You want to know how to market your online business, and you want to know how you can use webinars to do it. Good news–you’ve come to the right place!
Webinars are a medium that’s overlooked far too frequently. These things have a ton of uses, and can be a key part in your marketing process. They build trust, which alone makes them a worthy product, as well as a direct method of getting leads for your business. Most importantly, webinars make your audience curious.
Curiosity is a bit like a yawn that just won’t stop coming back. Curiosity causes people to keep looking in and checking up on your business. People who’ve caught that bug won’t sit still: they’ll be regularly checking for updates from your business. Curiosity is a huge part of how to market your online business, and cultivating it is key. That’s why it’s the first C of The CLICK Technique.
We’ll take a look at what webinars are, why people enjoy (and sometimes prefer) webinars, and how to market your online business while producing the best online seminar you can.
What is a Webinar?
Most of you are rolling your eyes at this point. “We know what a webinar is.” Hold the phone! You’d be surprised by how many people don’t!
Simply put, a webinar is a seminar that’s hosted online. The title caught on in the early days of the web, but many people in business are still intimidated by it. Some of us are still a bit behind the times when it comes to this tech even though it’s the perfect opportunity for you to create curiosity around your business.
Don’t be tempted to duck out if you’re confused by the concept of webinars! These online seminars are a fantastic resource that can teach you how to market your online business to a new crowd. I appeared as a guest on Social Media Business Hour where I talked about basics of Online Marketing Strategy, you might want to check it out.
There are a lot of perks to webinars that seminars just don’t have. For example: your seminar, workshop, presentation, or lesson can be far more personal and easier to engage with on the web.
Webinars are convenient, as participants don’t need to leave home to attend them. Seminars put the speaker up on a platform or in the lime-light, where webinars put everyone on the same level. This intimate detail makes webinars much more personal and attractive. A good webinar feels more like one-on-one coaching!
Before taking off and hosting your own webinars, you’ll need to learn how to market your online business with them. Don’t worry–my team and I have got your back! We’ll go over tricks I’ve learned through the years that you can use. We’ll also reference Jessica Nazarali, a successful evergreen webinar host, who I recently had a fantastic interview with.
Pay Attention to Details
A big part of learning how to market your online business is learning how to harness small details. There are a lot of little details that you need to consider in the planning stages of your online seminar. Ignore them, and you risk losing out on a ton of potential audience members and leads.
Incorporate multiple forms of media in your presentation, just as you would with a normal seminar. If anything, use MORE than you would in a normal seminar! Try to include both visual and auditory components. Your audience has a chance to directly engage with whatever you send them on a one-to-one level – utilize that!
Speaking of direct engagement, your audience will likely want to have a way to easily ask questions. You’ll need to spend time brainstorming and incorporating methods for direct communication. How interactive do you want to get? In my opinion, the more interactive the better; after all, your audience taking the time to ask questions in, for example, a post-webinar Q&A is a perfect representation of the way in which you’ve piqued their curiosity.
Lastly, make sure your webinar offers some value to the audience. What are you looking to achieve here? What are you teaching those who attend? You may know a lot about a certain topic, but you’ll want to narrow down the goal of the webinar to be easily digestible.
Create a Special Offer
Many webinars are free of charge, but even those that cost something need to have a link back to your business. These are people who have already expressed interest in you; harness that! The best way to harness that curiosity is to hand out a special offer at the end of the webinar, available only to those who attended.
This special offer is critical: it’s become so commonplace, it’s almost ridiculous to not offer something. A big part of learning how to market your online business to is keep offering things of value to your audience, and that’s just what this is. Jessica Nazarali admitted that, when she first started her webinar, she completely forgot to include this offer… and it had a big impact on her conversion rate.
“Sometimes, when you have a funnel, you miss something really obvious. This seems silly, but we didn’t have a special offer for the webinar,” said Jessica. “It somehow got missed in the process of putting the whole thing together. We didn’t have a special offer to get someone to take action right away. When we realized it, we fixed it quickly.”
That small change made a huge difference in her business’s bottom line. Jessica realized that, with the high cost of the offer she was putting out, she couldn’t just put it out there once and then close it up. She knew that a big part of how to market your online business is anticipating the needs of your audience. She knew she needed to give people time.
“You need to give people a little more time than, say, just on the webinar,” said Jessica, “They may have to ask their husband, or find a credit card.”
You need to give people time to process your deal, and be curious enough about it to want it.
Stay in Contact
Don’t think that things are over when the webinar is done! Once you’ve wrapped up your presentation, you need to chase those participants to offer them a hook back in to your content. We’ve discussed giving limited-time offers, so let’s move on to other ways you can keep in contact with your audience.
It’s critical that, once you put out your limited-time offer, you don’t drop the ball on communication. A big part of how to market your online business is open communication because open communication keeps that curiosity from dying off. As Nazarali pointed out, her company benefited from keeping up with regular reminders of the deal.
“They’d get the sales letter when the offer came out,” Jessica noted. “We would send emails regularly, remind them that the offer was expiring in two hours, one hour, and then fifteen minutes before it expires.”
Something new that’s catching on fast is SMS marketing. Nazarali uses it in conjunction with her email messages, and she found that it helped out a ton. Not only that, but she used it prior to the webinar to help with show-up rates.
“We would send them a text message fifteen minutes before the webinar, as well as fifteen minutes before the offer was expiring,” Nazarali said. From integrating that small communicative outreach, the cost to hook her customers went down by nearly a third. That’s a huge leap!
Clearly, a critical part of learning how to market your online business through your webinar has to do with keeping communication up. Don’t forget to seek out new and convenient forms of staying connected. Social tech is changing and transforming constantly; don’t get left behind!
Learning How to Market Your Online Business Using Your Webinar
I love webinars. There’s something about the medium that is super persuasive. No matter what you’re selling, people will be more likely to buy if they have a chance to hear about it straight from you. One-on-one sessions are time-consuming and can be a bit awkward if you don’t have the skillset. Webinars create a group environment from the comfort of your own space!
There’s an important factor that we haven’t really discussed yet, but it’s crucial to understanding why webinars work. When you’re learning how to market your online business, you’ll steadily figure out that it’s YOU that you’re marketing. People want to know who they’re dealing with. A webinar introduces you to your audience, and they always love it!
The most important lesson is the last: be okay with making mistakes. It’s how we learn, after all! The path to learning how to market your online business is a slow one, and it’s filled with stumbling blocks. Stick with it, and you’ll see results. Even the highly successful Jessica Nazarali has made her mistakes, but the only way to succeed is just to keep going. After all: Keep Going is the “K” in The CLICK Technique.
“You need to be okay with making mistakes,” said Nazarali. “The biggest mistake I see is that people get too disheartened too quickly. I’ve done so many things that haven’t worked! Keep on powering through. Just be okay with making mistakes, and work on constantly improving little bit by little bit.”
If you’d like to know more about how to market your online business via webinars, check out the recent interview I had with Jessica Nazarali. She’s the founder of It Girl Academy and It Girl Radio, and has a lot to say about her success with webinars, specifically going “evergreen” with her webinars.
