Webinars remain one of the most effective but underused marketing strategies for advisors. True, they require some effort to set up, but advisors who host them find out these events are an excellent way to engage a large audience and fuel their other marketing channels, all at little additional cost.
Every marketing strategy tends to come with a learning curve. So to help you get the most out of your webinars, I’ve put together a list of tips to help attract attendees and generate leads in a shorter period of time.
1. Select The Right Topics
The best webinar topics are found at the crossroads between your business goals and your audience’s interests. And as long as both criteria are met, you can get as creative as you like! You can roughly categorize your topics this way:
• Something timely: Look for a current topic—say, anything from pending legislation or changes to the tax code (for instance, the sunsetting of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act) or even just a market recap. Consider one particularly popular subject right now: how you and your clients can protect themselves against identity theft. If it helps, you could partner with law enforcement or cybersecurity experts to attract attendees to such an event.
• A niche-specific idea: Here, your webinar would focus on the concerns of a highly specific audience, like doctors, business owners and retirees. You could bring on other experts like attorneys or CPAs who cater to the same clients.
• Evergreen topics: These webinars could get into estate planning, retirement income strategies, tax optimization, caring for aging parents, Social Security and Medicare. If it’s still relevant a year or two from now, you can consider it evergreen.
• General wellness topics: These webinars could focus on things like nutrition, post-college planning, and even real estate updates, subjects that easily transition into financial services talk. Such topics also give you great opportunities to work with guest speakers, and together you can expand your audiences.
2. Tell A Story
A webinar isn’t just an informational presentation. It’s a way to engage with clients, prospects and others in the industry. Your content needs to be both engaging and educational, and you definitely want stats and figures.
But these numbers should mainly support a larger story, a narrative with a clear beginning, middle and end that allows you to demonstrate the value of your information. Narratives allow you to weave in data in a more engaging way, helping your attendees visualize how your scenarios will relate to them. For example, if you’re discussing taxes in retirement, you can use fictional characters in various situations to demonstrate your larger ideas in action.
Your guests can help here, too: You can interview business owners and leaders within a certain profession or even your community, letting them tell their own stories about how they got started, what lessons they learned and what advice they have for the audience. And of course, you can have them explain the ways financial planning has played a role in their success or peace of mind. It can even be your story.
3. Use An Effective Promotion Strategy
Promoting your webinar is just as important as hosting the webinar itself. Without this step, all the effort you put into your webinar will be for nothing. After all, how are you supposed to get registrants if they don’t get the memo that you’re hosting an upcoming webinar?
Before scheduling any communications, you’ll want to set up a plan. Here’s what I would recommend to help attract registrants:
1. Build a descriptive registration page: This is the page you’ll be directing everyone to, so you’ll want to include basic information while highlighting whom the webinar is for and why they should register.
2. Set up your email reminders: Let recipients know you’re hosting a webinar and would like them to attend. Send three emails: one a week before, another a day before, and the last one an hour before. The first two should furnish the same information that’s on your registration page, while the third email should be a quick reminder.
3. Promote yourself on social media: Repurpose the text of your first email to build posts for your social channels. Share your registration link in these posts and consider creating an eye-catching image to draw additional attention.
4. Invite key influencers: If you’ve invited a guest or speaker, tag them in your social posts and ask them to promote the webinar alongside you.
5. Let people know on your home page: Place a banner on your page with a webinar announcement and a link to the registration page.
It’s also important to select the best time for your webinar. On average, midweek tends to be the best time—this is when you can garner the most participants. Remember to pick a platform that people are familiar with, since it makes them more likely to attend.
4. Identify Your Best Leads
Once you’ve finished the live event, it’s time to identify your best leads. This can be done by drawing on the analytics provided by your preferred webinar hosting platform. I prefer to use Zoom, since it provides several metrics to analyze attendee engagement and offers an easy webinar setup process.
Some information available through Zoom includes:
• Attendees’ time in the webinar;
• Responses to survey questions;
• The chat history;
• The webinars your audience members previously attended; and
• Their past marketing engagements.
You can use this information to see which attendees are the most interested—and therefore your best—lead opportunities. It’s also not a bad idea to send a post-webinar survey and check the chat history. Both are a great way to hear directly from your audience, allowing you to discover additional webinar ideas and business opportunities.
5. Repurpose The Event
Now that you have completed the webinar, it’s important to make use of the content you’ve created to generate even more leads. The best way to do this is to repurpose webinar recordings for social media posts and website content.
Here are some steps you can take:
• Transcribe the webinar and add subtitles: This will help make the webinar more accessible. There are a variety of tools that can help, such as Headliner, a podcast promotional platform. YouTube can also automatically add closed captions.
• Write a blog using the webinar transcript: At the top of the post, you can link to the webinar replay. By using the transcript this way, you can help improve your standing in online searches, since it adds key words to your website.
• Create short clips for promotion: These clips can be used to promote the webinar replay on social media, and you can separate them into key moments of the presentation. Try and edit these events so they are between 30 seconds and 2 minutes in length.
By repackaging your event this way, you can give fuel to your other marketing channels while taking advantage of the work you’ve already done.
Wrapping Things Up
Now that you’ve taken the first step, remember these tips and continue to improve and grow as you develop your webinar strategy. The more you host, the better you’ll get.
Susan Theder is the chief marketing and experience officer at FMG Suite.