Webinars are a great way to attract highly interested leads, build authority, and sell your products or services. However, not all webinars are successful at doing this right away. Your webinar needs to provide a clear value to your audience—so they’ll sign up, attend, and eventually decide to do business with you, if that’s your goal. Here are a few ways you can boost the value of your webinars.
Know what your audience wants. Before you can come up with ways to provide value in your own webinars, you need to know what your audience considers valuable. Are you looking to attract B2B customers who expect in-depth, serious coverage and who also download white papers on this topic, or are you looking for coaching clients who also appreciate a one-on-one evaluation of their issues or work? Both these audiences may be looking for very different things in terms of added value.
Bring on other speakers. Maybe you have a lot of expertise to share, but don’t have the name recognition to attract a large audience yet. You can both increase your reach and offer added value to your audience by partnering with a more well-known speaker who can deliver a segment of your webinar, or help you co-host. This also has the benefit of added publicity, as your co-host will promote their appearance to their own audience.
Offer a critique. Let’s say you’re delivering a webinar on web design. You could offer to critique websites built by members of your audience during the webinar. Limit the critiques to a number you can handle—maybe two or three—and keep them short; have audience members submit their links ahead of time or make it first come, first serve in your interactive forum. Your audience will appreciate the chance to have you review their work.
Make it interactive. Interactivity is a best practice for webinar production these days, but it’s still worth repeating. Give your audience many opportunities to interact with you and with the content—including conversing in a forum, asking or tweeting you questions, providing a webinar hashtag, and offering periodic quizzes.
Offer supplemental materials and discounts. Produce additional materials for your audience to take away—information sheets, data flow sheets, the PowerPoint presentation you used during the webinar, a free e-book; or provide a discount on your products and services for attending.
Webinars can be a great way to get the word out about your expertise, products, and services—and drive the collection of highly qualified leads. Consider a few ways you can give your audience more than their money’s worth—even if your webinar is free—and you’re likely to be successful.
