While you’re familiar with webinars and may have even hosted a few yourself, you may not be aware of the importance of doing a different type depending on the stage your client is currently in. Each type of webinar serves a different purpose and can help you achieve a variety of goals. Now it’s time to see what type of webinar you should do in every stage of the customer journey.
Type of webinar you should do in every stage of the customer journey
Awareness Stage
This first stage increases brand awareness and attracts people who are unaware of your company or the solutions you offer. The goal is to initiate meaningful relationships with the right people.
There are multiple webinar formats you can employ at the attract stage. Let’s see them:
Educational webinars
Educational lead nurturing webinars cultivate your relationship with your audience and move them down the funnel. Provide educational content that demonstrates your company’s expertise, unique approach and value proposition.
When running an educational webinar, it’s unnecessary to focus on your product or your platform. On the contrary, since it’s an awareness-creating event, you should tackle topics of interest to your webinar audience.
Interviews with industry leaders
Besides creating awareness as a whole, this type of webinar will help you establish your credibility as a thought leader in the industry. The best thing about this type of webinar generates exclusive content while positioning yourself as a knowledge gatekeeper.
You’ll have the opportunity to engage with industry leaders, get access to their audiences, and cross-promote your event.
Panel discussions
Panel discussion webinars help you increase brand awareness by accessing the audiences of your guest speakers. The difference between interviews and panel discussions is that a panel has multiple speakers. In an interview, one expert tackles a subject using the Q&A format.
On the other hand, the panel discussions have several industry stakeholders who talk about a specific subject together. Conversations are less restricted and may lead to great ideas, unexpected insights, and fascinating debates.
Consideration Stage
The consideration stage is where your potential buyers consider your product or services as a possible option to solve their issue.
Therefore, the goal is to create content that aids in these potential buyers considering your product or service as the best choice to solve their problem.
Case study webinars
To nurture leads, you need to utilize webinar types that will inform the audience of the usefulness of your products or services. Showcase one, two or more customers and how they used your product to overcome a challenge and the results they saw.
Report summary webinars
If you have published a report or whitepaper about a widespread problem in the industry, a trend, etc., create a webinar that highlights the key findings and how your product or offer fits into the solution.
Decision Stage
The decision stage is a point in time in a buyer’s journey when the buyer has decided that they are going to buy something, but they have not yet made a purchasing decision about which product to buy through which vendor.
So you’ll need to present your company’s products and services as the best option.
Product comparison webinars
With these webinars, you’ll have the chance to showcase more of your products and compare them to one another.
Or you can have a similar product from another brand or a generic brand and do a side-by-side comparison of the two. This will help your audience make a decision and push them towards being your customer.
Product demo webinars
Demo webinars can also help surface highly motivated buyers. In fact, GoAnimate found that prospects who attended a live demo webinar were 150% more likely to purchase than those who didn’t.
Retention Stage
Once the deal is closed, you want to keep your clients happy and make sure they’re always in the loop.
That’s why in this stage these are the best type of webinars to make:
Customer onboarding webinars
Geared towards getting your customers started with your platform, customer onboarding is a good way to gain people’s trust and make sure they achieve positive results by using your product.
You can give your customers tips and tricks, or secrets and essentials when it comes to using the products they have availed from you. These webinars should be simple, accessible, and run consistently.
Product launch webinars
A great way to satisfy your customers is by keeping them up to date with product fixes, improvements, and new features. This webinar format will help you connect with your existing prospects and communicate your commitment to innovating or improving your brand.
Besides, with product updates webinars you can develop meaningful conversations and present what’s new and unique about your product.
Advocacy Stage
This is the last stage of the customer journey and one of the hardest ones to achieve: to turn your customer into an active advocate for your brand so they generate the most powerful kind of marketing there is: word-of-mouth
For this stage we are not going to recommend you to make a specific type of webinar, but to put them all on-demand:
On-demand webinars
You can make all the webinars we have mentioned on-demand. This way, you can drive ongoing value from webinars you’ve already made. For example, instead of making training webinars over and over, you can give customers access to have them on-demand whenever they need a refresher.
And why putting all the webinars on-demand is necessary for the advocacy stage you may ask? The answer’s simple: because this way your customers can send them to acquaintances in order to advocate for your product, showing them it’s great in an easy way.
If you want to know more about what type of webinar you should do in every stage of the customer journey or about creating them with Watchity, send us a message or request a demo.