of those times when your inbox is peppered with webinar invites. What do you do with them? Within a few seconds a quick scan separates out the interesting ones which are worth more attention. This is the challenge – making sure your webinar subject is going to really motivate your target audience to register, attend and take action.
Powerpoint presentations with commentary are the most common forms of webinar but sometimes the slides presented are simply awful with too many bullet points and too many words so it becomes absolutely essential to follow good practice in slide layout. You may want to embed a video clip or two. This can work very well to get a point across or to show customer testimonials but care is needed. The clips should be no longer than 1.5 minutes or shorter, the content must be relevant with a compelling call to action. Don’t embed too many otherwise the commentators role becomes secondary.
There are three main stages to producing an effective webinar; invitation, implementation and follow up.
Invitation stage – This stage is vital to get people aware of you and so the subject matter must be tailored to grab interest. Remember that as well as selling a webinar you are promoting your company and brand at the same time and this needs to be reflected in the words and illustrations you use. Email invitations should offer a one-click access to a simple registration form. Email reminders or teasers are important too and should be sent out 24 hours and 3 hours before the webinar.
Implementation stage – generally free marketing webinars will last between 30 – 60 minutes. Since the average webinar attendee will tend to join the webinar about 5 minutes after the start time, plan your content, including questions and answers, for either 25 or 55 minutes. Remember to hold the webinar to fit in with your target audience usually mid-week at mid-day or for a financial services audience 7.00 pm may be better time for them.
For improved audience engagement you can set up the webinar with a live question facility via a dialogue box, the same as you would expect to see in chat rooms. For smaller webinars you can set it up for two way discussions and mute when appropriate. A challenge that often arises is keeping participant attention during the webinar; we’ve all done it; gone off to make a coffee finish some emails etc This is a difficult one to resolve but advice from experienced webinar users is to ensure the relevance of the content to the audience’s needs and interest; the better the match the better the attention. To keep involvement another idea is to introduce short question and answer sessions during the webinar and not just at the end of it.
Follow up stage – a ‘thank you’ email is obvious but make it useful by providing a link to a copy of the slides or even a recording of the live webinar. You can offer free reports, samples or price reductions. Above all make sure your communications have a “human touch”; we all like that.
In making a webinar more attractive you may wish to collaborate with a non-competitor; a company that compliments your service or is linked to your subject matter. The advantage is that you can present two sources of information to the audience. It also creates a useful way to communicate with the non-competitor’s prospects and in doing so will increase your pool of new leads.
Are you going to try it out. Give me a shout if you want to chat about it. Love to hear from you.
Nick Belcher www.reputation-selling.co.uk
