Provided you have strong quality content that will get people to opt-in, webinars can be a great revenue stream for your business. Let’s take a look at a few tips that will help you monetize your content successfully.
Unique Topics Sell
Providing value to your audience is crucial to the success of your webinar. No one knows what your audience needs better than your sales and marketing teams. Hold a brainstorm session and decide on a topic as a group. The goal of your webinar is to answer your audience’s questions and provide solutions to their problems that they cannot find anywhere else. If you want your audience to pay for a webinar or content following the event, the topic needs to be unique. Why would someone pay for something if they can find the information from google or worse, a competitor—for free.
Marketing, Marketing, Marketing
You can’t monetize webinars without a strong marketing plan. Once you’ve created strong content and determined a price, to steal a theater term—you have to get butts in the seats. With a paid webinar, lack of attendees can end up costing you money. You need to invest time, energy, and likely money into the promotion of your webinar.
Email marketing campaigns are the number one go-to channel for marketers. Create pithy email blasts that give your target audience a reason to attend. Share tidbits about guests and the topic. You want to make someone so curious that they have no choice but to attend.
Social media is the other excellent place to increase your webinar attendance. Paid social media ads targeting the right people through various channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn should be required. If you’re not willing to spend money on your webinar, why should your audience? Use retargeting and remarketing codes to target your website traffic.
If you’re not sure how to most effectively run ads on various social media channels, find an expert to help you. The investment in the services of a professional will make a big difference in your success rate.
For other social media webinar marketing tips be sure to check out our article “8 Ways to Use Social Media in Increase Webinar Attendance.”
Pro-tip: Think of your paid webinar like a conference when you’re developing a marketing campaign. What do successful conferences do to attract attendees? Find the most successful conferences in your field and emulate what they do.
It’s Over, But You’re Not Done
The opportunity to monetize your webinar doesn’t stop when the live version is over. If you’ve put on an impressive webinar, with strong, clear content, hopefully your attendees will spread the word, encouraging their coworkers to buy and download the webinar. Use these influencers to tap into their networks. Offer discounts on your next webinar to people who refer friends and family.
Reselling the webinar should be a no-brainer too. The recorded version of the webinar should always live on your website. Make it easy to find for your target audience and like we said with marketing, make them want to download it. Be careful though, you don’t want your lead capture form getting in the way.
Pro-tip: If you’re not sure how to build an amazing landing page on your website to attract attention, work with a professional who can help. It will be worth the investment.
It’s Hard Work…
Monetizing a webinar is hard work. Paid webinars can be extremely rewarding and play a bigger role in the sales funnel in your organization. Don’t let the hard work intimidate you. Just because it requires more effort, doesn’t make them any less worth it.
This article was first published on The Marketing Scope.