A webinar is basically a way of having a live conference via the internet. The quality of the internet nowadays means that webinar hosting companies are able to provide a service that does not hinder the ability of the speakers to present and convey their message. There are a lot of advantages to holding a live online seminar, they can add a lot of value to your business in the form of an increased client base and the ability to better describe what your products are about.
Reduce Your Expenses
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As a business you might have the need to host conferences every year in order to show off your products, reach a particular client base or even deliver training of your products. However, conferences can cost a lot of money because of the traveling expenses and also it can take a lot of time to set up. On the other hand, you can achieve the same thing with a webinar, the only difference is that you will save a lot of money. An expert from Mega Meeting explains this point further:
Webinars provide businesses with a way to save thousands of dollars on conference or seminar related expenses. Rather than renting out a convention hall or large room for the audience to gather in, a speaker can conduct the webinar from their office and attendees can watch and interact from wherever they please.
Furthermore, because webinars are relatively cheap to host you can hold more of them, and that in turn allows you to provide a better experience for your customer base, which in turn increases your sales.
Paid Webinars
You could make a decision to charge for your webinars, but that will significantly reduce the amount of people that will be attending. The point of charging for the webinars is not only to make some money, but also to increases the quality of the leads. This is important because webinars can have an interactive element. For instance, you can chat with your audience through instant messaging. The problem is that if you interact with people who aren’t really that interested in your products/services then you are wasting your time and resources. You need to be interacting with the kind of people that are likely to turn into repeat customers and loyal followers of your brand. By charging for the webinar entrance you are essentially screening your leads. To increase the profitability of webinars further you could turn them into a product in its own right as a Flyte.biz writer explains:
In addition to the paid attendance for your live event, you can also record the webinar and charge for later downloads. You can also bundle several webinars together for a discounted rate.
For those of you that are worried about alienating a large portion of their target audience by making them pay for the webinars they could do a mix of free and paid webinars. But it is advisable to spend more time interacting with the paid attendees for the reasons already mentioned.
Show Off Your Products
Webinars are a fantastic way to showcase your products and services. Let’s say that you have a product that might require training such as a piece of software which allows you to do keyword research. So what you would do is set up a webinar that explains how to use the software, then the next webinar could be about searching for the long tail keywords and so on.
By showing of your products via explanations of how they work and so on you are essentially marketing the products to the viewers. If we were to take the example above further, imagine that you were to illustrate to your potential buyers how efficiently your software was able to find a bunch of long tail keywords. By doing this a certain portion of your potential customers will think, “wow, I could really use that feature”, and as a result that will generate sales.
The great thing about these marketing type “how to” webinars is that they also teach your buyers how to use your products. This user support will be to your advantage because people want to buy products that they know they can get help making the most of.
Create A Lot Of Hype For Your Webinar
You need to make your webinar an event and to do that you will need to invest in marketing. However, if your website or Facebook pages already get a lot of traffic then all you need to do is simply announce any upcoming webinars and you might see that the number of people attending will be huge. Fortunately, even if you don’t get many people attending your webinars you can still make them profitable buy turning them into a downloadable product. So as your business grows and more people take notice of your products people will end up buying your webinars.
When compared with in person seminars and conventions the webinars are a much easier way for people to get to know your product. From their point of view all they need to do is register, wait until the webinars starts and watch in the comfort of their own homes. As a Typepad writer explains the webinars provide convenience for the customers:
Registering for and attending Webinars is usually an easy process achieved over the Internet with a standard computer browser and requires no more skill than using the average email program. Most webinar applications are designed for ease-of-use and require very little additional downloading of software, if any.
In conclusion, the profitability that your webinars can bring greatly outweighs the amount of work that is needed to set them up. Additionally, by hosting webinars you are interacting with your customer base in a different way, and your competitors might not bother to do so which gives you an edge. The variety of material to host a webinar is wide, you can do anything from explaining what your current products are all about to showing off what you have in store for the future.