Many businesses use free webinars for marketing. You promote your webinar to as many people as possible, attract more people into your marketing funnel, conduct the webinar to promote something at the end (even if it’s just getting their e-mail address for follow-up marketing), and eventually sell them something.
That’s why so many businesses see webinars as such a powerful marketing tool. But these free marketing webinars also have a number of other benefits, which you might not have considered. Here are ten benefits of running free promotional webinars.
- Expand market reach: Webinars give you the potential to reach the world just as easily as you can reach your local community. Some presenters are too optimistic about this potential, and get carried away with the thought they can suddenly attract attendees from far-flung corners of the Earth. Of course that isn’t the case – it takes diligent marketing to get every attendee. But it does give you the potential to reach more people.
- Generate more leads: Webinars are an excellent tool for exposing prospective clients to the value you offer. Because they have such a low marginal cost (in other words, it costs nothing to have another attendee on the webinar), you can run a free webinar to attract people, deliver high value, and then follow up with them later.
- Work at scale: You can run a webinar with groups of any size – small or large. You don’t have to book the right size venue in advance, you don’t have to print a certain number of handouts, and you don’t require minimum numbers by a certain date to confirm the venue.
- Create a marketing edge: Despite the increasing popularity of webinars, most business owners still aren’t using them. So they give you a competitive advantage.
- High touch for high-tech: Webinars not only allow you to leverage your time, they also give that personal touch, compared to e-mail, Twitter, e-books and other on-line services.
- Research your market: Use webinars not only to deliver material, but also to discover what material is of most interest to your market. For example, if you’re planning to launch a new product or service, conduct a free webinar beforehand, where you present something of value on this topic, but also take the opportunity to ask your audience to tell you their most pressing questions. In this way, you do your market research before you launch the service, which of course means the service will be more attractive and compelling to customers.
- Vertical servicing: One of the keys of successful niche marketing is to stop looking for new clients for your services, and start looking for new services for your clients. Use webinars to deliver additional value to your existing clients – either by presenting them yourself or by inviting guest experts to present for you.
- Joint venture opportunities: Taking this a step further, if you’re currently involved in any joint venture partnerships, you can use a webinar to introduce your joint venture partners to your network, and vice versa. This is an important step in the trust-building process. Unless your partners are hidden in the background and don’t need to be known by your network, people will want to know who you’re working with. They trust you, so that helps them trust your partners; but introducing the partners to them increases that trust level further.
- Bonus/incentive: A webinar is a low-cost high-value gift to offer as a bonus or incentive for taking action. For instance, If you’re selling directly to audiences, include a follow-up webinar in your offer, but only make it available free to people who sign up today (others have to pay extra).
- Reporting and analysis: Most webinar software includes tools for analysing your webinar, including audience attention, interactivity, time spent in the webinar, and so on.
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