How to Use Webinars to Create Great Relationships with Prospects and Customers

How to Use Webinars to Create Great Relationships with Prospects and Customers:

You may have noticed that a lot of businesses are using webinars to generate leads.
Do webinars work for that? Absolutely — they’re fantastic at it, as a matter of fact.
But you might not know that you can also use webinars to build great relationships with customers and prospects.
The fact is, webinars can be used in all kinds of different ways, depending on your business goals. The more creatively you approach them, the better business results you’re going to see.
Today I want to take a look at two different webinar models that can help you form a deeper connection with your prospects, or with your existing customers.
First, in case you’re not completely familiar, let’s get the 30-second definition.
A webinar is a web-based event, usually live, that incorporates audio and visual elements as well as attendee interaction. GoToWebinar is one of the most popular providers, and it’s the one that Copyblogger uses, as well as what I use in my own business.
Webinars are a great customer communication tool because they bring together three powerful elements — customer or prospect interaction, audio, and visual elements including video.
Two of my favorite uses of webinars for customer engagement are Q&A sessions and group coaching. Let’s see how both of those work.

How to build your business with ultra-useful Q&A sessions

My recommendation is to host publicly available Q&A webinars throughout the year, which allows you to “give back” to your market while also gaining valuable intelligence.
Pay close attention to recurring questions or themes in your webinars, since these are the signs your market may be ready for a new product.
They’re simple to do — just pick a topic and host an hour-long webinar where attendees can ask anything they’d like to learn more about or are struggling with.
Your job is to look for those repeating themes, because that’s what your market is hungry for.
If you’d like to go the extra mile, you can also record the Q&A session and post it on your blog or mail it to your list. (These recordings make great bonuses for your email newsletter subscribers.)
You can usually bet that the questions you get in your Q&A sessions are ones that lots of other customers have as well. When you solve real customer problems, you put yourself at the head of the pack in your niche.

How to deliver insane value with webinar-based group coaching

This is my favorite webinar model, because it gives me the opportunity to take a large topic and break it down into smaller pieces, usually in weekly sessions, and form a deeper connection with my clients.
The crew over at Teaching Sells does this as well, offering live group coaching sessions as a bonus that helps their customers put all of the valuable advice in the course into practice.
Their coaching webinars make their primary product considerably more valuable — and that’s the model you should adopt for your own programs.
Here’s what you should focus on when you’re putting together a group coaching program:

• An outline for you to follow, which will highlight what you’ll be teaching in each module and in what order. Don’t just wing it — be prepared.
• A step-by-step process of what your coaching students must do in order to accomplish the results you’ve promised.
• A way to benchmark progress. There should be a way for you and your students to continue measuring their progress once the coaching series ends. This will also encourage them to keep working, since there’s a result to look forward to.
• Support. Do you plan on offering support or some sort of follow up once the coaching series is complete? This is something you’ll need to decide beforehand.

The great thing about group coaching for customers is that people are motivated to show up and do the work, since they’ve got skin in the game (namely, the money they’ve paid you). You can use your coaching sessions as a standalone product, or as a bonus to any other product you sell.
You can also further that motivation by publicly calling on people to share their progress at the beginning of each coaching session. This kind of public accountability can be even more motivating than money at times … since no one wants to look foolish for not following through.
Always remember that no matter how big your list may grow, each number still represents a unique human being with their own fears, desires, and dreams.
It’s your job to stay connected to what those are and how you can best serve them. Once you get a handle on that, everything else will begin to fall into place.
How about you? What are some great ways you’ve seen webinars used? What do you not like when you see or hear it in a webinar?
Let us know in the comments below.
About the Author: Lewis Howes is the author of The Ultimate Webinar Marketing Guide and an avid salsa dancer. Connect with Lewis on his website here.
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