Legendary New York disc jockey Barry Gray of WMCA revolutionized radio in 1945 when he held his telephone up to the microphone to broadcast a live call from big band celebrity Woody Herman. Today’s talk radio hosts continue to thrive by using the same combination of wireless broadcasting and listener engagement.
But businesses are only beginning to realize how the integration of webinars with social media offers the same potential for engaging audiences. Socially-supported webinars provide a powerful platform for generating leads, boosting audience participation, and facilitating follow-up with attendees.
Why Webinars?
Webinars make sense for businesses because they’re popular and cost-effective. Recent research showed that during a six-month sample period, 18 percent of companies ran a webinar one to three times per month with an average of 28 attendees. Considering the relatively minimal investment needed to promote and run a webinar as compared to other promotional strategies such as advertising and direct mail, the number of leads per event represents an excellent return on investment. Add this to the 1.15 billion users currently on Facebook, and you can see how leveraging webinars can multiply your revenue.
Building User Connections
Coca-Cola, Texas HoldEm Poker, and celebrities such as Rihanna, Eminem and Shakira, have Facebook “Like”s in excess of 66 million, notes InsideFaceBook.com. For small businesses, even a few thousand likes represents significant outreach. This illustrates why social media offers a great lead generation tool for promoting webinars.
One way to use social media to promote webinars is paid advertising. Placing ads on Facebook, Google and YouTube connects you with users who fit your target demographics.
Building your own social following is another way to generate publicity for your events. Sharing valuable content of interest to your target audience can attract prospects to your Facebook page or Twitter list, giving you opportunities to invite them to your events.
Blog-based email marketing is a third way to generate leads for your webinars. By placing interesting content on your blog and creating an incentive for visitors to join your mailing list, you create your own in-house promotional network. Partnering with other list owners can expand your in-house outreach exponentially.
You will get the most leverage out of these tactics if you integrate your webinar registration page with your mailing list. This uses your event to build your list, giving you a platform for promoting future engagements.
You can monetize this model by charging for access to webinars. Of course, you’ll get more attendees to free events, so one tactic you can use is to offer a complimentary webinar up front, and use it to extend an invitation to a paid premium follow-up. Offering attendees a discount gives them an incentive to sign up for the paid event.
Engagement with Webinar Users
Radio talk shows let listeners call in, engage the host, and share their views on air. Social media support lends webinars the same appeal. While attendees are watching and listening, they can post feedback on Facebook for discussion with their peers and the presenter.
It’s challenging running a webinar and answering feedback at the same time, so a wise strategy is to enlist your staff and followers to help field Facebook comments. Assign or encourage key people to interact with attendees and help you answer their questions and comments. Your business could also employ a live help service to answer questions quickly during the webinar. You can let others handle the bulk of the discussion, and focus your own interaction on answering the questions that most demand your expertise.
Leveraging Your Events
Business management genius W. Edwards Deming, who helped jump-start the Japanese economy after World War II, said that profit comes from repeat customers. Profitable webinars are ones that generate follow-up business. There are several ways social media can help advance this strategy.
First, provide superlative customer support. Live discussion can enable staff and group members to handle questions and problems. Pinned comments can answer frequently asked questions. Uploaded files can perform the same function, as well as offer additional resources.
You can also use social media to conduct follow-up market research after your webinars. Ask attendees questions to learn more about their needs, how well your content addressed their concerns, and what they’d like to see in future events.
A final way to capitalize on webinars is by extending follow-up sales offers. One of the easiest ways to do this is to repurpose webinar content as a commercial product. This can be done by recording the webinar itself, creating an infoproduct in another medium that complements the content of the presentation, or bundling recorded content with other material that adds value for attendees.