What is webinar advertising?
All of us today understand what a web seminar is, popularly known as a webinar. Many of us have known this marketing technique for quite some time, as we have all faced a pandemic in the last two years.
Many of us have understood during this time that these webinars can be used effectively for business purposes and are great communication tools that allow us to hold full-fledged meetings without commuting.
Let’s take a closer view of one of the newest and, for lack of a better word, more astonishing types of marketing. Webinar advertising is the use of an online seminar as a tool to connect with a broader and more diverse audience and promote your business.
Marketing webinars are based on the principle that potential customers will have more confidence in your brand and your products and services if you provide relevant, timely, and unique value.
Although webinars can pique attendees’ interest in purchasing your products and services, a webinar is not essentially a sales pitch. Instead, the focus must be on providing value to attendees, not just focusing on your products or services.
The value you add to attendees, in turn, makes the webinar a perfect opportunity to sell your products and services as a service to a specific problem you’ve been talking about.
Companies use webinar marketing for three primary purposes – to introduce their products and services to potential buyers, to share content published in a particular blog post, and to showcase their expertise in their area of operation. Here’s some data on the use of webinars in advertising:
- According to the Content Marketing Institute, 58% of online marketers utilize webinars to drive sales.
- Webinars are good for 40% of viewers to keep their attention, according to MakeSocialMediaSell.
- According to ReadyTalk, 20% to 40% of webinar attendees convert into qualified leads.
- According to Branded Solopreneur, 2% and 5% of all webinar attendees purchase the product/service being pitched to them.
- As unfortunate as it may sound, no more than half of the registrants attend the webinar.
What is a webinar marketing funnel?
Simply put, a webinar funnel is a marketing process marketers use to attract potential webinar attendees. Creating such a funnel is considered one of the most effective ways to get people to attend your webinar. Without a webinar funnel, it is not easy for webinars to get noticed or attended, rather the opposite, which means that all your efforts can be in vain.
The funnel works by inviting people to join a webinar on a website or social media platform. The following process is the funnel and leads the person to the webinar’s goal. This could be training with insights or encouraging viewers to buy a product – there are many choices.
If you want to make sales with your webinar, you need a whole bunch of leads coming to you that you can then convert into clients. More importantly, these leads must be real people who must be interested in your product or service. If the leads are not of this nature, they are useless to you.
It is also where the true meaning of the funnel becomes apparent because not everyone gets through. The number of people who continue to engage with your webinar will almost certainly decrease as the leads move through the webinar funnel.
However, this is not a worrying sign. The webinar funnel can do both jobs of a marketer – acquire leads and convert them into customers. Over time, you’ll find that capturing every lead is unnecessary, but the right leads for your business to grow.
How does a webinar sales funnel work?
Working on a webinar funnel can be divided into three parts.
The first part starts with acquiring leads you can invite to your webinar. That is where you focus on traffic sources so you can understand your audience.
This phase of the funnel work process has two other essential parts – maximizing webinar registrations and sending reminder emails to maximize attendance rates.
Perfect Webinar Funnel
The second phase of a webinar funnel takes place during the webinar. It is about engaging your attendees and creating a personal and positive experience. It would be best if you kept them engaged throughout the webinar.
You can do this by providing as much value as possible and giving them a clear call to action at the end – encouraging them to take the next step. It could be signing up for a course, ordering a product, or providing feedback.
Third and finally, you should send thank you and follow-up emails to all participants. You can mention something in the emails that will drive sales at this stage. Since you’ve already provided the attendees with the benefits, they’re looking for, you can now directly target the sale.
Funnel steps
What is an automated webinar funnel?
An automated webinar is simply a webinar that runs on autopilot without the person in charge having to go live and run it. A sales funnel, as described above, is a path that an interested attendee should take in anticipation of closing a sale since you now consider them a potential customer.
An automated webinar funnel is a collection of the two, where you use a series of steps to guide the potential customer through making a purchase. The essential step in this process is, of course, the automated webinar.
What are the benefits of automated webinars?
