When it comes to having a business, it’s crucial to reach potential customers and engage them in a long-term relationship. There are a bunch of methods you can utilize to accomplish that goal.
Some marketers rely on newsletter marketing, sms marketing, etc. – while some others increase their budgets for explainer video productions for a better video marketing strategy. At the end of the day, it’s actually all about providing valuable, educational content in your area of expertise.
Your prospects and customers will appreciate that you help them solve their problems and make their lives a bit easier with the information you share. This, in turn, will convince them to trust you to and buy from you.
Other than a classic email marketing or video marketing strategy, webinars can be a secret weapon for marketers to build and nurture relationships by providing educational content or valuable information about your brand. It provides marketers with a cost-effective marketing strategy to reach a broader audience and connect with both new and existing customers.
As the current coronavirus pandemic makes face-to-face interaction a challenge, webinars are booming in popularity. Today, at least 57% of marketers run 50 webinars per year. What’s more, 57% of marketers claim that they would be more than happy to organize more educational webinars.
At this point, you might be wondering, “if webinars are great tools to provide educational content for my audiences, then how do I use them?”
Well, let’s find out!
Educational webinars for your business: why do they matter?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, it’s important to understand why educational webinars are such a big deal for your business.
In this digital era, prospects and customers are only getting more fickle and busier. Here’s a harsh truth: they don’t really care about what you sell. They only care about how your brand benefits them. In this case, hard-selling and bragging about your brand can do nothing but scare prospective clients away.
So, it should come as no surprise that one of the main reasons why people attend webinars is because they’re looking to gain some unique insight into your product or service. Therefore, educational webinars can fill that need.
According to video expert and founder of Breadnbeyond, Andre Oentoro, webinars are invaluable in the education of pupils (for teachers) and clients (for business owners). They help you highlight the benefits of your brand without being hard-selling, allowing audiences to understand why they need your brand while also getting educational content and valuable insights about your industry in general as well.
The more your audiences understand about the brand, the more likely they’ll convert into leads or even purchase a product from you and become life-long customers. It’s no wonder that 73% of B2B marketers say educational webinars are the best way to gain more high-quality leads.
To create truly educational material for webinars, you need to make sure to deliver high-quality content that’s of use to your target audience. After all, the best webinars aim to provide real value to their audience first and foremost.
In other words, educational webinars should focus on how to apply the concepts of a brand rather than demonstrating your product with an obvious sales pitch at the end – that’s not how you do it. Being too pushy only causes prospects to stray away from your brand.
If you highlight extensive information about your brand or products, audiences will view your educational webinars as something of real value and will come to regard you as an authority or trusted expert figure in your niche.
Now, the real question is: how do you build educational content using webinars?
10 handy ways to build educational content with webinars
Delivering educational content using webinars isn’t rocket science. However, your business can consider some effective tactics to get the webinar right. Get them wrong and educational webinars might turn out to be more of a hindrance to your brand than profitable.
Before you begin hosting, though, make sure you use at least some of the following tips to ensure the success of your educational webinar.
#1 Expert Interview Series
Product demonstrations might seem like the easiest and most obvious way to educate your audience about your products or services. However, depending on the recipients, it can end up being too hard-selling. As a result, it won’t entice prospects to attend the educational webinar because they know that you’re going to talk more about your products. What to do in this case? There’s a simple solution!
You can invite some respected industry authority to the webinar. It helps you enhance the educational value of your webinar by focusing on in-depth solutions to common problems that your audience faces.
By all means, involving experts in your educational webinars definitely adds a great amount of value to your presentation. Then, you can introduce the product as a solution to such problems.
#2 Q&A Educational Webinars
Q&A webinars allow audiences to directly ask you industry-based questions that are relevant to them. This type of webinar can be a great way to build a more personal connection with individual audiences – while providing them educational content at the same time. Not to mention that it can also help you showcase your insights and expertise.
More than 92% of webinar attendees say the end of your event must include a live Q&A session. This number is enough to show that the Q&As are one of the most high-performing types of webinars that most audiences are interested in.
