As we all stay indoors to help keep ourselves and others safe and healthy, businesses need to continue to grow. If you previously held in-person events prior to the stay at home orders, consider hosting webinars instead until we can all get back to be in person again.
Whether you consider Live or pre-recorded webinars they are a great way to get in front of people looking to be educated about what your business provides. Webinars allow you to get in front of a larger audience than an in-person engagement, it’s more cost-effective and with recordings, creates a repeatable system of engagement.
Why You Should Host Webinars
Webinars have always been quite popular, but they’ve definitely become more common during this pandemic. More people are comfortable with the technology like Zoom and now prefer it over live events. Hosting webinars is not only cost-effective, but it’s also a great way to build more of an online presence for your business.
Plus, you can continue to benefit from webinars, long after you’ve gone live. If you record your webinar (which we highly recommend), you can use this material later on to create even more online content. Converting part of the video into a blog post is on example. Another option is to create an evergreen webinar where you run the same event again to a new audience and they view the recordings. We recommend doing Q &A live to keep engagement high.
We’re all working remotely for the foreseeable future, so it’s important to find different ways to engage with your audience. There are many different types of webinars you can hold, depending on what your business currently needs. Such As:
- Lunch and Learns
- Interviews with Industry Thought Leaders
- Education “How To” Series
- Informational Topics
- Round Table Discussions
- Conferences
While this form of online communication has taken the place of in-person events we are seeing a hybrid mode being created in the future once we are able to get back to in-person meetings. Don’t think of this a temporary solution to outreach think of it as an additional way going forward to add to your marketing strategy.
Always Promote Your Upcoming Event
If you’ve decided that you’re going to start doing online events make sure to promote your events. Just as you would for your in-person conference, you need to let others know that you’re holding an event online.
Promoting your webinar can be done by sending invitation emails to your customers and leads. Utilizing LinkedIn’s event feature is also a fantastic way to let those in your network know that you’re holding an online event. Use all your social media accounts to spread the word. Through promoting your webinar, you can also increase your brand awareness and online presence, potentially engaging with new customers!
We recommend that you resend your invitation out to your audience several times. We see that we get double the sign ups if invitation emails are resent to non-openers 2 – 3 times. Make sure you create the emails well in advance of the event in order to be able to send multiple times without it feeling like spam. Two weeks prior to the event is a good time to start.
Post Webinar Follw Up
Don’t forget about communications after your event. They are just as important as the webinar itself. Ideally you want to track how many people registered and of those that registered who did and did not attend. Send replay watches to everyone and follow up multiple times with those that did not attend to see if they watched the replay.
To maximize your engagement track:
- email open rates
- how many times an individual opened an email
- who watched the replays
Based on this information decide who you want to follow up with. You can manually follow up with individuals via email or phone calls or you can elect to add them to a sales funnel. Check out our article for tips on how to create an effective sales funnel.
Organize Your Webinars Now
Need help organizing, implementing, and managing your webinars? We can help. Schedule a time to chat with us now to learn how we can assist you.
