From generating new leads to creating loyal customers, conducting webinars can help you truly optimize your sales funnel. You can easily utilize different kinds of webinars to help your sales team move leads down to the funnel, convert them, and retain them as customers. Especially with a managed webinar service on your side, webinars can be a notable asset that you can easily leverage to increase your sales. Here’s how you can use webinars to improve every stage of the sales funnel for your business:
Increasing brand awareness
The first stage of the sales funnel is to increase brand awareness and generate new leads. This stage is where you tap into your target audience who have never heard or have heard little of you or your business. In this stage, your webinars should be focusing on your audience only. No hard sells, no sales pitch, no offers. Instead, conduct a regular webinar that aims to create more awareness for the business that you have by offering unique value that they can remember you for.
Here are a few things to consider:
- Consider working with influencers or other partners for a few introductory webinars at this stage
- Use this time to know more about your audience; their likes and dislikes, their needs, their pain points, and more
- Don’t forget about leveraging social media and digital marketing; webinars can be used in the awareness stage, yes, but don’t rely solely on it
Educating prospects and improving the consideration stage
Webinars also work well in the consideration stage. This is where you should be educating prospects and nudging warm leads in the right direction, which is converting to sales. In this stage, use webinars to further educate the audience regarding the industry. Focus on best practices, statistics, new trends or techniques, and more. Make sure to give the audience useful and engaging content. With these, you’ll be able to increase credibility and establish authority in the industry, all the while making sure your audiences know more and will now be seriously considering your goods or services.
Closing the deal
Informative and convincing webinars will come in handy when it comes to closing the deal and converting prospects into sales. Now is the time to include your sales pitch or your hard sell, and turn leads into official customers. Conduct webinars that discuss your goods or your services, and how they can benefit the audience. You can also conduct webinars where you narrate reasons why your business is being trusted or patronized by other professionals. Webinars like these can help you convince prospects and close the deal.
Some webinars you could do for this stage are:
- Q&A sessions
- Interview webinars
- Panel discussions
- How-to webinars
Improving customer loyalty and retention
After you’ve closed deals and converted sales, you still have a job to do -- you’re going to need to maintain and improve customer loyalty to hopefully reconvert them into return buyers. Webinars that continue to build your brand and showcase your new products or services will be beneficial to existing customers. This will help them stay updated with your business, know more about the products or services they availed from you, anticipate new products in the future, help in improving current goods or services, and more.
Here a few examples of webinars that can help you improve customer loyalty:
- Product demonstrations/live demonstrations
- Tips and tutorials
- Upcoming release announcements
The more you put out webinars that target your customers, the more you’ll be able to keep them as customers and convert them to loyal fans who regularly lend support to your business.
Though webinars are a lot of hard work, it’s without a doubt that integrating them into your marketing and how you handle your sales funnel will be a huge help. Keep these things in mind the next time you think about improving your sales.