Webinars rock, but it seems my “webinars rock” illustration caused more confusion than it educated! To rectify the situation, I have cut up and explained my thinking in this article.
1. Awareness and Ideas
The first reason to love webinars is that you get the opportunity to create a sense of event around your ideas, value and information. This attracts attention and builds traffic and positive awareness. There is both a direct attraction to something “live” and newsworthy, but also the viral impact of people sharing their intention to attend, and a third party/affiliate promotion opportunity.
2. Products and Teaching
When you present your information live and interactive, the audience can question, clarify and drill down the parts that interest them most. Rather than guess at what your audience most wants, allow them to ask you! This means teaching is deeper and accelerated in comparison to other forms of presenting content online. In addition, you are creating products in real-time. Any recordings you make can be repurposed and redelivered in the form of video, audio, slides and transcripts. Presenting webinars is a perfect compliment to membership sites, and in fact most premium memberships include a webinar, Q&A or other “live” component.
3. Relationship Building
Because your audience gets to hear you and interact with you, your credibility and connection to your audience builds faster and deeper than through text, or even the same content presented as pre-built video. It’s the next best thing to meeting you in person, but with the advantage that webinars scale to allow you to present in front of hundreds and even thousands of people all at once without any travel involved. Not only this, but webinars have significant value versus articles or other kinds of audience retention content, so keep you top of mind as someone who is worth listening to longer term.
4. Profit and Income
There are obvious profit benefits just from what I have mentioned so far. People are happier to spend money with people they know, like and trust, so content delivered using webinars will build your business if there were no other benefits, but there is more! Review, promote, or discuss a product in a webinar and you will increase your sales. Either through demonstration or allowing the audience to question and dissolve objections clears resistance, and gives you vital marketing information for where you need to clarify your sales information in future. “Preview Webinars” where you present product information in a kind of pitch are proven to have greater conversion rates than sales letters or launches alone, either for your own products or those of a third party. I am not one to hard sell, but even with my laid back style I have seen conversion rates of 20% or more. Lewis and Sean have done even better. Finally, who could forget paid webinars where your content is presented as an online class or course.
5. List Building and Audience Creation
If none of the other benefits came into play, this fifth benefit of growing your audience and list would make the return on investment of webinars fantastically compelling. Lewis built his list of 30,000 names in considerably under two years almost entirely through webinars. My own webinars have grown and compounded lists, and allowed me entrance to niches where previously I had little presence by utilizing the natural event and attraction of webinars, combined with reasons to subscribe and stay informed. Through partnering with other people you can accelerate this growth even further.
Summary
Hopefully this explains all the reasons I love webinars and encourages you to find out more about how webinars can help grow your business too.
Of course after all I have said it would be silly for me to forget to invite you to our webinar about webinars.
On Wednesday, July 14th at 12:00 noon EDT we will be presenting our FREE “Webinar Marketing Strategies” class.
Sign up here to get the full details and a free webinar marketing report ebook to download.
We look forward to talking to you live!