Why Webinar is one of the Key Mar-Tech Channels for Sales Expansion?

In this uncertain time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the instincts and traditional approaches of sales representatives have been limiting the sales; it’s hard to sell with uncertain economic conditions like these. The sales team needs to learn new strategies and skills, to deal with this situation. A webinar can be an effective tool and a key sales driver in this pandemic. Webinars can work miracles in these unprecedented times, where governments across the globe have imposed several restrictions, impeding human interaction. Webinars takes prominence over all other MarTech channels, helping you reap a variety of benefits, engaging the one-on-one suppliers, existing and potential customers, to an enhanced branding value and online presence.

As per the mar-tech experts, missing a single opportunity, may result in losing a potential investor.  With AI it has become even simpler to expedite your existing opportunities and target new ones, accelerate productivity, and drive the business forward with substantial marketing automation, content-based journeys, to your high-value customers and prospects. 

Webinar’s use in sales and marketing makes it a powerful tool for business growth, nurturing sales enablement. It is of paramount importance to mention that webinars are far more different than marketing videos, as it involves the viewer in real-time, enabling them to interact with the presenter, sharing highly insightful information.

What is a Webinar?

A webinar is a coalition of web and seminar, exclusively a web-based seminar, attended by the online audience with the right to interact. It can be any workshop, video presentation, or lectures hosted online, customarily through Webinar Software. The webinar software allows users to create virtual meeting rooms to open up the data for their attendees; meanwhile, they also get access to presenter’s desktop screens, files, and any open applications on their computer or mobile device. 

Benefits of a Webinar

In this digital era, an effective use of webinar can be a master stroke, a marketing platform for businesses to drive sales and enhance brand value. Here are some strengths a webinar can provide to an organization’s marketing strategy.

Enhancing an Organization’s Content Marketing

It all starts with Content, that an organization creates to educate or draw the attention of the audience, eventually, to drive profitable customer action. Companies have been using content marketing to promote their business, services or products for a long period, however, from the past decade or so, quality of content has taken precedence over the variety available on the internet.

Content presented in webinars enables businesses to educate their audience about their products or services, building a beneficial relationship with buyers. The webinar content keeps viewers engaged for a longer time. Every webinar you host creates a rich collection of information that is important and relevant to your current business. It has been proven in ClickMeeting’s latest State of Webinars report, that webinars are the particularly effective Content Marketing channel with some important features like live streaming on YouTube, presentation, screen sharing, whiteboard, and call-to-action. The webinar recordings can also be converted into blog posts or Q&A articles, helping to grow organization’s online content for a more vibrant online presence in the long run.

Enriching Branding Value

Every webinar conducted represents your brand repeatedly to the attendees, eventually leaves a mark with the targeted audience There are webinar platforms, like MegaMeeting, EasyWebinar, WebinarJam, EverWebinar and many more, which allow you to customize a webinar, using your own brand colors, logos, and domain names, to match the uniqueness of your brand with every aspect of your webinar presentation.

Generating Superior Sales Leads

Everyone can deliver a webinar, but not all of them end up converting the leads into customers. According to the latest, Webinar Benchmark Reports from ON24, average webinar attendance is 46%, which is pretty consistent looking at the previous studies. Here the sad truth is that only around 20% leads get converted. Use of marketing technology can be beneficial to generate high-quality leads and converting them.

Buyers now search for meaningful content experiences driven by industry experts, that  adds value at every stage of the buying cycle. Delivering insightful information can improve your brand value, also helps you to position yourself as an expert in the industry. The greater engagement you achieve with your content, the fully targeted and high quality leads you will get.

With a strategic follow up plan after a webinar, with decent survey, online research, and customer data, one can dramatically convert the attendees into profitable customers.

Building Stronger Business Relationships

Relationship selling, as the name implies, is the sales technique based on the interaction between the salesperson and the buyer, rather than detailing about the product or prices. It has become an important marketing strategy and a webinar is one of the best ways to build strong business relationships. Webinars can be used in different ways to approach the customers, depending on your business goal, the more creatively you approach, the better results will come out.

Webinars allow you to connect with your customer on a personal basis, educate them using visual aids, tell them about the working of your product or benefits of your services. This helps to build and strengthen relationships with customers. There are different ways to approach new customers and existing ones. Developing a relationship with new customers need special attention, the webinar you’re presenting should have unique content that the attendees couldn’t get somewhere else; you can also offer a one-on-one session or any special support for the product as an added advantage for them. For existing customers, you can provide high-quality webinars and exclusively tailored offers to strengthen the relationships. It is also advantageous to use Customer Relationship Management software for building stronger business relationships.

Establishing Authority

As an individual or a business, having credibility in the market is advantageous. People are most likely to consider the information right if provided by an authorized business or individual.

People often steer towards businesses they believe to have solutions for their problems or answers to their questions. A webinar can work best when delivered as a solution to any problem. Hosting a webinar, full of insights, and valuable information for your audience can be a way to present your organization as an authority in the market. Consistency in your webinar schedule leaves a good impact on attendees. Using live webinars and recordings, joining forces with other experts in your field reinforces your authority. This shows that webinars can be a great way to become an organization that has complete authority in the field of its operation, making it easier to market your product or service.

