Webinars are the perfect way of reaching out to large numbers of potential suppliers, business partners, and customers. Being relatively low-budget and low-effort, webinars can do wonders to a startup, small and even large company. Regardless of the industry, webinars connect businesses to clients, educate larger audiences about the product and market trends, and enhance business’s online presence.
What are Webinars?
Webinars are essentially seminars that are hosted online. Depending on the platform you are using, hosts can share images, videos, presentations, and other documents during the webinar to include the audience into the lecture. Webinars are interactive and encourage input from the audience. Besides, the host can start up a poll or a survey to learn more about the audience and get direct feedback about their products. Usually, there is a live chat where participants can ask questions, communicate with the host and with each other.
Webinars can help you introduce potential users to your product, explain how to use your product most efficiently, generate leads, answer common questions, etc. Especially amid the pandemic, webinars serve as a great marketing tool to promote and raise awareness about your company and brand.
Key Benefits and Uses of Webinars
Webinars have become a part of marketing strategy for a multitude of businesses. They provide more options for companies to reach out to audiences and share their skills and knowledge as well as boost product awareness. Let’s go over the main benefits of hosting webinars and how this marketing activity can expand your business.
Access to larger audiences
According to WorkCast, the webinar attendance grew 87% in the last year, mostly due to social distancing. But even when everything opens back up, organizing events online dramatically expands the potential participant list. You can reach out to the audience across the globe without spending money on traveling.
Enrich online presence
Any marketing strategy involves generating content. From writing academic whitepapers and informal blog posts to creating interactive Instagram images and YouTube videos, companies are forced to engage with various platforms to be seen on the internet. Webinars is another format that businesses can choose to create more relevant content and attract an audience. Most modern webinar portals come with a recording feature that allows you to save the videos for further use as FAQs, onboarding tutorials, Q&As, etc.
Lead generation
Webinar participants are potential customers that are clearly somewhat interested in the product. During the registration, you can collect data such as names, emails, occupations, hobbies, etc., and use it to enhance future marketing activities. The collected data will help you move the leads along the marketing and sales funnel and increase revenue.
Cost effectiveness
Without spending time and money on choosing and hiring a venue, employing a catering service, paying traveling charges as well as finding staff to organize and host the event, your company will save a ton of valuable resources. The costs of event organization are much higher than people assume and might not even be worth the effort. Especially if you are new to the event organization, you are more likely to lose money than create a feasible event. Virtual seminars on the other hand are not expensive and do not require as much planning. Even if your first webinar fails to attract a large audience, you will not lose too much money.