Webinars are more popular than ever. You can’t read anyone’s blog these days without a sidebar ad or popup promoting their latest session.
Why are they so popular? Because they work. According to Content Marketing Institute, 58% of marketers use webinars for promotion, and 32% think webinar marketing is critical to their success.
You may be intrigued about webinars, but you aren’t sure if they’re right for you. In this post, we explore five reasons you definitely should get into webinars.
1. Webinars Help You Connect with Your Audience
Your audience wants a personal connection with you. They may see your name on your emails and your picture on your About Us page, but those aren’t enough to make them feel like you’re a real person who wants to add value to their lives.
“There is nothing more personal than seeing someone live,” says entrepreneur and business coach Melyssa Griffin. “Whether it’s in person or online, live interactions are inherently more intimate than, say, reading a blog post or scrolling through someone’s Instagram.”
Webinars give you an opportunity to put your face right in front of your biggest fans. You can respond to their thoughts and questions in real time. They get to learn your mannerisms and quirks. They gain all sorts of information about you they wouldn’t normally collect through emails, blog posts, and even podcasts.
Most importantly, through webinars you become human; a concrete object in their lives, rather than an abstract concept that appears in their inbox from time to time. After they “meet” you, they’ll become more engaged with your other forms of content, and more receptive to your sales pitches.
2. Webinars Help You Get in Front of New People
Webinars have a higher perceived value than most other forms of content. People think, “Wow, this person is willing to give some of his/her time to teach us something.”
People sign up for webinars at a much higher rate than they sign up for any other type of content. According to Adobe, about 51% of people who visit your registration landing page will sign up for your webinar. Then about 36% of those people actually attend the meeting.
All-in-all, about 18% of people who view your registration page show up to the webinar. Take a minute to go through your lead magnet conversion rates. Does anything you’ve ever published convert that high? Probably not.
This means webinars are excellent ways to get yourself in front of new people and grow your following. Even if you can’t convince them all to make a purchase, you’ve still collected their email address (even if they don’t attend the webinar). Maybe you can convince them to at a later time.
Furthermore, you can supercharge your audience growth by partnering with other experts who have their own audiences. By working together, you can reduce your investment in the webinar (because your partner can help you build the presentation) and potentially turn your partner’s audience into your audience. Your partner gains the same benefits, so there’s an incentive to work together.
Hosting joint webinar ventures is considered one of the fastest ways to grow your email list and customer base, as long as you pick the right partner with an audience that overlaps yours.
3. Webinars Let You Teach People as a Group
When most people think of webinars, they think of a free training session with a sales pitch at the end. That’s probably the most common way people use webinars, but they’re also an effective way to deliver a product you’ve already sold.
Webinars are great tools for coaches and consultants to provide training to their customers. Rather than teaching people one-on-one, you can round them up in a group and teach them all at once.
These kinds of webinars are a good format for you because they let you scale up your business, effectively earning more per hour. You can use your free time to expand your marketing or refine your product. They also provide more feedback at a faster rate, letting you improve your product quicker.
Group training actually provides more value for your students, too. For instance, if one student asks a unique question, every student benefits from the answer.
4. Webinars Provide Value After the Event
Just because you present your webinar live doesn’t mean that’s the only way you can get value out of it. After you finish a webinar, you can stretch its value in a few ways:
- Add the recording to your YouTube channel (or whatever video host you prefer) with an SEO title so other people can find it and become fans.
- Send the recording to people who signed up for the webinar, but didn’t attend the live event.
- Send a link to the recording whenever one of your fans or customers asks a question you answer in the webinar. They get their answer plus a ton of extra value.
- Cut snippets out of the presentation and post them on social media to give your audience some free value (plus it’s a lot of easy social media content to generate).
- Turn your webinar into an automated recurring webinar that runs on whatever schedule you designate. Let it run, teach, and generate income indefinitely.
As you develop your webinar, think about what other ways you could use your webinar after the event. This will help you create a versatile presentation.
5. Webinars Sell Better Than Other Digital Channels
This is the most important reason your business should run webinars.
Webinars are the highest-converting digital sales channel. Sales rates average between 10% and 20%.
How do standard sales pages compare? They convert between 2% and 3%.
With the right strategy and a solid presentation, webinars sell better than most channels because of the reasons we mentioned above. People prefer to buy from other people they know, trust, and respect as an authority.
Think about it like this: Would you spend, say, $500 with someone you didn’t know? Would you spend that much money because some sales squeeze page told you to? Probably not, and most people wouldn’t either. Even $100 is a lot to spend with someone you’ve never met or a business without a face.
73% of marketing and sales leaders say webinars are one of the best ways to generate quality leads. Your sales pitches are more effective when people can see your face and hear your voice. If they have any questions or objections, you can overcome them right in the meeting.
Furthermore, webinars let you identify your warmest leads that require a more direct touch in order to convert. For example, if you notice someone asking a lot of questions in your webinar live chat, but don’t make a purchase after the event, you could reach out to them directly to give them a little push.
And at the end of the day, sales are more important than anything else for your business. They put cash in your account to spend on growth tactics (like more webinars). Plus, once someone buys from you, it’s much easier to sell to them again in the future.
Going Forward
There’s no doubt that webinars can have a tremendous impact on your business. You can use them to grow your audience, engage your fans, and convert your attendees into customers.
But how do you get started? Aren’t there a lot of pieces to manage?
With a tool like WebinarPress, you can organize live, automated, paid, and member-only webinars within your own WordPress website. Combined with a streaming tool like YouTube Live or Google Hangouts, you can create a seamless webinar experience for you and your guests.