Cost-efficient Communications

Effective communication is always beneficial for driving the long-term productivity and profitability of a business. Also, cost-effective operations play a vital role in driving the profitability of any business; however, webinars are significant for its affordability. Hosting a webinar is affordable, more productive, gives access to a larger audience base and only requires an internet connection, computer, webcam, and access to a robust webinar app.  

Businesses can save money on traveling to the networking events, seminars, and one-on-one meetings with the use of webinars. Instead of wasting time and money on traveling, delivering a presentation to a small or large gathering, you can create multiple webinars that are cost-effective, maintaining one-on-one contact with everyone in their network, further expanding the network via marketing and sales webinars.

Webinars for Better Sales Expansion  

Every business or organization has a distinct and a unique approach for lead generation. Including webinar as a part of their sales expansion strategy, according to the nature of business, the understanding and choice of the right type of webinar becomes important. Here are some common types of webinars that organizations can use for more engagement and sales expansion.

Sales Webinar

Sales webinar is one of the most common types of webinars to grow your business. Sales webinars are effective when people are actively searching for a product or service and your business has a strong presence in the respective field. This webinar will help you provide insightful information to buyers, and for that the content or value of your webinar should stand independent of your product or service. Presenting the right information with a good approach builds a salutary relationship with the attendees, dramatically boosting the chances of lead conversion. Sales webinar allows you to educate your potential buyer, position yourself as an expert, leading to the growth of your business.

Webinars for A fee or Immediate Revenue

This is a type of webinar opens up for immediate revenue. A webinar that you charge people for, based on a particular topic with a specific learning intention, a unique benefit, and a promise of value. This type of webinar doesn’t aim at selling or marketing a product or a service but delivering meaningful information that creates immediate revenue through it. 

What decides the price for a one-off webinar? A pre-eminent topic and targeted audience allow you to decide the right price for it. Instead of looking over many, think about depth in one area; focus on providing the value for money people pay for, even when the market is immersed with free content.

 Case Study Webinars

Have you ever sold or purchased any product online? If yes, then you must be knowing the importance of testimonials or social proofs. People always show curiosity in reading others’ reviews about the product or service, before buying it. With the case study webinars, your attendees will get a clear idea about how your case study subject is making great results with your product.

During a case study webinar, you can either interview your customers or show some video clips, that speak about their experience with the product. Starting from the way how they used your product to the great results they experienced, your customers should mention the way your product has driven transformation for them. If you’re interviewing a customer, make sure to keep your questions handy, to bring more engagement for a webinar. Since you can use a video, it allows you to repurpose the webinar for a podcast.

The Multi-Module Webinar

Irrespective of you being an individual or a business, the multi-module webinar can act most versatile if structured well. Converting your content into a virtual format and presenting it to your attendees can leave a great impact leading to better engagement. Hosting a series of specialized training webinars is a great solution to generate revenue. Your webinar should provide value that can stand on its own throughout each module of the series. If your business can provide content to help someone achieve a credential, then this type of webinar unveils abundant opportunities for your business growth.

A webinar’s role in the mar-tech stack

Marketing Software spending rate has increased in the world, which shows that companies today are appreciating the role of mar-tech in flourishing their businesses. The tech companies like Microsoft offered web conferencing and webinar software options in the early 90s, which later occupied the market.  Webinars are a significant mar-tech channel, intending to enhance the brand value and other technologies you are partnered with, amidst its nature to feed in mar-tech channel and elements of your stack. Webinars can combine well with other online marketing activities like email marketing, and content marketing.

Technology stacks must be unique and support different needs, functions, and goals of marketing departments. Webinars can help marketing teams to increase productivity, efficiency, revenue, and enhance reporting capabilities with the perfect technology stack. Content is an indispensable part of a marketing technology stack, also the email marketing, lead management, and social media helps leverage the efforts of marketing teams in the mar-tech stack. The use of webinars can add significant value to a mar-tech stack.

How to use a webinar as a key sales driver?

A webinar is one of the most effective channels to drive sales. But it is only effective if people sign up and attend, allowing you to educate your attendees, build relationships, and drive sales. If you provide the content your audience is searching for, you can surely make sales on a bigger level. Ensure that the topic you choose for a webinar fits the criteria and expectations of your targeted audience… Try to approach your email list to drive the traffic for your webinar. Promoting your webinar through social sites can efficiently promote and invite registrants for it. Once you make a person sign up for your webinar, it becomes easy to build trust, educate them about your product or service, and eventually making sales.

Conclusion

Webinars provide a wide approach to companies, communicating with the targeted audience eventually directing to business growth. Webinars can be a right platform for businesses to experience sales growth on a consistent basis. You need to invest in technology to get the most from your business and achieve the sales you need. But when it comes to building your mar-tech stack, you need the right tech solutions to create and promote the webinars