Tip of the Week: How to Use Webinars to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Authority. Knowing what your business does well, and using that knowledge, experience, and expertise to increase your company’s position within the market is more crucial for the small business today than ever before. This is because, from a competitive standpoint, the small or midsize business is not able to sport the kind of prices that larger firms can, and still make a profit. One way an organization can utilize this talent to increase the visibility of their offering is by using webinars.

It’s Not a Seminar, It’s a Webinar
The seminar has been used for decades as a way for companies to expose industry professionals and the curious to new practices, products, and procedures. The seminar would provide a condensed view of information for people that had, for one reason or another, become interested in the concepts discussed at them.

Today, smaller companies, many of which couldn’t afford to routinely throw a seminar, can leverage the power of the Internet to work to this same effect by holding webinars. If you aren’t familiar with a webinar, it is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a seminar held on the internet. More accurately, it is course for people to learn more about a product, service, or practice; and, it can work on several levels for an organization.

Webinars are inexpensive to hold. The solutions required to hold a webinar can be found free, or are extraordinarily affordable. A presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint can be used to put together an arrangement to help hold the audience’s attention. In fact, the only expense of any real consideration is the cost in time to hold the webinar; which is hopefully mitigated by the acquisition of new clientele.

The Webinar is a great way to distribute information to customers, potential customers, or even staff (if you think the concept is important enough for them to know about). Since the webinar usually covers a specific element of the business, it is normally developed with the hope that at the end attendees will better understand a concept.

Putting together a webinar is relatively simple. Since you are the authority in your market, there has to be at least a few questions that you are asked regularly. Start there. The webinar gives you the opportunity to provide answers to questions, and teach concepts and practices that people need to know in order to make decisions that will affect how they spend their time and money, so be specific. It’s not a podcast after all.

The typical webinar can be anywhere from a few minutes to several hours long. Many longer webinars are split into sessions to keep attendees from getting information overload. If an attendee doesn’t get much out of the webinar, there is a significant chance that they will not come back for another one. If you look at it as your chance to grab people’s attention, you’ll be in the best position when it comes time to present advanced or detailed topics, as then you will approach it with the urgency and specificity necessary to make a webinar work.

One of the best features of a webinar, as a marketing or training tool, is that people can view them on their own time. So, while you may have some attendees when you first hold the webinar, others can view it at their leisure. Flexibility distributing your company’s knowledge and authority has shown to be beneficial. Buzzsumo has stated that nearly one-fifth of their webinar attendees turn into paying customers, an immensely large portion as compared to other forms of web marketing.

For more information on the technology it takes to run a webinar, how to set one up, or to get productivity solutions designed to help your business, call the IT professionals at Directive today at 607.433.2200.