Webinars are a powerful tool that can be used to help strengthen relationships with clients as well as position you as the leader in your market. In today’s always on, instant access, age of distraction, the importance of building and maintaining strong relationships with clients is of utmost importance.
According to research by Peppers, the Peppers & Rogers Group, 60% of clients will leave a company if they sense indifference. In other words, they believe you no-longer care about them.
To make matters worse, defecting clients probably won’t tell you there is a problem before abandoning ship. In fact when asked, some 80% describe themselves as “satisfied” or “very satisfied” just before leaving, therefore the occasional survey or poll is not enough.
Relationships connect buyers with the people in your company, not your product or price. Read that last sentence again, people are very in tune with how you treat them. Sure, product features and price matter, but I am assuming you have excellent products and competitive pricing.
Sage marketing advice says;
“People buy from people they know like and trust.”
The quality of the relationships you form with your clients is what matters most. One of my clients has staff dedicated to contacting clients each year to remind them it is time to prepare for this year’s order. They have clients who have been repeat buyers for 27 years! Those clients are loyal and stay for a long time because someone bothered to take the time to reach out to them — reliably and consistently.
Over the years, they have built solid relationships simply by contacting their clients once a year and being helpful. Even though they have earned strong client loyalty by paying attention them, I still advise them they should do more to nurture and strengthen those relationships, and they should look for new ways to contact them more frequently, especially with new clients.
So How Do You Keep and Attract New Clients?
Pay attention to them! There are many ways to pay attention, from sending handwritten thank-you letters, cards, gifts, phone calls, reminders and visits. One very effective solution is to host webinars. Not only are webinars a great way to connect with clients on a personal level, but webinars can be also be used to generate new business, create new products, educate clients and position you as an expert!
Here are Seven Ways to Use Webinars to Connect with Clients
- Ask for feedback – when you ask your clients for their opinion you are letting them know that you value their opinion.
- Answer common questions – look in your inbox for commonly asked questions and create a webinar that answers those questions.
- Educate – does you product require special preparation or learned skills get the best results? Webinar are excellent ways to demonstrate “how-to” do something. Education webinars shows them they can do it too!
- Create new products –webinars can be recorded and packaged into a DVD, or audio CD and can be transcribed and turned into a product you can sell or use as a lead generator
- How to solve problems with your product – to expand on the idea of teaching how to use your product, use webinars to demonstrate how your product solves a problem.
- Client meetings – Sophisticated screen sharing and teleconferencing technology makes it easy to use webinars to meet with key clients “face-to-face” making travel unnecessary.
- Guided tour – do you sell software or some other technology or process that requires demonstration? Use webinars to give demos and tours. Do you have a brick-and-mortar business? Conduct a facility tour. You can show a slide show with photos of your building and staff, or PowerPoint presentations. You can also show virtually anything you can display on your computer screen during a webinar.
What is a Webinar and Why Should You Use Them?
Simply put, a webinar is a seminar conducted over the Internet. Webinars are interactive in that the host can share his or her desktop with attendees. Attendees interact with the host via telephone or with a microphone connected to their computers. Webinar participants ask questions via text like chat windows and the host responds, usually in real-time. This personal interaction is one of the key advantages webinars can bring to your marketing arsenal, and you can host a webinar without leaving your office!
A webinar also allows participants to attend a seminar without leaving their home or office, therefore saving them time and money as well. This makes webinars very accessible and convenient.
In addition, since webinars offer audio, video, print and personal interaction, they satisfy wide variety of learning modes as well as relational needs. Some people prefer to consume audio, others video, printed material and still other prefer a combination.
Readily available software and services can help you easily transform Webinars into other media. Transcription services transcribe the narrative portion of the programming into printed material and software can isolate and record just the audio portion into convenient MP3 format for listening off line.
The ease of access and media flexibility makes webinars the platform of choice for smart marketers looking to create products in an array of forms. Webinars allow you to record once then transform and deliver the content created in a single day repeatedly in a variety of media.
Now you can see why webinars are a good choice for delivering content and connecting with clients…
There are many more ways to use webinars to connect with clients and attract new clients too. Here are three ways you can put these ideas into action right away so you can start using webinars to build better relationships with clients.
- Ask your clients what they would like to learn. Run a survey, check your inbox and identify frequently asked questions you are already answering (TIP: Keep it simple)
- Put together the top 2 or 3 questions and answer them in a PowerPoint presentation.
- Plan to host a webinar using a free webinar service such as AnyMeeting.com or signup for a free trial with GoToMeeting.com.
