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Monetize A Webinar With These 7 Ideas For Business Owners

But for video who tops it by a mere 2%, marketers have found webinars to be the most effective online marketing tactic for B2B’s.

The reason why webinars are so effective is because it’s the closest thing to face-to-face marketing on the Internet, and people who sign up as registrants are considered qualified leads.

To follow are seven ideas for small business owners to make more money by monetizing webinars using a webinar application like Clickmeeting.

#1: Cold Email Prospective Attendees

Cold emailing is still very much alive. In fact, the majority of businesses find it necessary to use cold emailing or calling as part of their sales process. Since hosting a webinar is ultimately an indirect sales tactic, cold emailing prospective attendees is a sharp idea.

Now, what you need to know is that according to MarketingSherpa, email marketing has 2x higher ROI than cold calling.

Your success rate is higher if you target the right people; those who would see value in what you’re offering via your webinar.

However, the biggest challenge with cold emailing is that you need the email address of the right contact; followed by the right technique: try adding the big benefit of the webinar in the subject line of the email, and in the body, let them know what you can solve for them.

Add a link to your webinar landing page and there you go.

#2: Offer A Paid Service or Product

Use a webinar to address a problem your target audience has, by coaching and giving answers to the questions you know they’re asking. At the peak of the session when they are most attentive, tell them what your product or service is and what problem it solves.

Most attendees realize that you’re hosting a webinar as bait and that the goal is to market products or services, and that this generally gets done at the end of the presentation.

Telling them about your offerings at the peak of the presentation is more effective, as long as it does not detract from the reason they signed up to attend.

#3: Use A Webinar As An Educational Tool

By using a webinar as an educational tool without trying to pimp out your products or services, your business gains credibility and authority. Lack of trust is one of the three reasons people don’t buy online; because they think the product or service can’t address their particular need.

When people sign up to attend a webinar, they are giving a clear indication that they need what you are offering, which is why webinars do so well as a marketing method. It is because of this that you know they are a good lead.

It’s clever to use webinars in all stages of the marketing funnel, but with different focuses.

Image Credit: Kissmetrics

At certain stages (awareness, engagement and discovery) of the marketing funnel, it is a good idea to host a webinar as a purely educational tool. What you should aim to get out of it at this stage, is not a sale but an email address which allows you to promote your goods later.

#4: Add Attendees To Your Email List

When people register for your webinar, they are required to provide their email addresses. Using webinars as a way to grow your email marketing list is superior to any other method, because of:

  1. Volume: when promoted well, webinars attract many people from all over the world.
  2. Value: webinars (when done properly) provide value to the right people.
  3. Interactivity: webinars (also when done properly) provide interaction between attendees and hosts, of which no other online method does.

Email list subscriptions are the Holy Grail of online marketing, specifically because it is the best way to nurture leads until they are ready to buy.

#5: Extend a Coaching Call or Content Membership

Although the webinar must fulfill the value promise initially made, you don’t have to give all your secrets away. The balance has to be right: give enough information to provide value, but leave some as “premium” information that needs to be paid for.

At the peak of the webinar presentation, after whetting their appetites so to speak, extend the offer of a 30 - 45 minute coaching call for customized solutions. Alternatively, offer membership to certain premium content that answers their questions further.

Be sure to charge for these services, as not charging - and not charging enough - is only doing yourself and perhaps even your client, a disservice.

#6: Charge For The Webinar

Free webinars are likely to achieve more success depending on your objective.

For marketing purposes, it is more effective to host a free webinar when people are at the top of the sales funnel, as it does not require high commitment on their part.

Paid webinars however, work well when you don’t aim to use them for attracting an audience. They work best when they’re promoted to an already loyal email list, because those people are already vested in your business and are further along in the marketing funnel.

They also work well when presenting a highly specialized topic, like important research on new dental technology, or as a coaching method to a group of motivated people.

#7: Attract More Traffic To The Webinar Replay

It figures that the more traffic (the right traffic) you get, the more money you’ll make. Once you’ve hosted your webinar, it can be made into a video which you can upload online to attract more traffic via search engines.

When you do this, not only does your business benefit from hosting a webinar, but also from being able to use it as a video which does well with search engines. And by the way, videos are the only content that attracts more attention than a webinar, so you win in multiple ways…

Conclusion

Although the preparation for hosting a successful webinar is time consuming, the benefits far outweigh the effort. That’s a fact.

The ideas for monetizing a webinar can reap rewards a little into the future, or immediately, but they’re all powerful ways of generating or nurturing leads.

 

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