7 Ways In Growing Your Business With The Help Of Webinars Or Online Meetings

You may have already heard about webinars or online meetings and their ability to help grow a business. But how exactly are webinars able to do this? How do you make use of webinars in making your business grow and succeed?

Before proceeding with the enumeration, though, it’s important to emphasize that webinars are not just what many would likely think of as “seminars on the web.” Webinars are live online events that make use of video conferencing software to do presentations, lectures, workshops, demonstrations, discussions, or an instructional session.

The following are some of the most effective ways in harnessing the power of webinars, online meetings, or web conferences to enable the growth and success of a business:

1. As a Tool for Reaching Out to New Customers.

Arguably, webinars can help businesses grow the best in the marketing aspect. They can be used to attract potential customers by serving as a platform for sales pitches. A highly informative webinar that audiences find useful is capable of convincing potential customers to buy or subscribe to a service. Webinars are essentially live online events that can be used in growing leads and sales. One good example of that found success in using webinars to boost sales is healthcare tech firm LUMEDX, which reported increased contact with more than 500 clients after implementing a webinar-based campaign to raise brand awareness.

2. As a Post-Sale Educational Tool.

In an effort to create added brand value, it helps using webinars as a post-sale educational tool. This means supplementing the products or services offered with post-sale learning opportunities to make customers see more value in the products they buy. It’s about positioning your product as something that is truly useful, to differentiate it from competitors. However, when using webinars as post-sale educational tools, they should not include sales pitches as much as possible. The primary goal is to build a brand or business reputation. Bear in mind that a good brand or business reputation is also important in growing a business.

3. As a Platform for Attracting Potential Investors.

Webinars are also used in doing business presentations to stakeholders and other participants who are potential investors. It will not be easy inviting potential investors to attend a webinar but it’s worth the try. Besides, in the age of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, it would be better to supplement invitations for crowdsourcing or crowdfunding with real interactions with people who can become potential investors. Having a Kickstarter page is great but it’s even better if you can convince more to support your business by engaging them and laying down your innovative ideas or offerings.

4. As an Idea Crowdsourcing Platform.

Webinars can be good venues for soliciting ideas while you are sharing yours. If you are able to put out an engaging webinar on a topic that directly concerns your business, you can encourage participants to share useful ideas or insights. You may not be able to collect good ideas all of the time but there will be many instances when you can get good insights from those who participate. Not many would bother getting involved in webinars but those who decide to participate are usually the more enthusiastic ones who have great experiences and knowledge to share.

5. As Means for Hosting Virtual Events.

As the Internet continues to play an important and prominent role in today’s businesses, virtual events have also become popular. Many companies use the Internet to stage various virtual activities such as conference, exhibits, expositions, and trade shows. These virtual events create networking opportunities among businesses. They are excellent B2B opportunities that transcend distance constraints. They are particularly useful in meeting possible business partners, suppliers, distributors, manufacturers, subcontractors, and other entities that can help a business grow. Moreover, product launches may also be undertaken as virtual events, especially when the product is to be marketed in various markets in different locations.

6. As a Tool for Employee Training and Collaboration.

This one’s a given but still worth emphasizing. Webinars are very useful in orienting, training, and updating personnel especially if a business is already branching out or opening stores in new locations. The great thing about webinar-based trainings is that they can be recorded and presented to other employees without or with very minimal video editing involved. Also, many webinar platforms include tools for online collaboration that make it easier to do high impact presentations, compelling discussions, and collaborative projects.

7. As Additional Site Content or Freebies for Subscribers.

If you are have a website (well, you should have one!) you can use recorded webinars for additional content. Webinars are excellent additions to your site. They are great in attracting search spiders and may even place high up in the rankings. You may notice that Google has the tendency to place video content (YouTube in particular) on the first page of the search results for certain keywords. Study these keywords and try to create genuinely valuable webinars and come up with distinct but popular keyword combinations. Additionally, you can use archived webinars as freebies to encourage subscriptions to you site or blog. These webinars may also be included in your email marketing campaigns.

These are just some of the creative ways you can use webinars to aid the success of your business. Consider using some or even all of them as you market your business, connect to potential customers and business partners, engage current customers, and conduct efficient employee training and communication. Just remember that as you do all of these, you have to choose a dependable and feature-rich platform for your online meetings. All of the ideas mentioned above cannot be optimally undertaken if your webinar platform fails in terms of reliability and features.

Webinars or online meetings can help your business grow and succeed in the areas of marketing, networking, idea generation, and in attracting potential investors. Webinar platforms at present also offer several functions that specifically support the idea of creating success for as business. You just need to find the right platform and properly understand how webinars work so you can create a business strategy using them.