Want to have thousands of people promoting the great benefits of your product or service around the clock, across multiple platforms and without you ever needing to be there? Consider a webinar.

You may be wondering “Should I do a webinar?” The answer is yes, especially if there’s any how-to angle of your product or service your viewers will find meaningful. Webinars aren’t what they used to be. Today’s social media tools, video tagging tools and smartphones mean webinars are easy to access and provide an in-person touch to your topic. Webinar attendees can respond in real-time across social media platforms, creating more of a sense of genuine learning in a community rather than motionless faces watching someone share a presentation.

Think of it this way – a webinar is your chance to have an online meeting with thousands of people who are actually interested in learning more about what you have to share. You can include online dialogue, view websites as a group, watch videos and then send out a recording of the event for months or years to come. Plus, you can expand your email newsletter list or fans/followers base by capturing information from attendees in a permission-based format.

The subject matter for webinars has also evolved. Try using any customer questions or hot topics from online forums as a foundation for your information, and be willing to step outside of a pure salesmanship role and into the role of educator. This means you are presenting yourself as a local expert among your viewers, and can give you higher customer perceptions and loyalty.

• Make your webinar more searchable and more interesting with tagged photos, a strong description, links to your blogs and your website, and video components.
• Be sure to promote your webinar using keywords across your website, your social media posts and especially your blogs.
• Let people know that dialogue and community learning is a key element, so they’ll be more likely to get involved in the webinar.
• During the webinar, be sure to keep the chat areas open so that participants can see the dialogue and get involved. A webinar is really more of an onsite laboratory for sharing and learning.
• Explore newer webinar tools that will allow you to have follow-up breakout webinar sessions on topics that are especially interesting to subgroups of your initial webinar.
• Consider setting a number on participants. This gives more of a sense of urgency to your webinar and allows for better community-based learning and sharing.
• After the webinar, (and a reminder, also before!) ask questions across your social media platforms to encourage dialogue about it and encourage people to share the content with others.

Finally, remember when considering “Should I do a webinar?” that it’s another tool in your overall content marketing strategy – and if it’s based upon quality information that gives real value to your readers, it’ll be effective.

If you are ready to add a new component to your overall marketing strategy, and would like to try hosting a webinar, then contact Susan J. Campbell Copywriting Solutions. We can turn your vision into a reality.