Webinars are a cheap and effective way of exchanging information, not only for the organizer, but also for the participant.

For Marketers especially, webinars are a powerful way of increasing online traffic and brand loyalty.

This post lists five major benefits of hosting webinars for marketing purposes.

#1: A webinar is an excellent platform for education-based marketing

Sales pitching and traditional marketing, is over. It simply is no longer effective.

For instance, let’s say your small business is all about telephone systems, like Company ABC’s.

Before becoming aware of education-based marketing, Company ABC would cold-call a list of companies – as was traditionally a sound practice – and ask if they were interested in talking about a new telephone system (I’m sure the person being called was thinking, “oh yes please, I’ve been waiting in breathless anticipation just for your call!”).

I can hear you laughing, but this is what most successful businesses used to do, and many still do today. Company ABC had four salespeople who made hundreds of calls to prospects on a daily basis. Out of all those calls, the result was a mere three appointments per week.

What a waste of time.

And then, Company ABC discovered education-based marketing.

The sales reps started calling larger companies with this offer:

“We have a new educational program called, “The 9 Ways You’re Wasting Money on Your Voice and Data Spending.””, followed by, “We’ve been in the telephone business for 10 years now and we’ve found that every company wastes money on its voice and data spending in at least nine areas. So we’ve compiled a white paper to educate businesses how to stop wasting money. And then, if there comes a day when you may need any help at all with your voice, data, or telephone system needs, we want you to think about us first. So we’re sending you our white paper.”

What happened then?

Well, this approach dramatically increased their appointments from a measly three a week to 30 a week. Their revenue at the time, was $3 million and after implementing education-based marketing, after six months, its projected sales were $9 million.

Image Credit: StuartJDavidson

Moral of the story? If anything’s going to sell, it’s education-based marketing, and hosting an online webinar is a perfect platform for it.

#2: Add webinar attendees to email marketing lists

Online marketers recognize that email lists are their bread and butter, and they’re always on the lookout for ways to collect more email addresses. Hence free e-books, white papers, free trial periods, etc.

When you conduct a webinar, it is one more method of getting more email addresses, because attendees are required to provide their email addresses when registering for the webinar.

Not only are free webinars a great way to solicit email addresses, but it’s also a brilliant way to start engaging and building relationships with potential buyers. Email list cleaning software is one of the most reliable tools for cleaning and validating email lists.

#3: Repurpose recorded webinars for other marketing initiatives

Once you’ve recorded (and edited if necessary), an online webinar, you can repurpose the content for other purposes, such as:

• Staff training
• Uploading to YouTube to attract more traffic to your channel or website
• The content of the recorded webinar can be transcribed into a blog post
• Create a podcast from the recording
• Turn the recorded content into a Slideshare presentation

The reason you’d want to repurpose the content is twofold: to attract more traffic to your website, and to offer more value-add resources to your visitors in order to increase credibility and trust (which has a direct impact on your bottom line).

#4: Attract more website traffic

Use the recorded webinar to attract more website traffic. There are four ways you can maximize the ROI of your webinar recording:

1. Upload it to YouTube or Vimeo and send traffic to the link
2. Add a link to the published video on your website
3. Repurpose the recording
4. Promote the video to increase traffic

How do webinars work to attract more traffic?

Once a webinar is recorded, it becomes a video which can be uploaded to YouTube or Vimeo. When it’s published, you have the opportunity of providing keywords so that it gets found better. Because not all that many companies are using video in their content marketing strategies, you have a better chance of ranking in search engines with video, using the right keywords.

If you repurpose the recording to a blog post on your website, it will also work to generate more traffic.

#5: Use a webinar to get more info about your target audience

Because participants don’t see other participants in webinars, you are far more likely to get more truthful results if you’re looking to understand your target market better, so a webinar is an effective way of getting information.

You don’t even need to make the webinar all about target audience research. Instead, use polls and Q & A’s naturally, in your content, to gather what you desire to know.