live webinars are the best medium for inbound leads

The Coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing lockdown has really accelerated the trend
towards webinars. This is especially true in the field of working professionals who have
started using webinars in a major way to improve skill development and learning. Webinars
are a new, exciting and productive way to engage with users and audiences and give some
level of personalization. If you wish to get started with webinars you should begin
immediately. Given the likeliness of people turning into webinars, this is the perfect
opportunity to get started.

Anyone wanting to generate high-quality new client inquiries faces a bewildering range of options.

Every marketing program, course, seminar, workshop, book, podcast, blog, or website seems to be suggesting completely different methods for generating new client inquiries.

I’m publishing an Inbound Marketing Book where I explore these issues and here are some thoughts from that book.

So who’s right? And is it wrong?

If you don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong, then it’s very likely that if you haven’t already, you’ll end up wasting tens of thousands of dollars trying to figure this all out.

Allow me to save you the 11 years and over a hundred thousand dollars that I wasted figuring this out.

Facebook Adverts

When I started running these back in 2008, we were able to secure new email subscribers for around about a dollar per opt. These days even expert marketers are watching their costs go up from eight dollars to $10-$12 and more.

This massive increase in the cost of acquisition is due to the fact that every man and his dog. So to speak is preaching the virtues of the online funnel. The theory is terrific: set on your beach for half an hour every day with your laptop, make a few clicks, and then let all the money wash over your beautiful body.

Sad to say but Facebook advertisements are not only incredibly expensive these days. But also generate very poor quality leads simply because the purpose of anyone who has subscribed for your lead magnet, promoted via a Facebook advertisement, was never going out of their way to look for your offer. They stumbled across it. They had no serious intent to buy, at least it’s unlikely that they had.

Podcast a List

Most people confuse contact detail with a lead. The former is almost entirely worthless, whereas the latter is someone who has made an inquiry having moved through various quality-control filters. More on that soon. But in the meantime, let’s say you are targeting business owners, and you bought a list of a hundred thousand business owners, including our email addresses.

Good luck having your email gets through the spam filters! And that’s just for starters. If you have no pre-existing relationship with those contact, your email is unlikely to even get a quick glance. And even if your email gets through the spam folder and also if it is read, you still completely de-positioned your brand they reaching out to people who have expressed exactly 0 interest in what you offer.

Social Media

Social media is great for keeping people’s brands in its market place’s brains until the latter is ready to buy. Brand, brain, buy. But for the latter to happen, you have to give people a call to action.

Social media is not the appropriate format to ask people to reach out to you and make an enquiry about your service or product. That’s why it’s called “social” media.

Referrals

Everyone loves it when a client is kind enough to refer to one of their colleagues. I read many survey results where respondents routinely report that 70% of their new business comes from referrals, which is terrific when it happens. The problem is that is random. Referrals should be regarded as cream on the cake, not the cake itself. Every business needs something that’s more predictable, and that can be turned on like a tap. Not left to chance.

Business networking

As a marketer of 39 years, one of the little-known truths that I’ve observed is that most marketing methods and efforts fail for one simple reason, which is that the person doing the marketing doesn’t want to do the marketing. By and large, people wake up in the morning and spend the day doing things that they prefer to do. The idea is that they don’t want to do tend to get put off or to get started the often not finished.

What I’m suggesting here, therefore, is that if you love business networking meetings, then you should go to business networking meetings, and yes, you’re probably pick up one to clients from that. But if you don’t like going to business networking meetings, then don’t because you won’t do a consistently.

And if you’re one of the lovers of business networking meetings, I say good for you. But please appreciate that it’s very easy to fish those little ponds dry very quickly. You need something that is gonna be more sustainable and, again, more predictable.

Webinars

Running alive webinar to demonstrate how your clients work with your service is the very best medium to generate high-quality, inbound, new client enquiries.

Of fundamental importance is that webinars allow you to establish credibility with your target market. It’s the commercial equivalent of asking them for a first date. Instead of buying a list and spamming people, or giving them an offer cold through pay per click advertising. You simply invite them to attend a live demonstration of how you work with your clients.

It’s also a very direct, transparent, and honest value proposition. It’s not a “training webinars.” It’s a demonstration of how you work with your clients.

The strategy will get you fewer registrants but of a much higher quality. At the end of it, you simply invite people to reach out to you via your online booking link to have a conversation about working together.

And it gets even better.

If you think about the world’s oldest most proven effective marketing method in the world, it’s speaking to groups of people. And if you have any doubt about that just ask yourself how many clients Christ border and Mohammed have because the answer is billions. And all those three guys did was speak to groups people.

Now, if you think about the most modern marketing medium in the world, which is the Internet, and you then combine the two concepts of speaking to groups of people over the Internet, what you end up with our webinars.