Have you ever wondered if there’s more you could be doing to market your business?

You’ve already built a website for your brand, which is the first place anyone should start. But what about the channels you’ve used to spread the word about it? Have you blogged? Posted to social media? Sent out newsletters? Run pay-per-click advertising?

There is a lot of work that goes into marketing your business and sometimes it feels as though you make little progress getting in front of leads; not to mention the right kind of leads.

But that’s why you’re reading this post. You’ve likely heard that webinars can help increase brand awareness. So, let’s review why webinars are such an effective tool for marketing a brand and talk about how to tackle getting started.

What makes webinars such effective marketing tools?

With much of the marketing you do these days, there’s a good amount of time and energy that goes into managing strategies (and the content that goes into them) on a daily basis. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s greatly beneficial to blog regularly, post on social media weekly (if not daily), and to stay in touch with email.

That said, when your marketing ROI is solely contingent on how much time and effort you put into these tasks, it can quickly become frustrating. Here are some of the ways that webinars deliver more bang for your buck.

The time aspect

In terms of your own productivity, a webinar is a highly effective use of your time. While you may put a couple hours into the preparation of the presentation, lining up co-presenters, and coordinating the details of the webinar with your team, that’s about it.

You deliver the webinar and then have a highly valuable recording you can share over and over again – and in many formats for many marketing channels, mind you.

Consider it a form of one-and-done marketing that has major legs.

It’s easy

Webinars tend to be an easy way to communicate with an audience.

From your end, you have to prepare some slides, test your webinar software, and make sure the lighting and audio are good. So long as you come equipped with a great presentation, that’s all there is to it.

From your audience’s end, webinars are easy to consume. They see some details about the webinar, provide a minimal amount of contact information, and virtually attend a 30- to 60-minute session where they walk away with a new skill or understanding.

Because you and they can plan in advance for a webinar, it makes it a highly attractive option for both of you to engage in this manner. Plus, video is always a great way to reach consumers, be it live or pre-recorded.

It attracts audiences of all types

Webinars aren’t usually created with the express purpose of selling something. That’s what your website and other marketing efforts are for. Webinars are meant to educate, which means you have an opportunity here to reach a much larger audience that is in various stages of the sales funnel.

If your goal is to…

• Increase general brand awareness with prospects
• Build a list of viable leads to now more closely foster to conversion
• Or improve the value of your business for current customers

…then a webinar is a fantastic way to cover all your bases.

How do you use webinars to boost brand awareness?

Running a webinar is a fairly straightforward process. Set yourself up in a quiet and well-lit space. Test all your equipment. And come prepared. Oh, and I would suggest using webinar software like ClickMeeting to host your presentation.

In addition to being a reliable webinar hosting platform, ClickMeeting enables you to handle marketing and sales activities related to the presentation, all from the same dashboard. You can create and share the webinar invitation, run it in a manner that best suits you, engage with the audience in real time, review the analytics after the presentation, repurpose the video and also promote it online.

Now, that covers the “how” of hosting a webinar. But when it comes to how to use it to boost brand awareness, here are the key steps you’ll need to take.

Establish authority

HubsSpot is generally seen as an authority on marketing, so it’s no surprise the website would be chock full of educational resources. What you might not have realised, however, is that they have over a dozen pre-recorded webinars included in this repository as well:

As you can see, each one delivers a very specific and relevant lesson to users.

By putting the focus on relieving the audience’s pain instead of on self-promotion, businesses can use webinars to establish themselves as an authority. Webinars, in turn, become something consumers can’t help but share via word-of-mouth marketing and social media.

Searchability

SEMrush is a software product and a blog that publishes articles related to the subject of SEO. A website like this already benefits from the fact that it publishes content on a regular basis. SEMrush takes it a step further by promoting upcoming webinars like this one from last summer, for example:

That can then be indexed in search listings:

In other words, SEMrush has leveraged its good standing in search to get its webinars ranking, which can help drive relevant organic search traffic for years to come. It definitely helps that they include a webinar transcript and slide deck embed on the page, as the rich content helps with indexation as well as user stickiness.

In general, the more frequently websites push out high-quality content to the web, the better they will perform in search. For businesses that want to get in front of a brand-new audience in search without having to pay for it, rankable pages for upcoming and past webinars will significantly help.

Turn it into a lead magnet

Monday.com is a relatively new task management platform that has done a lot to set itself apart from the sea of lookalike tools. One of the ways it’s accomplished this is through its ongoing series of webinars.

Now, what’s smart about this is that these free, educational webinars aren’t just random videos uploaded to YouTube or the blog that anyone can access. If Monday.com wants to provide extra value to consumers who simultaneously have their eyes on more well-known tools like Asana and Trello, the company needs to stay in touch with leads long after the webinar wraps.

And they do that through this:

By turning webinars into lead magnets (i.e. something given away in exchange for an email address), businesses can now more effectively stay in front of leads through email. Businesses can also take their pre-recorded webinar, package it into a branded video product, and use it to support their future sales and marketing efforts.

Leverage influencers’ reach

As I said earlier, you can run your webinar any way you want. You know your audience and you know what kind of message they want to hear from you. That said, if you’re using this as a vehicle to greatly expand brand awareness, think about leveraging big-name influencers.

Here’s a good example from Pantheon, a hosting and development solution for the web:

They’ve been running a webinar series around the subject of WordPress Gutenberg, a topic which has virally trended with their target user base for a while. However, rather than take on this topic on their own – especially since they’re not strictly WordPress specialists – they have six headliners from various parts of the WordPress ecosystem speaking on the subject.

This is a brilliant way to boost brand awareness, whether you’re a fledgling business or you’ve been around for some time. If you have partners with bigger names or have an in with other high-profile connections, leverage their brand names to bring greater recognition to your own.

Summing up

If you’re looking for a way to shape up your marketing strategy, think about adding some webinars to the mix. They’re easy to create and have a lot of potential for increasing your brand awareness now as well as down the road.