by Maulik Patel
Online marketing experts support webinars greatly. In the last few years this concept has gained steam. Marketers are making use of live broadcasts as a part of their smart digital marketing strategy, in fact, if you’re planning to promote something big, go for webinars. Or you can try seminars like we have at Management 3.0 where we conduct intimate question and answer sessions with like-minded people.
If you’re doing a webinar there’s one thing to consider. When you’re selling something at a smaller price point, are webinars still potent?
This question has perplexed the minds of the owners of SaaS companies for many years. It’s all because of the unique challenges they face.
What are the marketing challenges for SaaS companies?
#1: Figuring Out The Right Search Engine
The ARPA of almost all SaaS companies normally ranges from low to medium. When it comes to lead generation, it is an amalgamation of content marketing and inbound sales, as their budget is often low, they can’t afford pure sales. Inbound marketing is something, which is very easy and cheap but it takes a lot of time to get the desired results. However, as experts say, when you are dealing with a low ARPA SaaS business, you will should maintain your CAC at a lower rate. If you, by chance, opt for doing outbound sales, the cost of acquisition will dramatically increase.
#2: Scaling is Very Tough
To scale 1:1 demos is very hard for SaaS companies. After a certain level of experience, these platforms need to scale up their inbound sales team for the functioning of more demos. Basically, they have to come up with a large number of demos with the same sales rep in the same time-frame. They also have to look at increasing productivity and maintaining high converting 1:1s for important leads. Hence, the entire chapter becomes pretty tough for them.
#3: Smaller Sales Cycle
To qualify your leads for sales requires a significant amount of time based on the number of calls that you schedule and boosting campaigns that you’ve set up. The longer the sales cycles are, the higher the cost is of acquisition. Fortunately, webinars have somehow helped many organizations.
How can webinars be a perfect match for SaaS companies?
#1: Share Unique Information
The content that you will share through a webinar should be made useful, relevant, and unique. With that you can provide value to your audience. You can make your webinars into presentations and events that people don’t want to miss.
What type of exclusive information goes into a webinar?
- Behind-the-scenes tid bits of information regarding the ways in which your company uses tools.
- Concise and informative ‘how to series’, which discusses the right approach for doing a task related to SaaS.
- Brainstorming conversations with well-known industry experts
#2: Prove Your Authority
You might have launched a myriad of blogs, courses abd websites but, as they say, too much of anything is pretty confusing and detrimental. With so many things around, your prospective customers might not take you seriously. However, if you’re coming up with an effective webinar, it’s easy to showcase your expertise and establish authority with your viewers.
Experts like Tom Discipio believes that webinars are more engaging when compared to written content. According to him, the major difference between reading a book and being an attendee of a great webinar lies in one major aspect. In the latter, the interaction is more because you can hear, communicate, possibly even see the host who has organized the webinar. So, the overall communication is great. Before getting into a business relationship with your company, the prospects will certainly want to know who are the faces behind it and webinars make that more palpable in the world of digital marketing.
#3: Create Long-term Impact
Although a webinar runs for an hour or two, it’s content persists for a longer period of time. With the help of replays, your webinar content will be living in the minds of your audience for months and even years. That means you can be ensured about the longevity of what you’ve created. So avoid topics which don’t have a long shelf life. Another effective way to get the most out of your webinar replays is to play them in a series.
#4: Boost The Range Of Your Content
Create great slides, you can easily use them again for a Slideshare presentation, crafting a blog post, or sharing the same in your next email newsletter. Just like generating cornerstone content as discussed above, your SaaS can attain a long-term growth while reusing the contents.
So, these are the effective ways through which webinars can create a difference in the business of SaaS companies.
Photo: rawpixel (Unsplash)
