Five Reasons to Include Webinars in Your Internet Marketing Plans
Online conferencing has been around over a decade, but it still remains one of the most underused internet marketing tools available. Successful marketers make connections with their customers, and since the current success of social media marketing stems from the ability to engage people in conversation, it is hard to understand why more use isn’t made of the conferencing technology that is specifically designed to facilitate communication. The high conversion rates that are driven by webinars alone make them worth considering, but there are other positive benefits that come from hosting webinars when you are planning your online marketing campaigns.
Webinars Make a Personal Connection with your Customers
Online marketing is driven by interaction with potential customers, and webinars offer a platform where you have your audience’s full attention for the length of the presentation. Online conferencing gives you the opportunity to form a closer relationship with customers because unlike other social media, the conversation is happening face to face, in real time. This makes webinars a highly personalized, mutually informative type of communication tool on the internet.
Web Conferencing is Inexpensive and Easy to Set Up
Most online conferencing platforms are very inexpensive to subscribe to, and offer the necessary software to attendees as a free service. The hardware requirements for hosting a webinar are also relatively inexpensive, and most people have access to equipment such as webcams and microphones that they will need in order to participate. It is possible to produce a good webinar right in an office without the need for any expensive production outlay.
Webinars Offer Valuable Content and the Opportunity to Make a Comprehensive Sales Pitch
Valuable online content is becoming more important to building good SEO (search engine optimization), and webinars are one of the highest quality sources of information online. Because people are attracted to your webinar according to their interest in your niche and the perceived value of the information you are offering, webinars offer an unparalleled opportunity to pitch your products or services to a well-targeted audience.
Webinars Establish your Reputation as an Authority in Your Niche
In order to be able to host a webinar, it is necessary to have information that is worth sharing. The appeal of most online conferences is that they give people access to the experts in their field on a level that encourages interaction and sharing of information. Information that is posted on the internet may or may not be written by the owner of the website, but a webinar is a more personal presentation that connects the host directly with the information that they are sharing, allowing people to see and hear for themselves that the speaker is an authority in their niche.
Hosting Webinars is an Effective Means for Building a Subscriber List
People that are interested enough in the information that you are presenting in your web conferences are usually already engaged in the conversations in your niche. The fact that they are willing to spend the time to attend your webinar indicates that they are likely to also be interested in your e-mail newsletter, and other direct marketing methods you may utilize. In fact, ending your webinar with a direct sales pitch is one of the most reliable ways to make online sales conversions, because you are offering your goods to an audience that has recently become better informed.
Any one of the reasons given here should be enough to encourage most marketers to consider using webinars as a part of their online promotional campaigns. Together, they make a strong argument for taking advantage of this underutilized online service as a way to stay ahead of your competition.