Below are the many advantages of automated webinars that make them very business-friendly:
- You don’t have to be present for every single webinar – this buys you more time
- Automated webinars can begin every 15 or 30 minutes, 24/7, 365 days a year
- Eliminates any stage fright if you get nervous giving presentations in front of many people
- You can pre-record the webinar video and tune it to perfection
- The last missing piece of a fully automated sales funnel
With automated webinar funnels, you gain a lot of extra time because you don’t have to invest as much time in your webinar once it’s created. You can then use that extra time to put more effort into your business, which in turn grows your business and lowers your customer acquisition costs.
However, if you prefer live interactions between you and the audience, we recommend hosting live webinars if you want to focus on dialogue and questions. You should use the best webinar software for living, automated, and hybrid webinars.
6 Tips for creating an effective webinar funnel
1. Make your webinar accessible
Try to remove as many hurdles as possible to ensure that as many individuals as possible sign up for and attend your webinar. The more attendees, the more customers.
2. Be personable
The best webinars are the personalized ones; even if they aren’t, they can still give everyone a personalization experience. Building relationships is just as meaningful in business as in personal life. After all, that’s one of the most critical points of a webinar.
3. Make the audience understand how important you are
If you understand what your attendees need, emphasize how you can meet those needs. Apply to your product/service.
4. Thank everyone
It is essential to thank everyone for their participation, so do this at the beginning and end. Courtesies can take you a long way.
5. End your webinar with a CTA (Call to Action)
The point of a marketing concept for a webinar, after all, is to attract clients and make sales. End your webinar with a simple, concise, short, and straightforward call to action. After an exciting and valuable session, this small dose of sales talk won’t bother you and may get you some sales.
6. Use the best-automated webinar software
The webinar platform you use to run your automated webinars can make the difference between success and failure. The most important features to look out for are the webinar registration page, hiring options (including automated offers), and email follow-up sequence.
4 Steps to creating an automated webinar funnel
Step 1: Prepare the topic of your webinar
First, identify the audience you want to target before deciding on a topic. What is the purpose? What is the best method to reach them? What are their most important professional or personal challenges?
A small survey of this kind can save you a lot of trouble. Of course, the topic should also be aligned with the product or service you’re trying to sell. That will assist increase the conversion rate of the webinar (number of successful sales per attendee).
Step 2: Create the presentation and talking points
It doesn’t matter if you use PowerPoint, Prezi, or Keynote; ensure you can convey your main idea well. A fancy presentation is useless if it can’t convey a clear message. A typical structure used by most people divides the webinar into five parts:
- Introduction to the topic and you as the presenter: why should people listen to you? What does the expertise give you?
- Introduction to the problem: make the issue tangible. Your audience needs to be able to empathize and relate to the problem.
- Your proposed solution to the problem: That is a crucial element. Describe and show how your product or service completely solves the problem.
- Ask your audience to take action: What action should take? The call to action, in this case, should be crystal clear.
- Anticipate and dispel doubts: Participants may still be undecided about your solution. Common doubts include: What do previous customers say? Can I get a discount or refund?
The time you split between these sections depends entirely on your personal decision, but try to stick to the times that resonate best with participants.
Step 3: Record the webinar and export the recording file
Automation reduces the hassle of presenting repeatedly, but it creates a focus in the recording portion of the webinar. That will be helpful for you. As mentioned in the same article, you can ensure the clarity, conciseness, and just total perfection of the webinar.
Please record your screen, for which there are tools like OBS, Camtasia, etc. With these tools, you can record your presentation and voice and edit the bad parts.
Since automated webinars are becoming increasingly popular and our readers will work with them for a long time, they can buy special microphones that will improve the quality of their voice and thus the quality of the whole webinar.
After recording, export it to a file format suitable for webinar automation tools.
Step 4: Use automated webinar software to set up your webinar
That is the part where it all comes together. You upload your webinar recording file to the webinar platform, create an attractive registration page, and set up all the actions.
One of the most crucial parts is timing the automatic offer and ensuring all the links work. You may also want to set UTM tags for your links so you know exactly how many clicks you get through the webinar.
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