How to Use Webinars to Sell Your Products and Services

If you are yet to start using webinars to drive sales, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to boost your revenue and grow your business. 

Here are some stats showing why any business owner cannot afford to ignore webinars…

• According to the 2017 State of Digital Marketing report, webinars are one of the top drivers of revenue for B2B marketers, coming just second after white papers.
• 20% – 40% of those who attend your webinar will turn into qualified leads.
• 5% of those who attend your webinar will make a purchase within 48 hours of attending the webinar.
• 74% of B2B marketers consider webinars to be the most effective way of generating high-quality leads.

So, how do you leverage webinars to drive more sales and boost your revenue?

In this article, I’ll take you through the 4 step process we use to host highly effective webinars that translate into thousands of dollars in sales for our two blogs, Cleverism.com and Founderjar.com.

1. Identify a webinar topic that drives your audience’s results

Choosing the right topic for your webinar is very important if you want your webinar to achieve results. On its own, the right topic can lead to more webinar registrations, higher attendance rates, and ultimately, more sales.

So, how do you come up with the right topic for your webinar? The key is to focus on topics that will help your audience achieve their desired results. To identify such a topic, you need to…

Define your target audience

It is impossible to pick a great webinar topic if you don’t have a good idea of who you’re going to be presenting to. 

For instance, a topic like “how to earn $1000 from through freelance photography” would be an excellent topic for an audience made of freelance photographers. However, the same topic would have little impact when presented to a business consultant looking for ways to win more clients.

Therefore, the first thing you need to do is to identify the exact audience your webinar is targeting. Here, you need to come up with an audience persona defining all the following characteristics about your audience:

• Age
• Gender
• Education level
• Income level
• Geographical location
• Their purchasing behaviors

Identify their biggest pain points

Once you have defined your target audience, the next thing is to identify their biggest challenges and pain points. If you focus on something your audience is struggling with, they’ll definitely be eager to hear your solution to this problem.

There are several tactics you can use to identify your audience’s biggest problems. Here are a few:

• Use Google: Simply go on google and search for “biggest challenges for [your target audience]. For instance, if your audience is freelance writers, you can search for “biggest challenges for freelance writers.”
• Ask your audience: If you already have an email list, you can send an email to your subscribers and ask them what their greatest challenges are.
• Use social media: Find groups that bring together your target audience, and go through the comments to identify the issues that most members ask about.
• Use your blog analytics: If you already have a blog, check the articles that attract the highest traffic. In most cases, these will be articles about the problem most of your audience is struggling with.

Use a captivating title to make your webinar topic irresistible

After defining your audience and identifying their greatest pain point, you already have a good topic for your webinar. The final thing is to come up with a captivating topic that will get your audience eager to attend your webinar.

Here are some tips on how to come up with a great title for your webinar:

• Make the webinar current. Example: Top video marketing trends for 2020.
• Use “how-to” in the title. Example: How to use video marketing to boost your sales 10x.
• Add the word “new” in the title. Example: New video marketing tactic that will boost your sales by 10x.
• Use a list-based title. Example: 5 video marketing tips to grow your business in 2020.

2. Prepare and host your webinar

Now that you have a great topic for your webinar, the next step is to prepare and host the webinar. Here are the things you need to do in this step.

Choose the right webinar software

The platform you host your webinar on will have an impact on the quality of your webinar. 

The key things you should watch out for when choosing the most suitable webinar platform for you are the features offered on the platform and the cost.

Create your webinar content

The next step is to come up with the content that you’ll present to your audience during the webinar. While you might be tempted to wing it because you believe you know your topic well, it is advisable to create a script to guide you during the webinar. This will help you keep the webinar flowing logically, and will ensure that all key points are covered.

You should also come up with engaging slides full of facts and stats, as well as other engaging content such as polls and surveys. This will help prevent your audience from getting bored during the webinar.

Perform a dry run

A webinar is a complex event containing several moving parts, and it is quite easy to overlook something during the preparation stage. To avoid getting caught by surprise during the actual webinar, you should conduct a dry run before the actual webinar to make sure that everything is working properly.

During the dry run, test your audio and video feed and make sure they’re working properly, and go through your presentation slides and make sure that they don’t contain any errors. You can also practice making the presentation to help you get rid of the pre-presentation jitters.

If everything is working as it should, you can go ahead with the webinar as scheduled.

3. Promote your webinar

Creating the best webinar ever counts for little if no one gets to attend the webinar. Therefore, after creating your webinar, you need to figure out how to let your target audience know about your webinar and how they can attend it.

Before you start promoting your webinar, however, you need to create a conversion-optimized landing page for the webinar. This is where you’re going to send all the traffic from different promotional channels.

An effective webinar landing page should contain the following information:

• Information about the webinar topic, what the attendees will learn, and how it will improve their lives.
• The time and date when the webinar will take place.
• The names of the speakers.
• An opt-in form to allow them to register for the webinar.

How to promote your webinar

Once you have your landing page ready, you can now start promoting your webinar and driving traffic to the landing page. Some of the most effective channels you can use to promote your webinar are:

Your website

Add call-to-action buttons promoting the webinar on strategic locations on your website, such as your homepage, on the sidebars, on the footer, and so on.

