Webinars are an outstanding way to engage people whether they are your existing or potential audience. And FREE webinars are an excellent way to build your profile and list.
Running a free webinar is all about the exchange, the exchange of information where people give you an email address and they register to attend that webinar.
Offering free webinars allows you to grow your business and foster relationships between your brand and customers. When your reach more people through a webinar, you’ll get more leads.
The process of creating a webinar used to require a substantial amount of technical knowledge and complex setups, but today you can run a free webinar with just a few simple tools.
Here we are going to provide you with a simple guide that will show you how to host a webinar for free and the benefits of a free webinar for your business.
Live vs. Evergreen Webinars
Webinars can be run live which gives you a chance to get to know the people you’re talking to, or they can be run evergreen.
We use Restream for running live sessions and broadcast them to Facebook and YouTube. We make an event page that lets people opt-in to make sure that we’re getting the most of that free webinar.
If you’re pushed for time, evergreen webinars are a really good way of running a free webinar. Tools like eWebinar and Webinar Ninja allows you to run pre-recorded webinars and have an evergreen webinar within your marketing cycle.
What’s the purpose of a free webinar?
Webinars provide valuable information to recipients so that they will then take the next step in your lead journey. Essentially, webinars are a lead magnet. It allows people to get a glimpse of who you are and what you do. It is a great way to showcase your expertise and give them a taste of what it’s like to work with you.
Running a free webinar is a great vehicle for you to encourage your audience to take the next step, whether that is to opt-in for another product, download an ebook, enrol in a course, or even book a consulting along the way.
What are the benefits of running a free webinar?
A free webinar allows you to get into a wider audience, especially those who are maybe at the interest or the seed component of your marketing tree.
Webinars allow for higher engagement and rate of conversion because these participants have actually put aside the time to attend your webinar or training. You can answer questions and get through the barriers that people might have in taking the next step.
And it’s about building your profile and exposure. People talk about webinars after they’ve attended and they can talk and share the insights they’ve gained from your webinar with other people.
Return on investment (ROI) of webinars
Webinars tend to have an increased ROI on investment. It doesn’t cost a lot to run a webinar, but it does get your message out to a wider group of people. It allows you to increase your marketing effort around that activity, and get a better level of conversion once you’ve got the people in the webinar.
Webinar attendees are interested attendees. They are hot attendees because they have taken the time to attend your webinar. And that is the difference between anyone who watches a YouTube video or reads a blog post.
Final takeaway
Running a free webinar is a great way to get your message out to a wide audience. So here are some tips for you:
- Make sure that you are marketing your webinar. We like to have a four-week window to make sure that we’ve actually got enough time to market our webinar. Make sure that you create a good event page. We love Eventbrite for creating events and sharing them on our social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Make sure that you’ve run through your presentation and prepared yourself throughout that process. Don’t assume that your webinar attendees know you so introduce yourself and what you do.
- Make sure that your audience is feeling encouraged to ask any questions. This encourages them to engage with you.
- And then make sure that your webinar has a strong follow-up sequence. Remember, not all of our leads are going to be ready to buy at the time we run our webinar so you need to nurture them on a journey until they are ready to make the purchase.
Highlights:
[0:00] Introduction
[0:20] Best practices, purpose, and benefits of running a free webinar
[0:47] What is a free webinar?
[0:55] Live vs recorded webinars
[1:10] Using Restream to run a live webinar
[1:21] Other tools to run a free webinar like eWebinar and Webinar Ninja
[1:36] The purpose of running a free webinar
[2:08] It’s about gathering leads
[2:30] Nurturing your leads on a journey
[2:40] Benefits of running a webinar
[3:30] Free webinars have a good return on investment (ROI)
[3:50] Characteristics of free webinar attendees
[4:10] Running a free webinar gets your message to a wider audience
[4:15] Marketing your free webinar
[4:35] Preparing for your webinar
[4:45] Following up your leads after a free webinar
[5:00] Some ideas for a free webinar
[5:24] Don’t forget a call to action after your webinar
[5:41] Thank you for listening and subscribe to the Talk Podcast
Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:
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