You Ask, I Answer: B2C Webinar Marketing Tips?

In today's episode, Maria asks, trying to ramp up a new service offering via webinar, target audiences, parents of high schoolers. We are trying to prove the concept out with a small monthly budget and doing regularly scheduled live webinars. Also, we'll try Facebook ads. Any tips for B2C webinar marketing? If the webinar is not ever changing information, you may actually want to look into what's called a hybrid webinar, which allows you to do a pre-recorded uh session and then uh have uh someone available live for QA afterwards.

That might be something you want to look into. Webinar marketing in general is it's essentially event marketing in a lot of ways, except that the customer doesn't have to go anywhere instead of showing up to a hotel or a conference room, whatever they can sit at their desk or their TV or whatever and enjoy the content there. Now, with webinars, um a webinar is still a time commitment, right? It's a micro sale of its own. What's in it for the customer?

The key to webinar marketing, unsurprisingly, is to have incredibly clear value propositions. Why should somebody spend 15, 30, 45 minutes of their time to enjoy this thing? Um, assuming it is enjoyable, knowing full well it's probably going to be a sales pitch, right? So uh you know, you get all those things like you know, timeshare emails and stuff on the on the B2C side, and you're like, I know exactly what this is, and I'm not going to do it because it's just going to be a long sales pitch. And that's what people are afraid of.

So you have to alleviate that fear. How do you alleviate that fear? You have to you essentially build uh a value chain or a trust chain, which means that you have to get people to the webinar through a series of steps. Uh typically it's gonna be you're gonna use things like content marketing, social media posts that lead to blog posts and lead to short videos on YouTube that lead to webinars, because at each step along the way, you have to prove that you're not going to waste people's time. So give that some thought in terms of the value chain, the that chain of trust.

How do you get smaller commitments laddering up to the webinar to earn that trust so that people will be willing to spend the time on it? I don't know that for a situation like this that a webinar is the best choice, because if we're talking true B2C, meaning uh your average person who is uh is um you know out after the end at the end of the day, they're home, they're they're watching, they're ready to watch some stuff, depending on what the product is, and I don't know what the product is, um that doesn't necessarily fit with how people consume content. What does your viewing habits look like at the end of the workday? Give some thought to that. Yeah, depending on on what kind of job you have, uh you might have uh different things, but a lot of people, a lot of people do Netflix and Jill, right?

Or Hulu or uh you know Amazon Prime Video or whatever, but a lot of people just sit on the couch, veg out, and tune out, and just they're there to be entertained and amused. So asking somebody to sit down for a live webinar at the end of the day, may not be the best way to reach somebody. What could you do in a situation like that? Think about what would it look like if this was a season of Black Mirror? Right?

What would this look like if this was a season of uh House of Cards? Now I'm not saying you need to go and produce a you know a mega drama, but I am saying the habits of people and the way that they behave leans more towards that mini-series that somebody could binge binge watch. That's what people do, and so could your content, which is parents of high schoolers, could it be reformatted to be something they could binge watch, and maybe it's not an hour each, maybe it's you know 10 minute chunks, because that also would be compatible with people's browsing habits during the work day. If you're working at a a nine to five, you know, and you work at like Target, right? Your break is not an hour long, unless you're like the manager, but your break comes split up throughout the day.

If you work at the local uh grocery store, your break is two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch break. Um does your content fit into that? Does your content fit to the way the people commute? A live webinar is a big chunk of commitment compared to a series on YouTube, compared to a series on the video platform of your of your choice, compared to something that somebody can binge watch. So give some thought to that because I'm not convinced that this is the right path for B2C for some kind of a service offering where you would otherwise ask people to sit through 45 minutes of something, even if it's 30 minutes, still that's still a good chunk of time.

Again, give yourself give some thought to this. If if you were not working at this company, would you spend 30 minutes of your lunch break on this? When was the last time on your lunch break you watched a webinar? Right? If the answer is never, it's not a good indicator.

Now find some people who are parents of high schoolers. Ask them when was the last time you watched a webinar? And see what the answer is. If you're willing to spend some budget, I would actually suggest running a survey first using something like uh Google Consumer Surveys or uh SurveyMonkey and serving parents of high school students. That'd be your first question, your screening question.

Are you the parent of a high school student? Two, when was the last time that you watched a webinar? And I would have your choices be you know, uh in the last week, in the last month, in the last quarter, in the last three months, and the last six months, and the last year, and what's a webinar? And I think you'll be pretty surprised at how many people will choose what's a webinar. So run that survey first before you invest in a whole lot of a whole lot of money into this thing and give some thought to formatting your content to be the way that your average B2C person uh the way they live.

Especially since for at least within the United States, there is a substantial portion of people who work in non-white collar jobs where they don't have the ability to sit down for that long. Um but they do have smartphones and they do have YouTube and they do have Netflix. So give that some give that some thought. And if you'd go that route, build that value chain, build that trust chain, and and make sure that your value proposition is 100% clear and it's something that people desperately want. So good question.

It's gonna be a tough one. It's gonna be a real tough one. As always, please leave your comments below in the comments box and subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

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