The Power of Webinars
I have been using webinars for about 5 years now. It is one of the greatest tools available online to help connect businesses with their prospects on the web today.
However, using this strategy requires the right mix of preparation, communication, and strategy. Otherwise, your webinar efforts will be a tremendous failure as people fail to understand the importance of what you are looking to accomplish as you help them utilize your products and services along with gaining an idea of how you can help them with their challenges.
How can webinars help? They are one of the few online communication tools that allows people to communicate over long distances through voice, screen share, and video. Additionally, the ability to speak with large numbers of people at the same time means that you can have one webinar where you have possibly hundreds of people at the same time receiving the same information in order to spread your message farther than you could before.
Therefore, how do we prepare a great webinar? Having the right webinar takes time to prepare and set up. Unless you are very experienced at doing them, you generally cannot throw up a webinar at 1 PM and have 100 people there by 2 PM.
First, make sure that you have the right topic to draw people into the conversation. Second, market properly. If you send your marketing to the wrong audience then they will not be interested in any offer you have.
Next, communicate with your audience to invite them to the webinar. Even though webinars have been around for a little less than 10 years now a good number of users are just starting to learn how to use webinars. Plus, every webinars’ software sometimes feels like it has its own tangled delivery method to get onto the webinar.
Be clear how to get on the webinar and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat the instructions again. I have had numerous people tell me that they never saw the time or the link for a webinar even though it was in the email message and on the website. I do my best now to have every link, instruction, date, and time listed at least twice. A good policy is once at the top and once at the bottom.
Finally, what is your strategy? Having a webinar is a great way to engage your market, but so what? How you will turn prospects into clients? The answer is through a call to action and a great sales funnel that directs people from prospect to client.
Be prepared to do some testing on this topic, because it will take time to learn what works and what does not. One of my partners mentioned to me when we first started doing webinars and the results were a little slow that it was ok that only 2 people showed, because it was a test and when 20 people showed we would be prepared and know exactly what to say.
Once you have all three ingredients listed above ready to go you should start testing out what webinar software you like. There are a number of different options from the free (Anymeeting, DimDim, etc.) to the paid (GotoWebinar, MeetingBurner, etc) and then start to play around with what works best.