When selling your business, automation and efficiency are buyer magnets.
One easy and powerful method to trim the fat from your operations is through using automated webinars.
Think of all the presentations you give over and over again for the health and growth of your business: sales demos, customer onboarding, and top-of-funnel lead gen (to name a few). In a virtual world, you probably deliver these presentations live over Zoom or something similar.
While these activities help grow your business, the drain on time and resources make them an unsustainable strategy in the long run. And hiring an army of salespeople, customer success reps, and specialized marketers to scale your efforts is inefficient and costly.
This is where automated webinars come in.
In this post, we’ll explore the growing popularity of automated webinars, their significance in streamlining business operations, and how they can make your business attractive to buyers.
How Automated Webinars Make a Business Attractive to Buyers
In today’s competitive business landscape, buyers increasingly prioritize organizations committed to automation, efficiency, and standardized processes. Why? It gives buyers more scope to increase the value of your business and earn a return on their investment.
By embracing automated webinars, you can streamline essential tasks like training, customer support, sales presentations, and video content marketing. Automated webinars are a flexible and convenient way to deliver high-value video content at scale to a wide audience.
Unlike live webinars that require host and attendees to join at a specific time, automated webinars are pre-recorded and accessible at any time that suits the viewer. As a result, your attendees can engage with the webinar content whenever they like, dramatically increasing attendance rates.
You needn’t sacrifice a superior attendee experience to scale your webinar strategy, either. By incorporating interactive elements such as live or asynchronous chat, quizzes, polls, surveys, links to additional resources, and more, participants can engage with the material.
Imagine, for example, going from two to four customer onboarding webinars a month to over a hundred, but without losing a personal touch.
Or educating leads so they can self-qualify before speaking to your sales team, ensuring they only speak to people who’re ready to buy. Imagine reaping the benefit of a great marketing webinar over months and months rather than as a one-time live event.
Buyers know the value of automation. The more work you automate, the easier your business is to run and manage, giving buyers more time to focus on growth. They don’t want to spend months streamlining your processes – they want to earn a return as soon as possible.
Automated webinars demonstrate your ability to operate at scale without compromising quality or customer experience – an irresistible quality for all buyers.
Three Ways to Use Automated Webinars That Demonstrate Your Commitment to Efficiency and Scalability
Let’s look at three main use cases where automated webinars can help make a business attractive to buyers: sales demos, customer onboarding, and content marketing.
1. Sales Demos
On-demand webinars offer significant advantages when it comes to automating sales demos. Traditional live demos require the coordination of schedules between sales representatives and potential customers, leading to potential delays and missed opportunities. Sometimes sales teams deliver a lengthy pitch to a few attendees only to discover they aren’t ready for the product or service.
By pre-recording your sales demo and automating its delivery, you eliminate scheduling conflicts and allow potential customers to watch the demo at their convenience. You can also increase attendance, engagement, and conversion rates by reaching customers when they want to buy.
As potential buyers evaluate your business, here are the benefits they will see from you automating your sales demos:
- Scalability and cost-cutting: Automated webinars allow presenting to unlimited potential customers simultaneously, freeing up sales teams to close deals and ultimately increasing your bottom line.
- Flexibility and convenience: On-demand viewing enables potential customers to watch a sales demo at their convenience, reaching a broader audience across different time zones and busy schedules.
- Lead generation and qualification: Automated webinars capture leads through the webinar registration form. The webinar itself is a method of pre-qualification. Buyers can educate themselves and get their questions answered, while hosts can determine the prospects’ readiness through their responses to interactions (with polls, questions, attendee behavior, etcetera) and tailor (and automate) follow-up appropriately.
- Analytics and optimization: Detailed analytics offer valuable insights into attendee behavior, engagement levels, and drop-off points, allowing you to continuously improve your sales demo content and overall strategy.
- Selling your business: Automated webinars help showcase your business’s value and growth potential to buyers, providing a comprehensive overview they can access at their convenience. Showing that you use automation in your selling process additionally highlights how you operate a lean business.
