What Makes a Webinar Work?

So you keep seeing webinars pop up left and right, and you find yourself wondering, “But wait, do webinars work?”,  “Can webinars get me leads?”, “ Will webinars increase sales?” or what makes a webinar work?

Yes! Very much! Let me ask you, have you ever had somebody randomly come up to you, show you a product, and bug you to buy? Did you ever like that person?

Did you ever buy from those tactics?

Or did you find it annoying?

A webinar can help you veer away from being that annoying, random salesperson pushing products to everyone’s faces…

Because you surely don’t want your customers to see you that way.

On the contrary, webinars are like the free cookies that give you a taste, and make you want to buy a whole box. Why? Because when people become more familiar with something, or get a free sample, they are likelier to lean in.

But that’s not all. Webinars are a great tool to get more leads and sales for your business. Why, you ask? In this blog post I’ll be sharing with you the 3 reasons webinars work.

Number One: Webinars give you a chance to teach, and all the benefits that come with being “the teacher”.

Good webinars can turn you from a stranger into an expert, and your audience into customers.

Before someone buys from you, they need to know, like, and trust you. By giving you a chance to teach, webinars give you many advantages to being known, liked, and trusted by your customers.

First, being the teacher gives you a chance to prove that you know what you’re talking about. It allows you to be the authority in that space. Sometimes, people just want to see how you think, what you can do, how good you are, check if you really know your stuff.

Being in the “teacher” role does a great job of putting you in an expert position, and that’s great because nobody likes the stranger hounding them with ads and unsolicited sales calls. And that brings me to the second advantage. 

Webinars (especially live ones) build trust with your potential customers. It brings you from “stranger I don’t know” to “insightful expert I can keep learning from”.

And because webinars have video and audio, chat and slides, all working together with your personal style, you’ve got so much more going on for you compared to an email or a sponsored post. It makes you real,

It makes you more authentic.

Webinars allow you to meet your potential customers where they’re at, and move them forward to the next step. How does that happen? Sure, a webinar is you teaching and doing much of the talking, but webinars are also a great way for you to learn more about your customers. Where are they in their journey? How much do they understand their own pain points? 

They don’t know everything yet, and that’s why they attended your webinar. If you meet your customers where they’re at, and teach them the one thing they need to know (key: not an overwhelming dump of information), they’ll be more confident to move on to the next step with you.

This is critical in getting webinar leads. Meet them where they are and move them to the next step, whether that’s a one-on-one phone call or straight to a paid course.

This is the first point of what makes a webinar work…

Number Two: You can seamlessly work in testimonials into your webinar as educational materials that your audience will latch onto.

How do testimonials help get your webinar sales? Simple. In a webinar, testimonials are given context and room to shine. 

Instead of just being a recommendation from past clients, testimonials can become case studies that your audience learns from. First, it allows your customers to relate their pain points to one of your clients’ issues. This will help translate into webinar leads because they know that what you are selling is relevant to them.

Second, they can get inspired with ideas on the many ways, or the one best way, that their problem can be solved.

And third, they gain confidence that you can indeed help them solve their issues because you’ve done this before. A lot. From your testimonial case studies, they’ll see how you can get them their desired outcome.

This negates any statements like “of course that will work with you, but my case is different because xyz…” or “how can i know that will apply to my situation?” because you’ve used your testimonials as case studies to show that all those problems are solvable.

I’ve seen webinars bake in 30+ more testimonials in one session, but having 15-20 is already good. If your customer is sold on your solution to their problem, webinar sales are sure to follow.

That is point two of what makes a webinar work…

Number Three: You get to transfer your energy and excitement about your product to your audience. But instead of just one to one, webinars allow you to do that one to many.

This in my opinion is the biggest reason that webinars work.

Zig Ziglar said it best, “the sales process is nothing more than you transferring your excitement and certainty about what you are selling to the other person.”

This is why live events work so well, why selling from stage works so well. And this is why coffee meetings work so well—the only difference between a coffee meeting and a webinar is that you’re doing it one person to many people. You are multiplying and amplifying your message, and you’re sharing your excitement about something to more people.

This is no different with webinar sales. When people see you up there on a stage, they mirror your energy.

And so if your energy is high up in that webinar, your participants will get hyped with you.

This will turn them from webinar audience to webinar leads. 

So do webinars work? Absolutely! Webinars give you all the factors that can help you land many sales. However, not all webinars were built to sell. Some are bad, downright boring, or too information overload.

In another blog post, I talk about what you should be doing to build a money-making webinar, you can check it out here: https://stevenphillipwerner.com/how-to-make-money-with-a-webinar/