Social Media Blogs by Aliza Sherman

Using Webinars for Social Media Marketing

Using Webinars for Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves various social networks, platforms and tools that help you build your brand, provide customer service, and market and sell your products and services. One platform that can enhance the interactive, multimedia content you’re producing for your digital marketing efforts is the webinar-style video conference.

Today’s webinars are much more than basic slideshows. Video adds a compelling and attractive feature to a slide presentation, with split screen, screen sharing, multiple presenters, text chat, Q&A and polling functions and more. To produce and broadcast an interactive webinar, use web-based, mobile and desktop software tools like Zoom, WebEx, and GoToWebinar. Some of these tools, like Zoom, can even live stream your webinar to other channels such as Facebook or YouTube.

Why would you produce a webinar?

Webinars can be part of your marketing, sales and customer service efforts such as:

  1. Demonstrating products. Provide live customer service help by showing how to properly use a product and taking questions from your customers or potential customers.
  2. Educating consumers about topics related to your company and products. A clothing company could offer workshops on seasonal ways to accessorize outfits. A fitness trainer could provide brief workout sessions to provide a sample of their style and entice customers. A catering company can offer cooking tips to demonstrate their expertise. By providing information, you’re connecting with customers and prospects in a more valuable and memorable way.
  3. Appearing on other people’s webinars. Build your personal brand and attract new customers by being a guest expert on someone else’s webinar.

So how are webinars a part of social media marketing?

They are part of content marketing, a type of social media marketing where you produce quality content that can be leveraged in all of your social networks. Also, think about a webinar with the interactive features as a way to better connect with consumers in real time.

When producing a webinar, you are hosting a live online event and can use your social networks to market the date and time of your webinar to encourage registrations. When broadcasting your webinar live, you can expand your audience by simultaneously live streaming it on other social networks. If you set up your webinar to be recorded, you can edit the raw footage and have video content that you can share in social media posts or upload and archive on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram’s IGTV, and others.

Should you charge for your webinar?

In some cases, companies do charge for access to webinars, however, it can depend on your overall goals, the type of content you’re producing, and the duration of the broadcast. For example, a company like a yoga studio that offers certification courses could use webinars to provide the coursework remotely. An art supply store could offer 3-hour workshops on learning specific art techniques. An author of a “how-to” book can bring their book content to life in a webinar and build in the purchase of their book into the admission price.

Because there is a lot of free content available online, trying to charge for something that is already available for free can be tricky. You need to provide obvious and tangible value to turn your webinars into revenue generators.

By using webinars as marketing tools, you can buld a stronger relationship with your current customer base, expand your reach to reach new customers, and interact in a way that can help you convert interest into sales.

Read other social media blogs by Aliza Sherman