7 Ways to Claim Your Authority by Marketing with Webinars

One essential key to authority marketing is establishing the like, know, and trust factor with your prospects, and one of the best ways to do this is marketing with webinars.

As an online business owner, that is oftentimes difficult to do because you rarely meet your customers face-to-face. However, a webinar can solve part of that face-to-face issue. Webinars are the equivalent of live seminars done over the Internet. The host and guest speakers are seen as authorities because they have great information to share with the participants that solves a common problem of the participants. If you haven’t yet jumped on the authority marketing with webinars bandwagon, then you’re missing out on a fantastic authority marketing method that has an incredible ROI (return on investment) of your marketing dollars.

Here are the seven reasons you should activate your authority  by marketing with webinars:

1. Introduce your business or brand. Webinars are a wonderful way to introduce a business or brand to the masses. It gives your prospect a way to preview your brand and point of view without any commitment on the part of the prospect other than to listen to the webinar. The prospect will also get a feel for you and decide whether or not to continue to follow you. This low-risk method of introduction makes it easy to test out your company.

2. Become a recognized authority in your industry. Providing useful and actionable information on webinars gives you a credibility boost, thus directly impacting your like, know, and trust factor with your prospects. As the host of a webinar, you become an authority, and prospects begin to trust you and the products that you sell when you begin marketing with webinars. Unsure of what to say on your webinar?  here’s a link from the Content Marketing Institute on The No-Fail Formula for Creating Awesome Webinar Content.

3. Promote products. While I believe your webinar should provide useful information to your participants, if you do your job properly as the webinar host, you’ll leave your participants hungry for more information. That is the time where you offer more in-depth information to help them solve their problems through the purchase of your product that relates to the problem presented during the webinar. As long as your webinar hasn’t been a pitch fest for you and your business, most webinar participants will gladly listen to a five or ten-minute pitch about your product at the end of the webinar.

4. Increase sales. Once you have become a known entity on your webinars and your prospects get a sense of what to expect from you, you can expect more sales of your other products and services as a direct side effect of the authority status gained from hosting webinars. Once your client discovers how well you’ve helped him solve one problem, he’ll be eager to discover what else you offer to help him solve other problems.

5. Connect with strategic partners. If you’re like most business owners, you’ll discover doing webinars to be addictive, but in a good way! Because of the success you’ll experience from doing webinars, you may discover that you want to host more of them. Because you’re not an expert at everything, at some point you may decide to contact other experts to be a guest speaker. This is a great way to meet other authorities who serve a similar target market in a different way. Chances are you’ll develop a friendship or a strategic alliance that will help you both personally and professionally.

6. Communicate with prospects on a more personal level. One of the reasons social media is such a useful marketing tool is that it provides an opportunity for direct communication between the business and its clients and prospects. This access to you as the authority makes them feel a part of your community or inner circle. Webinars have the same effect on the clients and prospects — they have an opportunity to interact with you as the authority. Believe it or not, some of your prospects and clients are jumping for joy at this opportunity!

7. Make a low-cost investment for substantial ROI. Webinars are a low-cost way of promoting your business, increasing sales, building your brand, and helping you become a recognized authority. With a webinar, you become an educator and advocate for your clients, which is an amazing way to market your business without being salesy. Because you’re engaging your clients and prospects in educational marketing, they eagerly anticipate your next webinar because they have discovered you’ll be providing them a solution to one of their problems in your webinar, and they won’t mind any pitches you might do for your products or services.

Bonus: The two best tools I’ve discovered help you with marketing with webinars is Instant Teleseminar and Demio. Instant Teleseminar is more of an old-school program, but I’ve found it to be less glitchy than the rest.

Webinars are a business owner’s dream — you get to educate your clients and prospects in an intimate setting, as well as tell them about your products and services. Plus, webinars can be easily recorded for future use on your website or as part of an automated marketing funnel. If you’re not doing authority marketing with webinars, you’re missing out on one of the easiest marketing methods out there.