Webinar Marketing: For Financial Advisors

With the Coronavirus pandemic making waves and changes all around us, we have seen one marketing technique take a backseat for the meantime - and it may stay there. The death of the dinner seminar has advisors and businesses alike rummaging for a way to share information with leads while also prospecting them for future business.

In the past, the dinner and lunch seminars were great outlets to be able to invite connections from all walks of life and different networking events to get together and learn from your best presentations. Now, we live in a world where it is unclear when (dare I say, if) we will return to normalcy and businesses need to adapt. The dog days of the dinner seminar are long gone and have been replaced with digital alternatives - that are definitely more cost-effective for you as an advisor.

Webinars are a great tool for taking your material and resources virtual in a way. It makes it easy for you as an advisor to get in front of potential leads while establishing yourself as a valuable resource that they actually want to trust with their money.

At Hyperchat Social, we have deep roots with the webinar game. Our founder and CEO, Ted Jenkin, grew his practice through various different marketing techniques - one of which was webinars. He saw he had a gift for coaching and presenting, saw an opportunity and he took advantage of it. Ted has booked hundreds of appointments with potential leads via webinar marketing.

Webinar marketing can be tricky, however. There are several factors to consider when planning the perfect webinar from the title to the call-to-action at the end of the presentation.

What do you need to do to plan and execute your first webinar? Keep reading and you will find out!

#1: Pick Your Format

As with anything, there are a lot of options to choose from when it comes to the angle you want to take your webinar. You can host a live Q&A with a colleague about a hot topic or you can conduct an interview with someone in your industry. The most common format for webinars we see, however, is the good old fashioned presentation. Presenting on a topic that you feel knowledgeable in is never a bad idea when it comes to webinars.

Some may shy away from presentations because it may seem like a lot of work to put together, but you can work smarter not harder when it comes to planning for your next webinar. We will dive into how to best source and plan your material in our next point.

#2: Plan Your Material

Picking a topic is obviously the first step to planning and executing your first webinar. How will you possibly find the time to layout a completely new presentation?! It may start to feel a little like high school. The good thing is that you probably already have enough material for the webinar - it just needs to be repurposed.

Think back to all of those old, worn-out, marketing materials that you have handed out or used over the years. Take the points from an old eBook, do a little updating, and use the main points as your presentation. Reformat an old blog into a fancy new PowerPoint (Pro-tip: Use Canva to create a bomb presentation with great graphics). That miscellaneous content you have lying around your office would be great material to work into your next webinar. You just have to get a little creative!

#3: Choose your platform

Choosing the platform you would like to run your webinar on just as important, if not more important, than the topic you present on. There are several different options when it comes to webinar platforms. All are pretty similar in some ways and very different in others. Some of the more popular programs include WebinarJam, GoToWebinar, and everyone's favorite quarantine app, Zoom!

We have experimented with different platforms in it all really just depends on what you are most comfortable using. Some platforms record the presentation for you, some do not (GoToWebinar for sure does this!). Some platforms email all of the registrants before the webinar starts. Some start the drip process a few days before the actual webinar.

Our advice is to start a couple of free trials with the different platforms and see which one you personally work with the best and go from there.

#4: Craft Your Title

As with anything with marketing, it is all about getting people to want to learn more. That's why the title of your webinar matters so much. The title of your webinar should entice people to want to register and look forward to the webinar.

Do you not, I repeat do not, use a title like Taxes in Retirement. While your webinar might be about taxes in retirement, you are going to want to jazz up the title a little bit. Instead, go with something like The 7 Secrets to Tackling Taxes in Retirement ­- doesn't that seem a bit more interesting? This title will help the webinar perform better than the more basic one.

#5: Promote Your Webinar

Now that you finally have all of your materials together and you have come up with a great title for your webinar, it is now time to promote the webinar. Setting up the webinar is only half the battle. You actually need people to attend the webinar for it to be successful.

In the past, mailers, flyers, and one simple email blast would have sufficed for your webinar promotion. Now that we live in the social digital age, digital advertising is where it is at. If you are only promoting your webinar the old-fashioned way, you are missing out on a huge market.

When it comes to marketing your webinar over social media, Facebook ads are the name of the game. Not only does Facebook allow you to build a custom audience of the people who you would ideally like to attend the webinar, but it also offers you a multitude of different objectives to do so. The two objectives to focus on when it comes to webinar marketing are the lead generation objective and the traffic objective.

Lead Generation

The lead generation objective allows you to capture valuable information from the user that is interested in attending your webinar in the format of a form-fill. The great thing about the lead generation objective is that you were able to capture the lead's information as soon as they fill out the lead form. From there, you would use an integration site to automatically register that lead for the webinar (Pro-tip: We use Zapier).

The BIG con with the lead generation objective is that often times the email that Facebook auto-fills the lead form out with is from the user's profile. It may not be the lead's preferred email address. This can lead to a lot of registrations, but fewer attendees.

Traffic

The traffic objective allows you to push web traffic to the registration page for the webinar. We have found that this objective produces a higher show rate among registrants. We will see a higher number of clicks than we do registrations. On the other hand, we have seen upwards of 50% show rate of those that do register.

Now all that's left is to give the webinar! Follow these guidelines and you are sure to have success. Do you have an upcoming webinar to plan? Click here to get a FREE consultation to see how we can help!