Why host a webinar?
Because they're one of the most effective lead acquisition and conversion tools available in the online marketing world today.
They can be used to drive traffic to landing pages and product pages, showcase events, promotions and special offers, educate your audience and provide customer service.
Key Takeaways
Disclosure: Although I receive affiliate compensation at no additional cost to you to support this site that compensation in no way influences my recommendations, which are strictly informed by my 10+ years of online business experience consulting for clients large and small. My aim is to always recommend tools that offer the best return for your investment (for more details, read my Affiliate Disclosure).
Why Should You Host a Webinar?
Webinars have great conversion rates compared to popup windows and other text-based lead generation methods.
The reason is that video traditionally retains the audience's attention much longer than the written word.
Also, live webinars give you the ability to interact with your audience by asking them questions in real time (e.g. “Has anyone had this experience before? Type yes or no in the chat box”).
Below are a series of examples why you should consider hosting webinars for your business:
1. Host a webinar to market a new product or service
Webinars are a great tool for generating interest and leads.
Since video naturally has high engagement, webinars are a perfect medium to market a new product or service.
For example, webinars platforms allow you to demonstrate your product and easily engage with your audience through a chat box.
You can use this feature to hold a Q&A session that can last as long as you need to convert your participants.
You can also survey your attendees in real time to better understand what features they value most and why.
This level of direct user engagement is very hard to achieve with any other marketing approach.
Plus, you can display a call to action timed to appear when it’s most effective, and even integrate it with payment processing software to generate impulse purchases.
2. Host a webinar to educate potential clients about your offering
Sometimes, the best way to convert prospects when your product price point is high is to offer a series of free educational webinars.
Your goal is not necessarily to drive your audience towards a call to action at the end of your presentation every time.
Instead, you can build confidence in your product by demonstrating use cases that they can relate to.
In this way you get to nurture your leads in a non-intrusive way, improving your chances of conversion later on.
For example, in my personal experience, I never sign on to a new SaaS tool without first going through a number of product demonstration webinars.
3. Host a webinar to train clients on how to use your company's products or services
Another reason why host a webinar is as part of your customer onboarding strategy.
An effective way to reduce your product’s learning curve is to demonstrate different features through webinars and then seek feedback from your clients.
If you’re going to use webinars for customer training, you should consider creating a video knowledge base by recording all your sessions and building a training library.
Over time, your growing library will become a powerful asset that’ll make you stand apart from your competitors.
4. Host a webinar to educate your audience on a topic they care about
You can also create high engagement with your prospects by hosting webinars on specific areas of interest that you can glean from customer surveys.
For example, if you offer SEO services, you can create a series of webinars to apply different SEO techniques to help do-it-yourselves in your audience.
You could do a webinar about on-page SEO, another one on how to run a site audit, another on keyword research, etc.
In this way, you’ll be able to develop a reputation as a go-to person in your area of expertise.
If one day you decide to create an online course to generate revenue, you’ll already have a captive audience of fans to pitch to.
5. Host a webinar to showcase an event, a promotion or a special offer
Another great reason why you should host webinars is to promote an upcoming event.
For example, you could run a series of short promotional webinars where you invite guest speakers to tease upcoming courses and answer questions.
You could use these promotional opportunities to sell advance tickets at a discounted rate through a call to action timed to appear at the end of the presentation.
6. Host a webinar to drive traffic to a landing page or to a product page
All top webinar platforms either come equipped with landing page builders or integrate seamlessly with popular ones, allowing you to use webinars as lead generators for your business.
Given the high engagement rate of webinar audiences, webinars are natural lead-conversion funnels for directing highly-motivated traffic to your landing pages.
In fact, webinars are known for closing prospects at a much higher rate than that of traffic coming from a blog or an online ad.
7. Host a webinar to provide customer support to your clients
Finally, webinars can be used as an effective tool to scale your customer support without adding headcount to your customer service team.
Since webinars are one-to-many communications tools, you could hold regularly scheduled customer support webinars with visual demonstrations on how to solve key usage issues.
For example, you could solicit customers' questions in advance, or ask them to submit the URL of a webpage they would like feedback on, and then you could hold a webinar to answer questions or do a critique.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between a webinar and a seminar?
A webinar is like a seminar on the internet.
With a seminar, however, you get to see an expert live and you get to engage with them face to face during breaks.
Webinars try to mitigate the remote nature of the relationship by adding interactive features like chat, polling and live surveys.
How do webinars help businesses?
Webinars help businesses by creating a more intimate way to deliver news, product information, training and certifications.
Webinars have much higher engagement than blog articles, email marketing and advertising.
Wrapping Things Up
Now you know 7 great reasons why host a webinar for your business.
Click here for a list with great host tips and here for a checklist on how to run a great webinar.
