How To Run A Successful Webinar To Market Your Small Business

By Tony Restell

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Are you looking for a way to market your small business? Consider running a webinar. Webinars can be a great way to reach potential customers and promote your products or services. They can also help convert prospects into sales, and keep your existing client base engaged and feeling valued.

In this post, we'll discuss how to run a successful webinar to market your small business. We'll cover everything from coming up with an engaging webinar topic to promoting the event and ensuring your webinar is well attended. Let's get started!

Reasons why webinars can be a great marketing strategy for your small business

Webinars for lead generation

Small businesses need to generate leads to survive and grow. A great way to do this is by hosting webinars. By inviting potential customers to attend a webinar, you grow your mailing list and have the chance to win them over by persuading them you're an expert in your field.

When done right, a webinar provides value to the attendees and helps build trust. And when people trust you, they're more likely to do business with you.

If you're thinking of using webinars for lead generation, follow these tips: come up with a great topic, promote your webinar through email marketing and social media, deliver value-packed content, and make yourself available after the webinar in case attendees have any follow-up questions.

A LinkedIn Events Marketing Page

Webinars for sales conversion

Webinars can be used to generate sales from your list of prospects - and at scale, freeing up the time of your key business developers.

By inviting potential customers to attend a webinar specifically about the challenges they face and how your products or services address those challenges, you can create a more personal connection with them and convince them of the value your offering would have to their business. All in a way that is not high pressure or overly salesy.

What are some of the upsides of using webinars in this way? Well, they allow you to:

- Connect with potential customers on a more personal level than other marketing channels such as email or social media posts allow

- Educate your prospects about your products or services in a way that is engaging and interactive

- Convince potential customers to buy from you by highlighting the unique value that you offer compared to your competitors

- answer any questions that prospects have in real-time, further increasing the likelihood of making a sale

- Offer attendees something of value (such as a discount code) that incentivises them to buy from you there and then

Webinars for customer retention

Webinars can be used to retain current customers. By offering webinars on topics related to your products or services, you can keep your customers up-to-date and engaged with your company. The content of the webinar doesn’t have to be a sales pitch; in fact, it shouldn’t be. The goal is to provide value to your current customers so they stay with you and continue doing business with you.

Think about it from the customer’s perspective. If they feel like they are getting valuable information from you, they are more likely to stick around. Also, by offering webinars on topics related to your products or services, you are increasing the perceived value of your products or services. If your customers feel like they are getting more bang for their buck, they will be more inclined to do business with you.

Webinars also give you an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell your products or services. For example, if you offer a webinar on how to use your product, you can then introduce attendees to other products that complement it. This is a great way to boost sales without coming across as pushy or salesy.

How to create an interesting and engaging webinar topic that will attract potential customers or help existing customers

So you’re now thinking about hosting a webinar, but struggling to come up with an interesting and engaging topic. This is a common concern - after all, a successful webinar hinges on having a topic that will capture people's attention and persuade them to sign up.

To help with this, here are some top tips on how to come up with an interesting and engaging webinar topic:

Keep it focused

When it comes to choosing a webinar topic, it's important to keep things focused. That means avoiding topics that are too broad - otherwise, you'll find it difficult to cover everything in sufficient detail during the webinar itself. Equally, you don't want to choose a topic that's too narrow either. The sweet spot is finding something that's just specific enough to be interesting but not so niche that only a handful of people would be interested in attending.

Make it timely

People are always more interested in learning about topics that are timely and relevant to their current situation. So if you can tie your webinar topic into something that's happening in the world right now, or in the specific industry you serve, then you're more likely to pique people's interest and get them signing up.                                         

Think about what's unique to you 

When coming up with ideas for your webinar topic, think about what's unique to your business or organization. What knowledge or expertise do you have that other people don't have? What insight could you share that would be of value to your target audience? By sharing something truly unique and valuable, you're far more likely to capture people's attention than if you're just rehashing information they could find elsewhere.                           

Do your research

Once you've brainstormed some ideas for your webinar topic, it's important to do some further research. Connect with your intended webinar audience. Message some of your ideal attendees to ensure the topic is something they care about and to enquire what else they might like to see covered. This feedback will be invaluable in helping you finalize an interesting and engaging webinar topic that will attract potential customers or help existing customers. Plus, it’ll have the added benefit of potentially sparking some interesting conversations with prospects and customers even before the webinar itself has taken place!

How to promote your webinar and ensure a large turnout?

