Should you use a webinar to promote your business? In this episode, Joe and Tami talk about what webinars are, how to decide if your business could benefit from having one, the pros of having one, how to leverage webinars to expand your influence, and more.
Episode 16 Transcript:
Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing a podcast with us the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO, Joe Apfelbaum, on key marketing topics, and we share everything you need to know to properly grow your business online. This is a Q&A podcast, where I asked Joe questions about different topics and trends in marketing, based on his book, High Energy Marketing. You can get the book and follow along with us at ajaxunion.com/book.
This is the 16th official episode of our podcast about High Energy Marketing. And today we are going to discuss webinars. Should you be using them, how to use them, and so on. But first a little housekeeping. Find us on Apple podcasts, that purple icon. Give us a rating and leave a review. Let us know if you’re enjoying the podcast.
And let’s move to our inspiration minute Joe, do you want to give us some inspiration for the day before we get started?
Joe: Absolutely. People are like mirrors. Spending time with people is like spending time with a mirror. We’re programmed to mirror and reflect back what we see. Human beings are great imitators, to the degree that people will often look like their dogs. When people live together, they end up looking like each other, you end up mirroring what people say, you end up mirroring what people think.
So if you want to make sure that you’re living a great life, you have to surround yourself with people who say things that are empowering to you. People who are full of gratitude, people that are full of positivity, most people are living in fear, and they’re not going to be able to be positive around you, they’re not going to be able to be happy and joyful. And so if you’re living with that, you got to improve your network.
Instead of you mirroring them, what you need to do is become positive yourself, happy yourself, joyful yourself. And hopefully, they will mirror that. I personally have been told by some people to wipe my smile off my face, it makes them uncomfortable. Well, instead of wiping my smile away, I smile. And other people smile too. And if they can’t smile, they probably will not stay around me for a while. So instead of being full of fear, full of shame, full of sadness, because misery loves company, be full of light.
Remember that success leaves clues. If you want to have accountability, you must find people who will hold themselves accountable and are willing to hold you accountable to have a higher standard. So don’t hang around people that are complaining. And if you want to be inspired, hang around with people that are on fire.
Tami: People that are on fire. Thank you so much, Joe. Let’s move on to our topic of the day webinars, should we be using one to promote our business? So first, what is a webinar?
Joe: A webinar is a virtual presentation that you present to a target audience life. It’s like a seminar. But because it’s on the interweb, because it’s on the web. It’s called a webinar. So you take the S from seminar, remove the S, add the W and now you have a webinar.
Now, you can have an automated webinar. It’s one that looks like it’s live. But it’s really a replay of a live webinar. This can work in certain industries, there are hundreds of people running ads to automated webinars that are generating leads that turn into clients. This works especially well in the coaching and consulting services business.
Tami: So how do we know if a webinar is good for promoting my specific business?
Joe: If your business is the type of business where you have to educate your customers, and they have to go through some type of learning process, in order for them to buy your product or service, then it might make sense for you to have a presentation that they watch that they can get educated about their problem.
They can get educated about the industry, they can get educated about you and what you’re offering. It might not be all the way on the top of the funnel. But a webinar is a really great source of information that will entertain, engage and educate your customer to help them be able to understand that you are the authority and that you know what you’re talking about in your industry.
Tami: How long should one of these webinars be?
Usually, webinars are 20 minutes to 90 minutes, and you can go deeper with an audience. I’ve seen webinars that are three, or four hours long. I’ve seen webinars that were 15 minutes long, but I would say 20 minutes is like a short webinar like our blueprint webinar and our funnel lab.
Some are 20 minutes and then we have longer webinars that are 90 minutes, I’ve done an online summit that’s like three, or four hours. But that’s not a webinar anymore.
Although it’s the same format as a webinar, it becomes more like a summit or a conference or a workshop when you’re going really, really long. So I would keep my webinars as short as you can. But sometimes you have to go a little bit longer, especially if you’re trying to educate and indoctrinate a crowd. Sometimes it takes 60 to 90 minutes, I would say anywhere between 20 and 90 minutes depending on what your goal is and what you’re trying to achieve.
Tami: And how do you leverage your webinar to expand your influence?
Joe: The way that you leverage a webinar to expand your influence is to first get people to watch it. That’s step number one, the less time that your target market has, the shorter you want your presentation to be. At the same time, the bigger your problem is and the more time a client needs in order for them to know that you can solve the problem, they’ll invest more time on the webinar.
Someone in the market, like wanting a luxury watch, for example, I was in the luxury watch industry for a long time. So somebody in the market that was a luxury watch might invest 30 minutes getting educated to buy a luxury watch for let’s say 10, or $20,000. But they would probably do that on YouTube. Unless you have a presentation on your website that’s exclusive and behind the scenes for people that own more than three watches. Did you know that luxury watches can go over $100,000 each?
People who invest $80,000 on a watch would probably watch spend 30 minutes to watch a presentation. A Facebook Live that can last 90 minutes or an Instagram Live can last 60 minutes, people actually invest time into watching those longer presentations. And if you’re an engaging person, and you’re providing good value to a specific problem, then you’re much more likely to be able to have people want to watch that webinar.
