Are you tired of putting your heart and soul into your webinars and webinar marketing only to end up with little to show for it? If so, you’re not alone. Many beginner webinar engineers end up feeling frustrated after their first webinar goes live. They have such high hopes in the beginning. They plan everything perfectly, they practice until the material is permanently ingrained in their heads and they even put safeguards in place to make sure no hang-ups interrupt the action. This leads up to aggressive webinar marketing, since hopes are still high, and then the webinar goes live. When nobody shows up, that’s the time when most beginners feel like throwing in the towel. Even webinar engineers with a few webinars under their belts can feel frustrated by a bad turn-out. If you want to know why your webinars are not attracting the viewer counts you’re hoping for, it’s time to think like one of your viewers.
What Would You Look for in a Webinar?
There are three aspects that make people sign up for webinars. They include:
- Authority: People love to get expert advice to help them solve their latest problems. Position yourself as the authority in your niche and your webinar marketing will go much easier.
- Unique Perspective: Nobody is going to sign up for your webinars if you are merely rehashing information that can be found elsewhere online. Make your webinars engaging by providing a unique perspective on a common problem related to your niche. Your audience will get that wow factor and that can help your name and image spread when it comes time to engage in webinar marketing.
- Useful Information: People will sign up for a webinar even if the host isn’t well-known and even if the information is rehashed. If the information provides viewers with tools, techniques or even ideas that they can use in their own lives, they will always come back for more. Consider a webinar that teaches viewers how to eat more slowly using top techniques from top dieters. Even though the diet niche is saturated to death and even though people already know how to eat more slowly, the mere act of providing useful tips makes your webinar attractive to the average person trying to drop some pounds.
If you can combine the above three aspects, your webinars will become viewer bait, just like all the expert webinars before it. Here’s how it’s done.
Build Your Audience
Few people are able to start out with a webinar. That’s not to say that it can’t happen, but people are more inclined to read and follow your work when it’s free and readily available online. This is where a blog comes in handy. A regularly updated blog that provides quality advice, top tips, news regarding your industry with unique commentary and other information you feel your audience would enjoy is a great way to establish yourself as the authority figure over your niche.
And of course, to establish yourself even further you will want to set up an email marketing campaign so that you can gather your audience’s contact information, such as their names and email addresses.
An email marketing campaign with a regularly published newsletter or with several emails throughout the week is a great way to keep you brand in the forefront of the minds of your potential webinar viewers. Every time you post a blog, you can notify your subscribers. And of course webinar marketing will be simple once you know exactly who to contact.
Webinar Marketing 101
The time to engage in webinar marketing is six weeks before the webinar goes live. Do your best to build an audience using your blog and newsletter campaign first so that you can stack your deck, allowing all of your hard work to finally pay off.
When you provide your blog readers and newsletter subscribers with top-notch advice and you keep them in the loop, they’ll be interested in anything you publish, anything at all. That includes any webinars you take the time to craft with expert precision.
The next time you host a webinar, make sure you have positioned yourself as the authority figure, pledge to always provide your audience with a unique prospective and advice they can actually use in the real world and you will soon become a webinar marketing expert.
The key is authority. Once you establish that and your potential webinar viewers begin to trust you, webinar marketing will all be downhill from there.
