Posted by Is your brand growing the way it should?
You’ve devoted the time and resources to every needed area of your business, from marketing to accounting. You’ve built a brand that has equity. Your company is growing. But if you still feel that there’s something missing — your brand is not growing fast enough, for example — webinars are one of the most effective tools you can use to build it up.
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In a survey of marketing and sales executives by InsideSales.com, 75 percent of those polled agreed that webinars are important for lead generation. In fact webinars are a highly effective tool to get your name out there to people who may never have heard of your brand, but are interested in the subject that’s being discussed.
That’s why you need to be at the top of your game when creating the perfect webinar. Here are a few tips how to do that.
Find (and focus on) one big idea.
The biggest thing you can do to make your webinars a success for brand-building is to leave your audience with one big idea — nothing more. “So you have one goal during the research phase … find your single big idea,” the software company Kajabi noted in a blog post.
“One way to help get you there is by asking yourself this question … ‘What’s the one belief that if I helped my prospects to believe it, [their] taking me up on my offer would become an absolute no-brainer for them?'”
That big idea is what you build everything around. Think about it this way: Your brand is more than a name and a logo. It’s your reputation. It’s the idea that people have about what you do, and how good your company is at that. Your one big idea is an extension of that.
Related: 5 Simple Ways to Use Webinars to Close More Prospective Coaching Clients
Think about what makes your brand what it is. What’s your value proposition? Find a way to use that as the main tentpole of your presentation and you can really build up your brand.
Create evergreen-webinar content.
Webinars can be a prime source of evergreen content. According to research first published by Springer, even among students in higher education, having a library of online video for classes available has been linked to higher grades and reduced dropout rates.
Importantly, viewers also want to watch webinars on their own schedule. After analyzing data from 350,000 webinars, Daniel Waas, director of marketing for GoToWebinar at LogMeIn, described in a report that about a quarter of those signed up for the webinars didn’t want to watch them live …. . . But chances were they were planning to get around to that task later.
Making your video webinar available helps you offer a repository of useful information that people can keep coming back to, and point their associates and fellow entrepreneurs to. You can also chop up that content into smaller pieces offered via multiple channels. Gary Vaynerchuk does a great job of this, taking one or two big pieces of content and repurposing them in various ways.
“My content strategy is predicated on a ‘reverse pyramid’ model,” Vaynerchuk explained in a recent blog post. “It starts with a piece of ‘pillar content,” Vaynerchuk wrote. “With my personal brand, it takes the form of a daily vlog, keynote, Q&A show or another video that I do. Since I start from video, my team is able to repurpose that one piece of content into dozens of smaller pieces of content, contextual to the platforms that we distribute them to.”
In short, the webinar doesn’t stop when the camera turns off; so use it for more than that.
Pitch your product, but don’t force it.
People will go into a webinar expecting to hear about a product from your company — that’s expected. But you’re sponsoring it for a reason, so pitching that reason during the course of the webinar won’t be a shock to viewers. Still, whatever you do, the information you give must be useful with or without your company’s product.
Think about it … webinars are often used for lead generation and brand-building. Where are these people in the funnel? Usually they’re right at the top. If you’re hitting top-of-the-funnel people with information that relates only to your company’s product, what does that tell them? Webinars are a great spot to build your leads and your brand, to be sure, and a pitch comes in handy; just don’t make it the pillar.
A webinar isn’t a presentation. Know the difference.
Demos, presentations, panels –you name it: the talking-head-over-a-PowerPoint-background scene has been done to death. It works. But if you’re limiting yourself to that scenario, you’re not using the power of the webinar format in full.
Webinars can work for all sorts of different formats. Maybe you want to get a couple of your C-Suite executives on a panel to answer questions about what works and what doesn’t for your business. How about bringing in a guest or two? Try building one around user questions, or having a loose, open discussion.
Don’t just do a slideshow — get creative.
Cross-promote to bring about growth.
If you want to build your brand, one of the best ways to do that is to partner with another brand. Offering complementary services to something that already exists will get you in front of a different audience, help you build connections and leverage the brand equity that the other brand already has.
As entrepreneur Keith Herman noted in Forbes, “In my experience, these relationship-building opportunities pave the way for continued, steady growth. The business referrals obtained are of much better quality and much easier to close than cold inquiries.”
Webinars are a natural way for doing this. Maybe another brand can host the webinar, or maybe you can bring on an executive from that company’s team. Think outside the box.
Keep your audience engaged.
Having materials that go along with the webinar — handouts, surveys and the like — is a great way to drive engagement both during and after the webinar.
According to an infographic published by GoToMeeting, 40 percent of people in a webinar will use the engagement tools that are given to them, and if you give them something like a pdf handout that might come in handy down the line, that handout could be big for your brand equity.
Related: 7 Tips for Hosting an Incredibly Profitable Webinar
No matter how you choose to approach it, a webinar can be a powerful tool for your business, allowing you to build up your brand in an organic way. Make sure you’re utilizing webinars to the fullest with these simple tips.