But leveraging your webinar is about understanding the problem that your client has, and making sure that you’re able to educate them through that process and help them see that maybe there’s a bigger problem that you can solve for them.
Tami: So, when answering some of the reasons why someone would want to create a webinar, it sounds like one of the reasons is if you have a solution to someone’s problem, and you want to educate them on your solution, create a webinar around that. Are there some other reasons why someone would create a webinar?
Joe: In order for people to know that you’re an authority in the industry, like for example, if you’re in B2B, you can benefit from educating your clients with a presentation that breaks down a problem and gives a solution. But the key is don’t tell people how to fix the problem. Instead, tell them what they need to know and they can contact you to understand how. If you give people the “how” you’re going to overwhelm them.
And they might think that they can do it themselves. You want people instead to contact you, right? So for example, we have a presentation that teaches leads how the marketing funnel works, but it really tells them what they need to know, we’re not going to teach them how to use Click Funnels, how to use MailChimp, how to use Pardot, ActiveCampaign.
We’re not even going to discuss those particular tools. We’re not even going to have a HubSpot tutorial. Even though we’re HubSpot certified. Offering people information is actually doing them a service about what they need to keep in mind when they’re in the market for a watch, copy, or a lawyer or whatever it is.
Because there’s a lot of information that you would teach on a sales call that you can actually teach on a webinar. So, if you need to get on a sales call with a client, then maybe do a webinar and educate them. That is a very valuable thing to do. If you have a course, for example, that’s going to teach you how to generate leads on LinkedIn.
Like, for example, what we offer, we’re not going to sit there and talk to you about everything that’s inside our course, we’re actually going to solve a problem for you. And at the end, if you decide that you really want to learn how to use LinkedIn, you’re probably going to sign up for our LinkedIn course, because we actually solve the problem during our webinars so we can solve the rest of your problems inside our course.
Tami: Let’s say we still can’t think of webinar topics. How do we brainstorm different topics for webinars that we could run?
Joe: The best way to brainstorm topics for webinars that you can run is to write down the list of all your client’s problems, what is every single problem your client possibly has that you could solve with a little bit of education.
And if you do that, you’re probably gonna be able to turn each problem into a separate webinar, or you’re going to select the three most popular problems that your clients have, and turn them into a webinar. If you need help with that, I love love love coming up with webinar topics. As a matter of fact, Tami is always hitting me up saying Joe, we need a new webinar topic. And then I like to blurt out 12 topics I’m really good at coming up with topics, especially because I understand the problems that my clients face in a webinar.
You don’t just want to be a firehose of information. You want to provide people with three simple tips they could walk away with because most people are going to forget everything you told them within 24 hours. So you want to make sure to keep it really simple. So it’s likely that they’ll remember something. And the main thing I want them to remember is that you’re the authority, you taught them something, and then they can come back to you, and help you be able to turn them into a client.
That’s really the goal. No? Don’t you want to be your webinar to help you generate leads to help you get new clients to help you be the authority? And so what I love to do is tell people to watch the replay of the webinar as well.
So if you, if it’s something that you’re really serious about, we should definitely have a chat because I’ve been doing webinars for over a decade. And through that, I’ve also been watching a lot of webinars. And I’ve really upped my webinar game, both in terms of coming up with topics, and also how to conduct a webinar.
Tami: And let’s say someone wants to do a webinar. How did they get started?
Joe: Well, first you have to think about, if you’re getting started with the webinar, the first thing you need to think about is what technology you’re going to use. How are you going to get people to that webinar? What is your webinar topic going to be? What is your presentation style going to be? And you got to write out your presentation, and see if you can get anyone to join. People will give you feedback. I like doing dry runs of my webinar to people that I trust, and just kind of get their feedback. Was this valuable to them? Was it not valuable to them? What parts of the webinar
Am I droning on and on about the same thing? Am I taking people through a process or not. So if you want to get started with a webinar, it’s really, really important to first have a strategy session to make sure you get really clear on the purpose of the webinar, the flow of the webinar, what technology you’re going to use, how you’re going to get people to the webinar, you really want to have a plan.
So, don’t just do a webinar just for the sake of doing a webinar and tried to wing it, you’re not going to be successful if you’re going to wing it, you’re gonna get random results. Instead, you want to sit down, figure out the objective, and lay out the steps.
And if you use a marketing agency like Ajax union to help you with your webinar, you’re going to be much more likely that you’ll get to your goal.
Tami: Thank you so much. So that was amazing information. We hope everyone listening got as much out of this as we did.
In next week’s episode, we will be talking about creating the right email n so make sure to hit that subscribe button to catch the next episode. You can follow us on Instagram at Ajax union.
Follow Joe on all social media platforms at Joe Apfelbaum and follow him on LinkedIn at joelinkedin.com. If you didn’t catch that, you can check the description of this podcast for our social media links and go to ajaxunion.com/podcast to learn more as well.
If you have questions, you can shoot us an email at amazing@ajaxunion.com. Our music is by Michael Suarez. This podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon and edited by Sami Mititelu. Thank you so much.
