More and more trainers and educators are using webinars for customer acquisition. Accordingly, competition is growing quickly! In this article, you'll learn how online support provides a unique added value to your webinars, allowing you to successfully sell your online courses.
The wave of digitalization presents trainers and educators with new challenges: finding the right tool for online courses is just your first step. How do you find the right customers for your online offering? How do you convince them not only of your expertise but also of your tool?
The solution is known by blink.it colleague Claudia, who advises training experts daily on starting with online courses: “Convince customers not ABOUT your tool, but WITH your tool! A learning platform is not just a place for courses following the classic scheme: upload content, invite learning groups, issue certificates. A learning platform like blink.it can also be a perfect tool for customer acquisition, for example in conjunction with webinars!”
Basics: What is a “webinar”? In contrast to a live online training or an online seminar, a webinar is a purely marketing format: "In a webinar, the customer receives free information, and the instrument thus provides a good opportunity to attract attention from the target audience and increase the company's visibility. (Source)
Problem: Webinars do not highlight your offering
Many trainers are currently relying on webinars for customer acquisition. You are certainly familiar with a classic webinar. Such webinars often follow the following scheme:
Interested parties register via a form.
They receive an email with the access details.
You conduct the webinar, teasing your content and your tool.
Interested parties receive several emails afterwards with materials and offers from the webinar.
Webinars following this classic scheme are a classic, proven concept for your marketing. However, there is a problem: Today, it seems that everyone is offering free webinars! The offer is vast, competition is high, and the time and attention of potential customers (especially in the B2B sector) are very limited.
What you need is added value – a unique selling proposition to draw attention to yourself and successfully convince future customers of you and your online offering. With a learning platform, such as blink.it, you already have the perfect tool at hand.
Solution: Use your learning platform as webinar support
As a trainer offering online courses or online guidance, your main goal is of course: to sell courses! For this, you also need to convince future customers of the tool. The best way to do this is to focus on your way of working with the tool – even in acquisition webinars.
To do this, you build your webinar into a small course on your learning platform. This way, participants have the advantage of experiencing directly how you work and what effect online support has.
Example: This is what the connection between webinar and online course looks like with blink.it
This simple webinar companion course includes
a short introduction and greeting of the participants as a video
all information about the course and the webinar
the access data for your chosen webinar tool, here: Zoom.
the recording of the webinar
the answers to the questions asked during the webinar
a clear call-to-action for interested parties as a video
Benefits: Why should you connect webinars with online courses?
Your webinar is no longer a “standalone” offering!
Unlike a demo course for customer acquisition, which only offers static content, the webinar as a live event is the heart of the course. Thus, you do not offer “a webinar among many,” but a valuable overall package of platform insight, insight into the working method, and personal contact.The online course is your additional value argument!
Participants get everything for the webinar in this course: questions, recordings, information about the webinar, everything is bundled in one place. This makes the process easier for the participants and for you, and saves a lot of time (and the tedious search for the email with the registration data for the webinar in a full inbox…)Your future customers get to know your platform!
Interested parties do not sign up for a webinar via a form. Instead, they register on your learning platform for the course. Instead of showing your tool in the webinar, your interested parties can experience it live. A good tool excites your webinar participants even before the actual webinar. In the webinar itself, you can thus focus more on your content and didactics – and your participants are, when they become customers, already familiar with your platform!
Planning: How much time do you need to invest?
How much time the addition of your acquisition webinar with an online course takes depends on the tools chosen. The simplest and fastest option can be seen in the example above:
Creating such a small course on the blink.it platform takes a maximum of 30-60 minutes, including all content and videos. If you already have all content at hand, like a greeting and an offer video, you probably won’t need longer than 15 minutes.
Sales: How do you offer your webinar course?
This also depends on the tools you choose and your technical possibilities. You can embed the registration via a form on your website and import the generated registration list into your online course. Even easier is the distribution on well-known online marketplaces like digitstore24 or affilicon.
With blink.it, you can even directly connect your courses to these marketplaces. This means for you: Your participants are automatically registered as participants in your blink.it course after booking at digitstore or affilicon. Alternatively, you can also set your blink.it course so that anyone interested can register directly for the course if they have the link. This way, you can promote your overall package of webinar and course in a mailing or on social media.
Conclusion: “Convince customers not ABOUT your tool, but WITH the tool!”
Use this principle for your customer acquisition. By connecting classic webinars with online courses, you create real added value for your interested parties and stand out from the mass of webinar offerings. A good learning tool like blink.it supports you in all phases: in acquisition, in conducting your trainings, and in the long-term support of your customers.