Relevant posts on your blog

If you already have blog posts about the same topic you’ll cover in your webinar, you can add call-to-action buttons promoting your webinar at the top or bottom of these blog posts. If you don’t have relevant blog posts, you can create a promotional blog post meant to spread the word about your upcoming webinar.

Email

Email is one of the most effective marketing channels for promoting webinars. If you already have an existing email list, shoot them a series of emails encouraging them to register for the webinar. Based on our experience, we have found that a series of three emails tend to work very well. One email should be sent about a week before the webinar, another one two or three days before the webinar, and the final one a few hours before the webinar.

Social media

Social platforms are another great way of getting people to attend your webinar. There are two key approaches to using social media to promote your webinar. The first one is to publish short, engaging posts encouraging your followers to attend the webinar, accompanied by a link to the webinar.

The second option is to use paid social media ads. This is a great way to spread the word about your webinar beyond your existing audience. Before using this option, however, you should perform some research to find out the favorite social platforms for your audience persona, otherwise, you might end up wasting your money on platforms that don’t drive ROI.

4. Provide value, build trust, and convert webinar attendees into sales

Now that you have spread the word about your webinar and gotten a significant number of people to attend your webinar, it’s now time to provide value to these people, cultivate their trust, and convert them into paying customers. Below are some tips on how to do this.

Focus on delivering value not making a pitch

When some marketers hear about using webinars to sell, they automatically assume that the sole focus of the webinar is to sell their products and services.

Here’s the thing, however — no one signs up to your webinar because they want to listen to a sales pitch. They sign up for the webinar because they believe you can teach them something useful, something that will help them solve a problem they’re struggling with or achieve a certain result.

If your attendees realize that your webinar is one long sales pitch, the majority of them will leave your webinar even before you get to the halfway mark. This is not something you want.

To avoid this, the main focus of your webinar should be on delivering value to your audience. By the end of the webinar, your audience should feel that they have learned something that will help them improve their lives. Make them feel that you actually care about their success.

Showcase your expertise

You should also use the webinar as an opportunity to showcase your expertise in your field. If you want your audience to buy from you, you have to convince them that you have the expertise required to solve their problems.

The best way to do this is by making your webinar highly interactive. Read your audience’s comments and give your expert responses to these comments, respond to their questions, challenge their assumptions, and so on. You want to get them to feel that you really know what you are talking about.

Showcasing your expertise and focusing on providing value will get your audience to trust you, which is very crucial when it comes to converting them into paying customers.

Talk about your product or service towards the end of the webinar

Just because I mentioned that you should focus on providing value rather than making a pitch, this does not mean that you should ignore your product or service completely. 

Remember, your main aim is to convert your webinar attendees into customers, and therefore, you have to mention your products at some point.

The key is to push your sales pitch to the very end of your webinar. If your webinar has been immensely valuable to your audience, they will be more receptive to your sales pitch.

To make a successful sales pitch during a webinar is to tie your product or service to the main content of your webinar. Talking about your product or service should come across as a natural progression of the webinar. You should also make it clear that your product will help your audience achieve whatever you just taught them.

Product or service pitch example

For instance, let’s say your webinar was about “using keyword research to create the right content for your blog,” while your product is a keyword research tool. In your sales pitch, you should show that your product is the best tool for doing what you just taught them how to do. 

Given that what you just taught them is a game-changer for their businesses, you can rest assured that a good number of attendees will end up purchasing your product because it helps them achieve their desired results.

To increase your chances of making the sale, you can offer a discount or a bonus to those who will purchase your product or service before the webinar ends, or within a certain period of time (say 5 hours) from the end of the webinar.

How to measure the ROI of a webinar

Webinars can be extremely profitable, but you must estimate and track your ROI (return on investment) in order to avoid wasting money.

Webinar costs

In order to run your webinars you need to use a webinar platform (most of them start for less than 40 USD per month), invest time into creating super actionable webinar content (many webinar rockstars invest 40-100 hours of their time to prepare and produce a 90min webinar), and your marketing budget to attract webinar attendees (can be $0, if you already have a large email list; else you can expect 2-20 USD per attendee when you invest into paid ads).

Example:

Let’s assume over the period of 12 months you want to run a webinar with the following costs:

• Webinar platform: $500
• Actionable webinar content: $5,000 (100 hours x $50 per hour)
• Marketing costs: $20,000 (2,000 attendees over 12 months at $10 cost per attendee)
• Total costs: $25,500

Webinar revenues

Now, let’s assume further that you have a software business and want to provide a special deal to your webinar audience and thereby generate revenue for your business.

Example:

Webinar attendees: 2,000

Webinar sales conversion: 5% (making it 100 new customers)

Customer lifetime value: $1,000 (based on your historical customer churn analysis)

Total lifetime revenue generated from the webinar: $100,000

Example of webinar ROI calculation

In this example, we generate $100k in new revenue over 24 months and we’ve spent $25.5k on everything related to the webinar. This means we generate a healthy 4 Dollars on every Dollar we invest in webinar marketing.

Wrapping up

Webinars are a very useful tool for increasing your sales, and if you haven’t been using them already, it’s time you started thinking about how you can incorporate them into your marketing strategy.

The 4-step process covered in this article will help you to create irresistible webinars that will allow you to generate higher quality leads, convert these leads into paying customers and grow your business.