Webinars for Marketing Your Product

I recently responded to a question on Linked-in regarding the use of webinars for marketing vs. in-person seminars.  The seminar in question was a breakfast seminar for executives with topic: “Business Continuty and Virtualization” and subtopic: “Learn Best Practice Business Solutions: Reduce Spending, Optimize Efficiency, Increase Performance & ROI”.  In addition to recommending spellcheck (on Continuity), I recommended the following.  Since it’s very long, I split it into two separate posts.

My reply to discussion questions: Does anyone really attend seminars anymore? Has any one hosted seminars in the past and had great success? If so what was the secret?

As an online marketer, I frequently recommend online seminars or ‘webinars’. I personally attend at least 2 online seminars each month and find them extremely useful.

Information sharing is one of the best ways to get qualified leads online. Clients come for the free information and if you do a good job, you can interest them in the product. If you follow up without being salesy rather providing additional information, the follow-up is welcome. Several times, I have attended multiple seminars for a specific vendor and when the time was right — either recommended the product for a client or purchased the product myself.

The online seminars through Webex, go-to-meeting and other vendors are a cheap and effective way of employing interactive seminars to sell your products. No need to pay a venue or for food and you are no longer limited to your local area. For the attendees, there is no need for travel. I don’t have time to drive 2 hours round-trip for a 1 or 1.5 hour seminar. But I can certainly login in between meetings.

You can also record the seminars and offer the recordings to attendees and use them long after the seminar is complete. You can offer the recorded seminars in an archive and ask for user information to follow up with for continuous leads. If you have a particularly good seminar, you can post your seminar on YouTube which helps with search engine marketing when someone is looking up information about the products you offer. I personally search YouTube for seminars on usability all the time. You can also use www.slideshare.net to post your slides, again providing more opportunities to promote your company through information sharing.  

I have found surprisingly, that many people attend these seminars (if properly promoted). Expecting only a handful of participants, sometimes I have participated with 30 to 80 participants. The participants ask questions at the end either through the chat or via audio, if available.

The online seminars also seem to encourage continued communication. Because you follow up with the materials via email, many times the participants will continue to ask questions and there is a strong lead for you.

For your services in particular, I put together a business continuity plan for a company some years ago and I can assure you I did TONS of research and ultimately hired several companies that provided information through webinars, white papers, etc. Establishing your expertise in the industry goes a long way with clients.

I’ve seen companies use webinars as a sales call and some of the attendes leave as soon as they realize it’s a sales call.  The same goes for landing pages that pretend to offer information in exchange for your contact information.  If they are strictly sales, the visitor looses interest.  People look for information and if you can establish yourself as an expert, you will see better qualified leads than if you trick them into attending a seminar.  Click here for 10 tips for setting up a Webinar series…

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