“Automated webinars allow buyers to be in control as opposed to attending a webinar on a specific day at a specific time that wasn’t really convenient for them. It basically doubled our sales team by allowing demos to happen 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. So in comparison, our old demos were running between a 40 percent and 50 percent attendance rate, which you know, is pretty standard. With automated webinars, we’re running between 80 percent and 90 percent with multiple weeks of 100 percent attendance.”
Tom Foster, Director of Sales, The Receptionist
Read The Receptionist case study →
2. Customer Onboarding
In addition to sales demos, automated webinars offer significant advantages when it comes to customer onboarding.
The onboarding process sets the stage for a positive and long-lasting relationship between your business and its new customers. The challenge is how do you offer a high-touch onboarding experience at scale.
Here is how automated webinars make that possible:
- Standardized onboarding experience: Automated webinars ensure you deliver a consistent and standardized onboarding process to all new customers.
- Direct communication: Live and asynchronous chat in your automated webinars ensures new customers feel valued and heard. You can answer their questions without having to be there around the clock.
- Self-paced learning and full flexibility: Customers engage with on-demand webinars at their own pace and convenience. They never have to wait a week or month for the next session, which is great customer service.
- Scalability and efficiency: Automated webinars enable businesses to efficiently scale their onboarding efforts, accommodating multiple customers simultaneously without compromising quality. A CS team of one can easily stay on top of hundreds of hours of webinar sessions in a month.
- Personalization and interactivity: Through live chat, interactions, quizzes, surveys, and knowledge checks, you can create interactive and personalized experiences that engage customers and gather valuable insights.
“On live webinars, it’s hard to answer every question before the session ends. Now we run over 100 automated webinars a month and only spend an hour a day answering every chat message.”
Anett Vandor, Customer Engagement, Later
3. Content Marketing
Webinars are pivotal in content marketing, enabling businesses to grow their audience and drive demand. However, producing and delivering live webinars is time-consuming and resource-intensive.
By automating your marketing webinars, you can extend their value over time by making them evergreen.
Here is how automated webinars can benefit your video content marketing strategy:
- Efficient content production: Each time you create a new automated webinar, you can systematically promote it forever. The time and effort you put into your webinar strategy can deliver dividends long after each webinar is first recorded.
- Amplifying content reach: Provided you’re strategic about your content, your automated webinars can be evergreen, meaning they stay relevant over time. Because of this, you can then create a host of supplemental content, such as blog posts, podcasts, how-to guides, and YouTube video clips to drive new registrants to your webinar. You can even fold these efforts into your organic search strategy by optimizing your webinar landing pages or accompanying blog posts for high-intent keywords.
- Repurposing of existing content: If you publish recording of past webinars as videos, breathe new life into them through webinar automation, which can significantly increase watch time and engagement.
- Broader reach and lead generation: Automated webinars can reach a much larger audience because they’re infinitely scalable. By requiring registration, webinars are effective lead-generation tools, capturing valuable contact information for further communication and relationship nurturing.
- Analytics-driven optimization: Automated webinars provide robust analytics capabilities, enabling you to measure and analyze various success metrics. These insights allow you to evaluate attendee behavior, engagement levels, and conversion rates. By analyzing this data, you can refine your content, optimize your marketing strategies, and deliver more impactful webinars.
“Our attendance rates went from an average of 30 percent with Zoom to an average of 70 percent with automated webinars. Meeting people where they are by making our content on-demand has been a complete game changer for us. I couldn’t ask for a better way to save over 500 hours from May to the end of the year. That was just for one product line!”
Dusty Jostes, Product Marketing Manager, FlexMLS (FBS)
Automated webinars may be just the thing your business needs to automate, cut costs, and attract buyers. With seamless efficiency and well-documented processes, they streamline operations and make your business irresistible to potential acquirers.
If you’d like to get started with automated webinars, check out eWebinar’s on-demand sales demo to learn more.
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