Webinars allow you to build relationships, generate leads and even close sales at scale. But the scale at which you’re able to do this is obviously determined in large part by how many of the right people choose to attend. So how do you promote a webinar to get the maximum number of relevant people attending? Here are some ideas to help:

Get personal with your invitations

When it comes to inviting people to attend your webinar, I can tell you through extensive testing that the most effective method is always sending personal invitations - whether that's via social media or email. Simply posting about your upcoming webinar on your website or social media channels is unlikely to generate enough interest to result in a large turnout.

When planning your webinar, it’s therefore important that you create a webinar that will appeal to the people who are ALREADY connected to you on social media or on your email list. Or, you need to factor in some additional months of preparatory work to build up your social media connections and email list so that enough of the right people can be invited to attend.

Use an attractive speaker graphic

People are more likely to register for and attend a webinar if they recognise the speaker. So make sure you promote your webinar using an attractive graphic of the person who will be presenting. If you have multiple speakers, include all their photos in the graphic. Plus, one additional angle you can consider is involving an external speaker, or a panel of experts, whose reputation and network will help to bring in more of the right registrations.

Keep the registration form short and sweet

The shorter you can keep your registration form, the better. Resist the temptation to ask for too much information from potential attendees - all you really need is their name and email address. Incidentally, LinkedIn Events pages can be a very effective way of posting event details and inviting the right people to attend.

Have a good registration email sequence in place

Whatever platform you are going to use to run your webinar, be sure that it triggers a good sequence of events after someone registers for the webinar. You want your attendees to receive an email confirmation - and then reminders of the impending event as the date approaches. Plus, you’ll ideally have the event added to people’s calendars too.

A webinar conversion funnel

Lastly, after the webinar you want to ensure that people receive a recording of the webinar via email along with a reminder of whatever the call to action was at the end of the webinar (eg. provide the link where people can book in for a call with you, request a demo, etc.)

How To Run A Successful Webinar?

Delivering a successful webinar presentation can be a great way to connect with customers and build your brand. That said, it's not always easy to engage an audience online the way you would in person. So what are some tips to help you deliver a successful live webinar presentation?

Keep It Short and Sweet

Webinars are typically an hour long, but that doesn't mean that you should use up the entire time allocated. In fact, it's generally best to keep your presentation to 30-40 minutes. This will help to keep your audience engaged and prevent them from tuning out. The absolute cardinal rule is to only make your webinar as long as you have value-adding content to fill it with. All the time you are delivering value, people will be inclined to stay on the call. As soon as you introduce fluff and filler, that’s when you’ll start to see people dropping off the call!

Start With a Bang

You only have a few short minutes to grab your audience's attention and get them recommitting to the idea that they want to attend your whole presentation. So, it's important to start strong! Open with a compelling statistic or story that will immediately grab their attention and make them want to learn more. Give them a taste for the transformation or major win they can expect to gain by staying on the webinar.

Include Visual Aids and Variation

Remember, people are visual creatures. In order to maintain their attention, it's important to include visuals in your presentation—whether that means slides, infographics, or even video clips. You can use presentation templates that contain visuals to make this process easy. People also like variety, so if you want to mix up who’s presenting at different points in the session, that can work well.

Encourage Questions Throughout

Encourage your audience to ask questions throughout the presentation by opening up the floor for discussion after each section or regularly asking people to post their questions or comments. This will help to keep them engaged and ensure that they're understanding the material, plus gives you invaluable feedback during the call to help you adapt your presentation style and what you cover in greater depth.

Finish With a Call-to-Action

Your webinar doesn't have to end when the timer runs out! Use those last few minutes to issue a call-to-action, whether that's inviting people to book in for a call or request a fee quote or sign up for a demo. Ideally, the rest of your webinar will have been building up to a crescendo that will make acting upon your call-to-action a natural next step. Oh - and don't forget to thank them for their time!

Other final thoughts that have helped people I’ve spoken to about this include:

- Having a clear objective for your webinar (e.g. generating sales of a particular offering) and tailoring both the content and call-to-action accordingly

- Hosting your webinar using professional software such as Zoom or GoToWebinar which gives attendees a great experience and helps build confidence in your brand

- Talking through slides which help deliver your key messages clearly whilst also breaking up the monotony of listening to someone talk for an hour!

- Providing attendees with a link where they can access any resources that were mentioned during the webinar (e.g. recording, slides deck etc.)

Concluding Remarks

So, there you have it. Everything you need to know about how to run a successful webinar. By following our advice on objectives, topic choice, and promotion, you'll be well on your way to putting on an engaging and informative webinar that will help market your small business effectively.

Have any questions or want some help getting started? Don't hesitate to get in touch with us – we'd be delighted to assist! To do that, just book a call here.

 

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