All aspects of social media marketing involve three basic tenets:
1. Attract the interest of your target audience.
2. Impress them with your content and knowledge.
3. Convert them into paying customers or clients.
Regardless of what you”™re selling, if you can repeatedly and successfully perform these three steps, you will be successful. However, to really improve your success, you may want to add a fourth step:
4. Stay in front of customers with regularly scheduled, interesting and informative posts. If they bought from you once, they will be motivated to buy from you again.
Webinars address these four steps.
Although there are several reasons why people attend webinars, by far the main one is their interest in how your content can help them. Many presenters get sidetracked by graphics and effects, overlooking the true intent of their audience. I have sat through (and left) many such presentations, particularly when they have included incomprehensible slides that don”™t meet my needs or interest.
Not so long ago, I spoke with an accountant who was interested in using webinars to grow his business. He had what appeared to be a great value proposition for a highly targeted audience. He viewed webinars as a means through which he could address the needs of his prospects (and clients) while highlighting what made both him and his offering unique.
Think about it this way: Webinars allow you to stay in front of your target audience. Of course you need to provide quality content to your audience on a number of platforms and certainly through email marketing. However, by having webinars or videos, your audience gets to see you and hear firsthand what you have to offer.
I constantly use the phrase “the seven touches” and discuss it in great detail in my webinar training course. Where else can you reach out to your audience at least seven times over a three-week period without annoying them or worse, having them unfollow you? Between (up to three) invitations, (up to three) reminders, additional emails, the webinar itself and follow-ups, you can easily get before your target audience at least seven times. Assuming that you have some really great content that meets customers”™ needs, all of these touches will burnish your credentials and reputation.
When you commute by train, you see many people on their laptops, cellphones and tablets. Many of them use this time to catch up on the webinars and videos they would otherwise not have the time to watch. This is certainly indicative of the rapid growth of mobile technology. In a Wainhouse Research survey of more than 1,000 businesses, 43 percent of respondents reported using their mobile devices at least once a month to watch webinars or videos, with 17 percent of the respondents reporting daily use.
In this highly competitive business environment, a webinar ”“ or series of webinars ”“ that addresses the needs of your audience can be an inexpensive and highly effective way of building your business and allowing you to stand out from your competition.
Unrelated note for a future column: The recent dousing of people with ice water to fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis was based and promoted solely through social media. Initial reports stated that donations to the ALS Association have exceeded by 1,000 percent its normal amount of donations for the same time period. Once the final results have been tabulated, I will discuss in more detail several key behavioral indicators and aspects of this campaign that your company might be able to use. In the meantime, if your company took part in this promotion, I strongly recommend that you post pictures of it on your website, blog, newsletter and social platforms.
Bruce Newman is vice president at The Productivity Institute L.L.C. and a regular contributor to the Business Journal. He specializes in content creation and digital marketing. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.
