Have you thought about running webinars to generate leads for your consulting business?
Whether you have no experience with webinars, or even a little, this article will show you the best practice tips and tricks to make your next one a success.
Why webinars?
To begin, webinars can be a great tool to get the attention of your ideal clients and bring them into your orbit.
Public speaking is one of the quickest ways to get people to know, like, and trust you – so webinars are a very effective use of time.
And a one-to-many approach is a good when you have limited resources.
Here are some of the key reasons why webinars are particularly useful for consulting businesses:
- They establish your credibility: Hosting webinars helps consultants to demonstrate their expertise and knowledge on specific topics. By providing valuable information to potential clients, you can establish yourself as a credible and trustworthy expert in your field, which increases the likelihood of attracting new clients.
- You can reach a broad audience: Unlike face-to-face events, webinars are not dependent on people being in the same physical location as you. This makes them a good option to reach a wider audience. Signing up to a webinar is a low barrier to entry for your prospects, so this type of event enables you to connect with potential clients who aren’t already aware of your business and services.
- They're cost-effective: Webinars are an inexpensive way to get in front of your target audience. In contrast to organising a traditional seminar or conference, webinars typically requires less time and resources and can be an efficient way to reach potential clients on a budget.
- The content can be reused: If you record your webinar, it provides a great opportunity to repurpose the content across your social media channels. Cutting your full webinar recording into short clips gives you great content for your social media presence because you have already done most of the hard work upfront.
Overall, webinars can be a highly effective tool for consulting businesses to attract and engage with potential clients.
Choosing a webinar topic
Before we consider webinar topics, it's crucial that you define who the event will be for in the first instance.
Remember, you want to generate leads from the webinar, so we must be focused on attracting the people we want to work with the most, not just anyone and everyone we could work with.
This requires you to have a clear understanding of your ideal clients.
Choosing a specific target audience for your webinar is important because your initial goal is to encourage as many people who fit that description to sign up as possible.
And a good way to achieve this is to name the target audience by their job title in your marketing messaging when promoting the webinar.
This is because you want the target audience to clearly see that the webinar is relevant to them – by stating who your webinar is for will significantly increase the chance they’ll sign up.
Once you have decided on the target audience for the webinar, a good exercise to do is to create an ideal client profile / avatar for these individuals – this will be a big help when it comes to creating a good webinar topic.
Making an ideal client profile involves putting yourself in their shoes, considering what’s important to them, and mapping it all out on a piece of paper.
Here is an editable ideal client profile template I created to get you started.
Once you have completed the template for your target audience, reach out to 5-10 people that fit your ideal client profile and ask to have a conversation with them.
The goal is to go through the sections on your ideal client template and verify your assumptions.
In essence, you want to get them to describe their situation in their own words.
Take note of the specific phrases they use because this will come in handy later when writing the messaging for your webinar landing page.
Once you have a list of the issues that are relevant to them, pick a webinar topic that directly ties in with one of their challenges or goals.
Don't worry about trying to solve the entire client challenge during your webinar. Instead we should help the audience solve part of the issue or at least gain a better understaning about how to tackle it.
In my experience it's also good to be specific with the topic of your webinar. This is because you will probably only have an hour or so for the session.
Breaking down your topic into a step-by-step guide that teaches the audience how to do something in your session it's likely to be a winner.
Remember, if the topic doesn’t resonate with the target audience, they won't even sign up for the session in the first place so you don't want to lose people at the first hurdle.
Creating the content
When it comes to designing the content for your webinar, it’s key to give away as much valuable information as possible.
I'd even go so far to say it's a positive thing to feel a bit uncomfortable with the level of the content you are sharing for free.
This ensures you are delivering true value and aren’t holding anything back. Doing so will work wonders in terms of building trust with your audience.
It's paramount that the audience leave the webinar thinking it was worth their time.
So aim to speak directly to a challenge the audience is experiencing or a goal they're looking to achieve – this will make for engaging content.
The reason your content needs to be great, is because you want people to be interested in hearing more from you in the future. So that further down the line, they might be open to speaking with you one-on-one.
If they feel like they haven't got value from the session, they are unlikely to engage with any of your future content and webinars.
One final thought when it comes to planning the content for your webinar is to have a clear action you want people to take at the end of the session.
Asking them to take a specific action will ensure you make the most of your captive audience. If they have watched the whole, they are clearly interested in what you have to say.
And as we’re looking to get new paying clients with the webinar, encouraging people to speak with you one-on-one should be your next objective – so why not invite webinar attendees to book a free strategy call?
You can take this even further and say you only have 10 slots available for strategy calls. This helps to create scarcity and will encourage more people to sign up for a call.
Promoting the webinar
Now that you have a topic in mind, you need to think of a way to turn it into a short and snappy webinar title that will appeal to the target audience.
Remember, your first objective with this event is to get as many people to sign up for the session as possible – so using a benefit-driven headline will work in your favour.
Once you have chosen your title, setting a date and time is the next step to take. Be sure to allow at least a month to give you enough time to promote the event.
I won’t go into detail about choosing a webinar platform, but I will say this, Zoom is a good option because people are familiar with it.
Zoom is a low risk choice because your goal is to make it as easy for people to access the webinar as possible.
And if you can keep the duration of the webinar to under 40 mins, you could even host your event using Zoom’s free plan (but each meeting is limited to 100 attendees).
Once you have scheduled the webinar in your chosen platform, it’s time to promote the event. At a minimum, I would recommend:
- Sending personal invitations to ideal clients via email and LinkedIn messenger
- Posting 2-3 times per week about the webinar on LinkedIn
- Inviting people on your email list to attend (if you have one)
To spread your reach even further, you could ask people you are closer with to promote your webinar via their LinkedIn accounts.
And you could also experiment with paid adverts on LinkedIn to encourage people who aren’t in your immediate network to register.
Following up after the webinar
As we are using the webinar for lead generation purposes, it’s critical that we follow up with attendees once the event has finished.
Although you may get some inbound enquiries after the webinar, you can’t rely on people reaching out to you.
So in the next few days, your goal is to encourage those that attended to book video calls or meetings with you one-on-one.
Now anyone that signs up to your webinar can be considered a lead, but not all of them will be a good fit.
It's important to go through the list of people and qualify your leads.
We want to focus on the people in our target audience and match the ideal client profile (mentioned above).
When reaching out to your attendees, don’t directly ask for the sale.
Offer them a free strategy call and list the sort of things you cover with people in these sessions.
The communication medium you use for the follow up is likely to be via email or a LinkedIn direct message. You might want to use a combination of both i.e. start by sending an email and then follow up with a LinkedIn message.
In addition, half the people who register for the webinar probably won't turn up on the day – so you need a plan for how you reach out to these individuals as well.
You could give them the webinar recording or potentially a summary of the key points you covered.
It's still worth trying to engage with these people in conversation as well because they showed interest in your expertise and webinar topic by signing up for the event.
Conclusion and action point
In conclusion, webinars can be an effective way for consulting businesses to attract new clients because they:
- enable you to reach a broad audience
- establish your credibility and help you to build trust with prospects
- are very cost-effective to organise, and
- enable you to reuse the recording on your social media channels.
But to create a successful webinar, it's important to choose a specific target audience and select a topic that addresses one of their challenges or goals.
Remember, the goal is to get people to speak with you one-on-one, so the content should be valuable and encourage attendees to take a specific action at the end, such as scheduling a free consultation or strategy call.
Action point: If you're a consultant looking to attract new clients, consider organising a webinar and use the tips in this article to ensure your event is a success.
