You may have attended a few webinars, but how many have you hosted? No matter what your industry, webinars are wonderful lead generation tools as well as key parts of your customer retention strategy. With webinar marketing, you lend authority to all your other content by giving it a voice and packaging it in a format people love. It’s also a chance to showcase some personality, giving your leads a glimpse into your company culture. Stuck for a topic? Pick an area of expertise for your organization, and you’ve got what you need to get started.
Here are three great reasons to make webinars a priority for your marketing team.
Expansion
Lead generation is all about expanding into new markets. People may not be familiar with your brand, but they know they have an interest in the topic of your webinar. Google loves multimedia content, often ranking it above single-format content, so your webinar appears when leads search for more information. These aren’t just any leads, either – they’re valuable organic leads who have specifically sought a solution to a problem.
A new webinar also gives you a reason to expand your social media reach or connect with partners. With your new content format, you encourage re-tweets and shares to a wider audience of interested leads. Look for ways you and businesses in adjacent or dependent sectors can work together to boost visibility, and your lead gen activity can become a force multiplier for both of you.
Education
An informed lead is an engaged lead, and webinars are outstanding ways to educate your prospects. Webinars take advantage of every learning style, allowing participants to see graphs, hear lectures, and take notes at their own pace. As a lead generation tool, education is often overlooked by companies that don’t understand its value. That’s great news for the organizations that do prioritize it because they have less competition getting between them and their audience.
Your webinar should be content-rich. Think of it as a master class, not an infomercial. The goal is to inform rather than advertise, so look for ways to add relevance and address your audience’s needs directly. Like other content, you can create webinars to reach audiences at the top of the sales funnel, at the bottom, or anywhere in between. Just gear them to the appropriate audience, and they’ll find a warm reception.
Evergreen
Evergreen content never goes out of style. It isn’t seasonal or perishable. It’s also ideal for webinars as you can continue to offer them again and again. After you’ve recorded your webinar, it can go on YouTube and Vimeo to reach new leads. Even evergreens need occasional pruning, so revisit your older webinars occasionally to update or add supplemental material to keep them fresh and relevant.
Content creators know a simple trick to doubling or tripling the value of what they produce: repackaging and reformatting. The content in webinars can be repurposed into chapters of an e-book, white papers, blog posts, and other content channels. If you already have a sizable library of blog posts, papers, and case studies, turn some of them into a webinar and reach a whole new audience with them.
After your webinar, nurture the leads you’ve gained with additional content. Don’t forget to thank them for their attention and invite them to tell friends about what they’ve learned; referrals are golden.
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