As consumer and webinar experts, we know different steps are involved before consumers make a purchasing decision. For instance, you may begin by learning the brand, recognizing the products, acknowledging their selling points, comparing them with rivals, and weighing them in every possible scenario. Then, maybe with a final push of discount, you eventually take it. The journey from awareness, consideration, intent, and purchase to retention can take months, if not years. Marketing efforts are needed to extend exposure, remind, re-market, and reinforce the call to action. In fact, besides ads to push progress among stages, you can shorten consumers' buying cycle via webinar marketing.
How? Webinars are online seminars or interactive presentations that transcend geographical limitations and welcome more audience - up to 3,000 from all over the world at a time! However, when choosing the right host platform, webinars can be even more than that. Some webinar platforms lay a comprehensive foundation for implementing impact webinar marketing strategies. By picking up the right tools for your business, you can build landing pages to generate leads, send automated invitations and follow-up emails, and track user behaviors on one platform. This saves webinar hosts' time from switching software programs and optimizes marketers' ROI.
Through different stages in a buying cycle, here are some tips for more effective webinar marketing and how to pick a platform suitable for you.
Awareness: show your expertise via hosting a webinar
Hosting a webinar has become a direct and effective way to nurture leads. Webinars with engaging content may save you the hassle from the early stage of awareness-building and bring customers down the funnel to build a closer relationship. Strike up a conversion with potential customers as an expert. Not every brand in an industry is hosting online events to share deeper content.
Be a professional pioneer in the field. Start hosting regular webinars to position your brand as a leader by sharing the brand vision and contributions to the industry. Then, as you give insights that tag into consumers' scenarios, you also add value to both the products and the brand, thereby creating demands for your products and lifting the brand image and credibility. What's better to establish the first impression as an industry pioneer?
Consideration: segmentation, dive deep, and educate
By all the research and development of your product and service, it is almost certain that you would have so many thoughts and rationale behind it to share. But when to share what? Through the lead generation stage, reach your audience with different content angles pinpointing the problems they might be facing and where your product can show up, and clear the mess up! The bait that brings the attendees here in your webinar is a solution to the problem. Now, grab the chance to dive deeper with individuals - sentimentalize your audience by demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. Talk to them from a preferred angle to educate them about product features. You should also use the webinar platform's interactive capabilities to engage better. For example, a poll can be a mini-game to reveal facts, while a Q&A gives real-time responses to particular quests.
Joining the webinar, to some extent, indicates their interests and purchase intent. Creating engaging experiences with potential customers can make your brand stand out from competitors. To make it more explicit and easily understandable, you may also want to help them make comparisons, bringing them closer to purchase decisions. List the similarities and differences between yours and the available products in the market. Persuade in what scenario your product/service should be their go-to option.
Action & retention: follow up
After learning more about your brand and product, don't forget to give attendees more than a reason to act immediately. A limited-time discount code to shop or a free trial would be some good incentives to enhance the call to action. Distributing the stimulus during the webinar will keep your brand in the audience's mind for a couple more days, even after the webinar has ended.
Time for some personal bonds! Webinar marketing speeds up consumer relationship building because you have even more conversations with these quality leads of audiences with intent. Some webinar hosting platforms allow you to have breakout rooms to socialize and exchange information with attendees. Remind attendees of this functionality between speakers or product sharing sessions because breakout rooms facilitate more intimate engagements for users to stay and raise more specific queries. By interacting with speakers and moderators, users are one step forward to experience the service you provide.
Follow-up actions to an event/webinar are vital to closing the loop. You may want to collect feedback via surveys to listen to your potential customers and improve your webinar content and marketing strategy. Review the survey results and the webinar dashboard, check the retention and engagement and evaluate the event effectiveness.
Within 24 hours after the event, we suggest sending automatic tailored messages to thank attendees and remind them of the exclusive webinar offer. To be caring enough, share newsletters of topics they are most concerned with (to remind them of their needs and your products from time to time). With the integrated communications alongside the webinar, generating demand is more manageable, and the buying cycle can become more compact.
You can eventually build a micro-business community by hosting regular webinars, live or recorded to view on-demand, gradually educate your consumers, and turn them into customers or even evangelists of your service!
How to pick a good webinar hosting and marketing platform?
When choosing a webinar platform to host, keep your eyes on its functions and consider its webinar marketing tools. A good platform helps foster communication with your audience throughout the buying cycle. And from before, during, and after the webinar, it assists you with all the planning and follow-up work. These integrated benefits the data analytics and give way to a loyal relationship with potential customers.
An integrated webinar platform, like EventX, can leverage the technology to maximize your data synergy for better CRM while minimizing work and efforts. On the one-stop solution, generate leads with landing page builder and set up email automation for your invitations/countdowns/follow-up messages/newsletters. While every attendee's behavior is traceable, check the consolidated analytic dashboard with insightful reports to your needs in just a few clicks. We simplify the complex checklists in hosting a webinar and webinar marketing to ensure you get them right in place, with customization template options.
Capture and nurture the lead with us! Interested in our solution? Get in touch with our webinar specialists to learn more.