How do you stand out in today’s marketing landscape?
You can’t just say, “Our product is the best! You should buy it!” and expect to sell it anymore. Customers aren’t convinced. They have countless resources at their disposal to help them compare and decide what’s best for them. Putting all your effort into yelling louder than your competition won’t get you anywhere. It’ll just get annoying.
Transparency is the name of the game. By sharing your expertise and positioning your team of dedicated subject-matter experts (or SMEs) as an authority for success to engineers, you gain trust. Partners and thought leaders who actively demonstrate their reliability are the solution providers prospects respond to.
If it seems impossible, it isn’t.
You don’t have to write whitepaper after whitepaper or exhaust your email lists with another campaign. If you’re looking for a solution, webinars are your answer. They’re a proven marketing tool for achieving true communication with your engineering audience, whether it be in real-time or on-demand.
Webinars make it easy to position your products or services in the minds of customers and drive leads into your sales pipeline. In fact, webinars are the leading tool for building trust and partnerships between your existing or prospective customer base and your SMEs.
Most importantly, they’re nothing to be intimidated by.
Webinars are informative, engaging, and fun for both your prospects and for you. The rewards far outweigh any perceived risks. And this only scratches the surface of what webinars can do!
We went ahead and listed a few more outstanding reasons to use webinars. Here are five reasons why webinars are crucial to your marketing strategy:
1. They build your content library
If you don’t have a content creation strategy as part of your marketing plan, you should. Assembling an actionable team of SMEs to provide relevant, educational content to your audience consistently keeps you top-of-mind, keeps them coming back, and grows your business in the long term. Treat customers to a unique experience and treat old content to a facelift – for example, replacing your whitepapers with product demonstrations prospects can interact with. Or do the reverse – turn a webinar into a whitepaper, a blog post, an email, etc. Repurposing content in new formats doubles and triples your assets and webinars are one of the strongest platforms available to do so today.
2. They position your company as a resource
Want to be considered an industry thought leader? Presenting on a subject of interest (like your product or service, insight on a current trend, or your solution to common and recurring industry or task-oriented problems) gives your attendees the answers they’re looking for and rewards you with credibility. Prioritize transparency in the presentations you give, and prospects will choose to trust your company over others’. Through webinars, you can advise your ideal audience on the information they need to buy, meet new customers, and establish your leadership position.
3. They drive engagement
This is one of the most exciting things about webinars – by nature, they’re an engaging experience. Incorporating webinars into your content marketing strategy visually stimulates, and a live webinar presentation encourages audiences to pay greater attention. Thanks to the interactive services webinars offer (Q&A sessions, chat rooms, live polls, immediate audience feedback options) attendees are given an attractive platform on which they can easily communicate with you, and you can easily identify where each prospect lies in his or her buying journey. Measure attendee behavior according to the questions they asked or the way they answered a poll to gather data or get a sense of a registrant’s interests through buying-intent questions asked on the registration form. How can you tell whether someone is buyer-ready? By their engagement.
4. They generate high-quality leads
Through registration, audience members demonstrate a clear interest from the start, and that interest qualifies them as leads, which makes it easier for you to start natural conversations. New marketing leads may be compelled by a topic you’re discussing, and seasoned sales leads may sign up to see how your product differs from others. Webinars are good at meeting customers where they are as well as guiding them through the funnel. Proactively use webinars to connect marketing qualified and sales qualified leads to your company, and link them to the next stage of the buyer’s journey, whatever it may be (e.g. your website, a sales rep, another piece of content, etc.).
5. They expand your audience globally
Through the miracle of the internet, you can reach almost anyone in the world without having to leave your chair. Speak directly to a wider audience from wherever you are – Asia to Europe, Africa to the Americas – and build recognition.
Need help building your own webinar strategy? Or maybe you’re interested in putting together an online event? Simply let us know, and we’ll set up a time for a no-cost brainstorming session to determine the best way to connect with your engineering audience.