That being said, it’s quite challenging for some attendees to be comfortable asking questions in the first place. In this case, you can prepare in advance a few questions and answers of your own - things that your audiences often ask or situations they typically face. It’ll help them at any point to refer to an additional issue to address.
#3 Online Training
The online or live-training webinar is most common in professional education. Whether it’s internal training of employees or continuous professional education, you can provide personalized and specific training suited to your target audience’s needs.
The key here is to identify the learning objectives and proceed to create the material. You need to understand which learning topics can provide value to your target audience in the first place.
Another thing you need to bear in mind is that it’s crucial to use conversational language, so that your audiences can easily understand and retain the information you deliver.
Training webinars are the second-best type of educational webinars when it comes to boosting conversion rates, with a rock-solid percentage of 44.79%. So, not only do they help you educate your audiences, but they also make it easier for you to boost your conversion rates.
#4 Case Study Webinar Series
Have you ever thought that your own business stories can be great educational material that you can share with your audiences? You can tell your success stories, the challenges, opportunities, or tips you’ve gained while running your business in your specific industry.
You can also back up your stories with statistics or other case studies to make them more reliable and trustworthy. Meanwhile, to make the educational webinar even more educational, you can also ask some of your clients or other experts if they would be willing to share their success stories in the next presentation.
The beauty of this type of educational webinar is that your audience gets to hear different points of view from other, real users. Also, involving your clients or some experts can deliver valuable information in an unbiased way.
#5 How-to Educational Webinars
Everyone loves to know how to perform certain takes much easier. After all, the most engaging educational content in webinars answers a need or curiosity.
So, what could do a better job than a webinar that teaches someone how to do something that they’re eager to learn?
That’s probably the reason why how-to educational webinars can be a smart way to reach a larger audience, as well as educate and engage them. However, it doesn’t mean that how-to educational webinars are extremely easy to pull off.
You need to understand what makes your how-to topics different and unique.
PRO TIP: Always be sure to think about the main reason prospects turn to your brand. It’ll help you with a good starting point when deciding where to focus your how-to educational webinars.
Educational webinars: quick tips
There are some definitive “rules” that your business should obey to make sure that your educational webinars go well and give valuable insights to your audiences.
So, you can follow some of these quick essential rules to run your educational webinar like a pro!
Keep it casual and conversational
You might think that using formal and high-level language can make you sound like a pro. In fact, it will probably result in one thing - making your explanation hard to understand.
Try to always use a friendly tone that is adjusted to your audience, so they can easily feel comfortable interacting with your brand. In other words, talk to them like you talk to your friends – because they are, or they should be.
Attract more attendees by giving out freebies
You can gain more interest by giving out freebies as incentives for your audiences to attend your educational webinars. This is indeed an old, classic marketing trick and might sound like a no-brainer, but it still works well.
When you don’t have that “star power” within the industry, your audiences may wonder why they should attend your webinars. In this case, you can convince them by offering a tidbit for free. It’ll help them to consider choosing your offering.
Use Graphics and Illustrations
Educational webinars don’t mean that you have to sit and give attendees talks or lectures for hours. No matter how interesting the topic you break down and how valuable it is for your attendees, if you just talk for hours on end then it'll only make them yawn if not be bored to death.
That’s why compelling, colorful visual elements like graphics and illustrations can help your audiences retain information better. You can always use free graphic design software to create compelling graphics in minutes.
Conclusion
Educational webinars can be a powerful weapon to educate your audience about your brand without being too hard-selling, and make it easier for you to highlight the benefits of your products and how they can solve the audiences' problems. At this point, it’s safe to say that webinars are the crown jewel of your sales funnel.
The ideas mentioned above can help decide what kind of webinars you should host in order to generate brand awareness and engage more and more prospects. Above all else, no matter what kind of educational webinars you choose to host, make sure you spend a lot of time practicing. With enough will and effort, your educational webinars will get your message across to your audience in the most optimal way.