How To Use A Webinar for Marketing Purposes

Use Webinars to Market Your Products & Services Online

Webinars can be a huge goldmine for your business if you use them correctly for a number of reasons. Signing up to a webinar is a much smaller ask for a lot of your potential customers than making a purchase from your website. This becomes even more true if someone is coming across your business or brand for the first time.

They are a lot more likely to want to join a free webinar, especially if they are going to get some useful information, than they are to part with their money and buy something from a website that they are not too familiar with yet.

Secondly, webinars are a fantastic way for small businesses to grow their email lists. Not everyone who signs up for your webinar is going to turn up. For those who do turn up to your webinar, not every attendee will buy whatever it is that you are selling on your webinar. This is okay because promoting your webinars allows you to simultaneously grow your email list, which can lead to sales later on down the line through your email marketing.

You don’t just want to create webinars on any topic. It is important that you keep your target customers top of mind when curating webinar topic ideas. If, for example, you sell a skincare product, a webinar that outlines some of the most common causes of acne and how to prevent these would likely be a topic of interest for people who may also be interested in buying your skincare products. If you were to create a free webinar on this topic and attracted your ideal customers to it, you could have an engaged audience that you can teach something to while simultaneously promoting your products. This would do 3 things all at once.

• Build trust with them and make them feel more confident about buying from your brand as you have taught them something useful
• Articulate the value of your product and entice them to buy
• Turn them into customers who buy from you often because they are on your email list and receive notifications about the offers that you have on your website

Webinar for marketing step 1 – Creating your webinar landing page

A webinar landing page is the page that your business will use to promote the webinar. Most webinar software will allow you to create a webinar landing page. I personally use WebinarJam because I find it a lot easier to use and more cost-effective than some of the other solutions on the market. Above is an example of what some of the WebinarJam landing pages look like.

You may also decide that you want to promote your webinar using your website or a landing page software like LeadPages. Most landing page software like WebinarJam allow you to copy the embed code once you create your webinar, which you can paste onto your landing page.

This ensures that people who sign up have their information sent straight into your webinar software, and they receive all the necessary information automatically to attend the webinar.

Regardless of whether you decide to use the landing page templates that your webinar software provides or if you decide to create your own landing page, it is important that you outline the benefits that your ideal customer will get from registering for your webinar. You might want to include bullet points that mention the topics you plan to cover to entice people to register. You also want to ensure that your branding on these webinar pages matches your company branding elsewhere on the internet so that you remain consistent. You would be surprised at how staying consistent with your brand colours, your logo, and any slogans your company uses often can impact the success of your webinars long-term.

Webinar for marketing step 2 – Promoting your landing page

So let’s assume you have taken the necessary steps so far which involve:

1. Ensuring that your webinar topic is one that will genuinely interest your ideal customer
2. Created an effective landing page that communicates the value that participants are likely to receive from the webinar
3. Used your company branding on the webinar registration page

It is then time to start promoting your landing page. You can promote your landing page using paid marketing methods such as Google ads or social media ads, just to name two. If you have an email list or a social media following, it might also be a good idea to promote the link to your webinar registration page to your audience there too.

Remember, if you do decide to use paid ads to promote your webinar, everyone who signs up as a result of seeing your ad will also be automatically put onto your email list when you connect your webinar software to your email marketing software. This means that even if you spend money to get them registered and they do not buy, you can promote a new offer to them next month via email marketing, which they may respond to. Sometimes the best marketing is one that incorporates a huge amount of patience.

Some companies decide to run their webinars live, and others decide to host pre-recorded webinars. Although pre-recorded webinars can mean that webinars can be running without you having to be present and result in passive sales. If you are running a live webinar, this is a huge marketing bonus for you as during your promotions you can emphasise the point that there is a limited time to register for the webinar as it will be time-sensitive.

Webinar for marketing step 3 Connecting your webinar software to email marketing

Most webinar software makes it easy for you to seamlessly connect your webinar to your email marketing software.

This is a crucial aspect of your webinar because it means that whilst you promote your webinar, you can also grow your email list, which is a lucrative practice for most businesses.

If you are not currently doing email marketing for your business, you can sign up for a free Aweber account where you can start and grow your email list without spending any upfront money. You will need to upgrade to a premium account to make use of some of the more advanced features.

A lot of the best webinar softwares allow for you to tag people who register for your webinar. This simply means that when someone registers for your webinar and their details are passed through to your email marketing software, you can automatically notify your email marketing software that the person came from that specific webinar. This can be highly lucrative for your business because it allows you to segment the prospects on your email list.

Let’s say, for example, that you sell multiple products on your website and you are creating a webinar to promote a particular category of products that you sell. If 1,000 people sign up for the webinar, it is important for you to know what webinar they signed up for so that you can send them targeted emails that specifically relate to what webinar they signed up for.

Webinar for marketing step 3 – Delivering your webinar

Once you have done all of the hard work creating your webinar and promoting your webinar, it will then be time for you to deliver your webinar. I recommend having what you are going to say on the day prepared, ready, and rehearsed so that you are more likely to deliver a fantastic presentation. Remember, this presentation is also a representation of your business and brand, so you want it to reflect your business well.

It is also best practice to ensure that you are in a quiet environment with a strong internet connection to ensure the webinar runs smoothly. You don’t have to be on camera during your webinar; you can just have slides up in most cases, but if you do, ensure that the picture quality is relatively good. It shouldn’t be difficult to see you as this can be distracting and come across as unprofessional. It might also be worth investing in a cheap microphone so that your webinar attendees can hear you clearly.

Throughout your webinar, you want to ensure that you offer immense value to your attendees. Teach them something that they may not have known before and promote your products where appropriate throughout your webinar and towards the end of the webinar. It is usually a good idea to have a special promotional discount for your webinar attendees to incentivise them to buy. I recommend having this as a time-sensitive offer to encourage them to buy sooner rather than later.

For more marketing tips to help you promote your business online, make sure you download ‘The Formula‘ a free eBook that is designed to help you understand how the world of digital marketing works.