7 things to keep in mind to effectively leverage webinars as a marketing tool

Webinars are a great marketing tool for brands to have a conversation with their customers without directly selling a product, here's how they can leverage them best.

The pandemic has brought people closer virtually. Online, they share their triumphs, woes, memories and troubles. Often, solutions are sought. A number of new issues have also cropped up under lockdown, driving up the demand for technological innovations. This has given rise to the need for conversations and explanations to make these innovations accessible to those who need them the most. In the absence of real-life events, quite a few people are creating experiences online, especially for topics that are educational in nature. For brands, such conversations can be turned into webinars for marketing purposes and as a tool to drive need, desire and commerce. We take a look at how they can make the most of it.

Talk to people

One of the most important things that organisers (brands) should keep in mind is how their offering should be worth the time they are asking people to spend in the webinar. It is of utmost importance that the speaker talks and provides insights the viewers could not have gotten from a document or a presentation. Avoid sharing screens and rather, talk to your audience.

Go beyond selling

As a business, the act of selling is a tempting one. However, in a scenario where you have people hooked and listening for a short duration of time, selling should be disguised and if possible, avoided. Reel people in with your values and offerings, show them what they stand to gain. Don't sell your products directly.

Resolve doubts

Include people in the conversation, take questions and share specific insights. Unlike a physical event, where a person might sit through the unwarranted knowledge instead of walking out and risk insulting the speaker, online gives them the option to log off with ease. So, be interesting and make the session worth their time. Remember, it's a webinar, not a sales pitch. You have a chance of creating a real, two-way conversation. Use it well.

Also Read: How to shoot videos from home professionally

Invite experts

While deciding topics and speakers for a webinar, as a brand, it might be tempting to stage your thought leadership and make it all about your business. However, you must broaden the horizon and look at the industry as a whole. That's how you can add value to your piece and attract a larger audience. You can also tie-up with a media outlet or publisher to work out the resources and reduce your bias in the process.

Become a teacher

Webinars, by default, as a teaching tool. This means, irrespective of your identity or end goal, you must assume the role of a teacher and work out specifics in a way that you are supporting your audiences to open up to new horizons and take away learnings from what you have got to say. Take the route of a teacher and consider them your students.

Include a CTA

To use them as a marketing tool, you must include a CTA in your webinars. It cannot be a direct 'Buy our product/offerings'. Rather, it should be a disguised one that gives people something to do, preferably as a means to stay connected with you. You can announce another event, or tell them to follow you on social media, or drop hints about that push them into reading up on your brand's products/offerings. You CTA should be about igniting interest in them for your brand.

Follow up on email

Emails can be a good way to follow up. For one, it's not as pushy as any other marketing tool. Secondly, they are already invested a certain amount of time to listen to you and thus, a follow up might work as a catalyst for further action. Lastly, it will help you close the loop and understand their level of interest in further communication from you.