If you aren’t currently using webinars to engage with your audience and marketing your business online, you are likely falling behind the competition. While many of us are familiar with the concept of webinars to help in the process of selling higher priced products and services online, they are actually quite effective for a wide range of content marketing activities.
First off, webinars are an excellent way to generate new leads and email subscribers for your mailing list. It’s also a great way to identify and segment the active and engaged subscribers from any existing mailing lists you have — even if you don’t have anything to sell or offer at the moment.
However, this can become even more obvious when you start to look at not just how webinars are being used — but also in the way they are set up, created, and run through various platforms. For example, ClickMeeting is a webinar hosting solution that has continually changed and improved their features and areas of focus, while also making sure to improve the user experience for both the webinar host and the attendees.
Given the bad press that other leading webinar platforms have been drawing lately around cybersecurity issues, ClickMeeting’s fully browser-based approach, along with its advanced features, make it a compelling option.
But regardless of the platform you use, by keeping an eye on industry webinars and how they are run, along with the solutions being used to host such events, we can all learn how to better create and scale our marketing efforts in the process.
While the core focus of most webinars and events is often the same (incentive/story/end off), the process on how to better engage and convert audiences into paying customers is changing all the time.
With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at the future of marketing online and how webinars are helping businesses and organization scale across the board.
Making the Jump for Text Content to Live Webinars
As bloggers and content creators, we understand how important it is to create content of value. We also know how important it is to make sure our content is working for us and ranking in the search results. However, the days of relying just on Google for traffic and new leads is over. Now it’s all about social media, email marketing, and connecting with users on their mobile devices.
Brands around the world are recognizing this day by day. It’s not just about pushing out as many ads as possible, but instead to educate your audience and turning them into valuable and long-term customers. For marketers and businesses, it’s also important to be aware of not just your competitors and the solutions they are using, but also how to use each solution and their features to your fullest advantage.
A perfect example of this can be seen with Amazon, who has been sending out webinar invites to their Amazon Pay ecommerce store customers in reference to “10 ways to optimize mobile checkout“. It’s one thing to offer a solution, and it’s another to actually provide the value and service of teaching your audience and customers how to use it.
When looking at the current landscape of webinar usage on the internet today, it’s not as much about straight selling as it used to be. According to recent webinar industry stats from ClickMeeting, it’s now more about engagement and providing a useful service.
Webinars are now in demand for product demos and employee training, online courses, used for business meetings and collaborations, and much more. Throw an up selling and business model into the mix, and there is no reason why you couldn’t see a huge bump in your monthly ROI and engagement numbers.
In addition to understanding why users are attending webinars and the type of information they are looking for, it’s also great to know when and where such webinars are taking place as well.
While the United States is where you will find the most activity with webinars, they are also making their way around the world. ClickMeeting reports that countries like Canada, India, Mexico, Peru and the United Arab Emirates are all seeing huge growth numbers in webinar usage.
In reference to when, the most popular days to host a webinar on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (in that order). Most webinars launch between the hours of 4pm to 6pm. Popular morning hours to launch a webinar are 8am and 9am.
Even with all of this data in place, there is still a lot more you can do with online webinars and growing your business than you might think. In addition to providing industry stats on the world of webinars and online marketing, ClickMeeting is also making their tools and features accessible to all of their customers to make implementation of these stats and marketing tips more actionable.
Once you have a complete flow and automation in place, there is no reason why you couldn’t create an event presentation once and run a new webinar campaign week after week (or month after month) and see similar results.
It’s not just about running the webinar and making immediate sales, it’s also about the recurring growth of your mailing list, a continued increase in trust and engagement, and also the thrill of getting better and better at marketing your brand and products every time around.
However, your webinar campaign results and process may vary based on the different tools and features you have in place. ClickMeeting for example, has released a whole set of amazing new tools and features to help their clients get more out of each and every webinar — while also giving more to their attendees as well.
Such improvements and tool additions include:
- On-demand webinars – One of the biggest problems with running webinars as part of your business, is trying to find the right time to host them so everyone can attend your event. No matter what time you select, it’s not going to be perfect for everyone. The better option is to run your webinars on-demand, so they are accessible by all audiences 24/7. As reported by ClickMeeting, “Since we launched this feature in August 2018, over 25% of our users have taken advantage of it on a regular basis.”
- Custom branding – Websites, blogs, and email newsletters are all custom designed to match the look and feel of your brand. Your online webinar should be too. This is a new feature that ClickMeeting added in December 2018, over 10% (and still counting) of ClickMeeting webinar hosts have made the leap to running fully custom branded events. The end result is a better look and feel for the brand, while often increasing conversions and revenue in the process.
- Paid webinars – Webinars don’t always need to be a “free content to upsell” event every time. If you have a skill or expertise in something, the option is always there to offer the opportunity to attend an upcoming event for a set price. Best of all, you will earn revenue on every person who signs up to attend, whether or not they can make it to the live event. If they can’t make it, they will be sent the recording later on through email for full viewing. If you don’t think paid webinars are right for you, think again. ClickMeeting reports that “The most successful webinar host earned $43,000 on ticket sales for a single event! That’s nearly as much as the average annual salary in the US!” — and plenty of more success stories are likely on the way.
With any or all of these tools in place, it’s no wonder you are seeing such demand for webinars and live marketing events across the internet today. No matter what industry you are in, the power of live person-to-person engagement is huge.
How to Get Started with a Webinar Marketing Funnel of Your Own
If you aren’t currently using webinars within your online marketing efforts, you are definitely leaving money on the table.
To give you a simple five step process on how effective this can be for your business, check out the following:
- Sign up for a reliable webinar solution
- Launch your free webinar landing pages and collect email signup date
- Go live with your webinar and see how it goes (plus analyze user data)
- Follow up to webinar emails after the event and give them access to a replay
- Study your results and replicate the process again and again
Most of the work and effort that goes into a successful webinar, is during the initial set up process. Once this is all in place, you can keep running that same event time and time again to different audiences and traffic sources.
Take a moment to sit back and visualize how online webinars can start being used to grow your brand and business by leaps and bounds in the coming months. Your audience and competitors are already using them, so why not you too?
