Webinars can enhance your image, help close sales, retain customers and build your network. They’re truly a vitamin for your wellness business!
Choose the right provider
As you’re selecting a provider, check reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra.
Avoid discount web-conferencing services. The top providers just aren’t that expensive, and the discounted services usually offer lousy technical support. You’ll be saving pennies now and buying problems later when you desperately need fast, easy-to-understand assistance to resolve a problem five minutes before your event starts.
Look for a provider who makes it easy to record your webinar and allow future site visitors to play it back on demand.
You’ll also want a provider that makes it easy for attendees to sign up, get event reminders, and get follow-up emails. Some providers offer these capabilities as part of their service. Others make it easy to integrate with your existing email platform, like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign
Now, let’s get started! These webinar strategies give you five ways to strengthen your wellness business:
1. Get publicity and establish yourself or your team as experts
The concept: Offer a complimentary webinar on a topic related to your niche. You’ll promptly enhance your professional image and reputation.
Why? This kind of webinar offers a wonderful opportunity to establish your wellness business as an expert in a given area. The audience at this kind of webinar immediately perceives the presenter as an authority in his or her field, with deep expertise. Don’t limit the invitation list to known leads and prospects. Submit it to online and offline listings of free events and let your local media know.
Examples: A club which caters to women might offer a presentation on “Myths & Misconceptions: Fitness After Fifty.” A healthy lifestyles business might offer a webinar on “Ten Lies About Healthy Eating”.
2. Develop leads and nurture potential customers
The concept: Offer webinars focused on customer success stories or case studies to accelerate your prospect’s buying decision.
Why? These topics reduce the prospect’s fear of making a bad decision. And it’s much more efficient than one-on-one selling applied inappropriately early in the sales process.
Examples: Invite several of your most successful and enthusiastic customers to participate in an online panel discussion on a topic like “Tips, Tricks and Traps: Five ABC Gym Members Share Their Lifestyle Secrets”. You can bet that they’ll sing the praises of your gym – and it’ll be sincere and unscripted.
3. Retain customers by extending special benefits to members
The concept: A free, invitation-only webinar offered as a member exclusive helps your customers feel appreciated by your business.
Why? Surprising customers with lagniappe (a Creole word meaning “a little something extra”) is a wonderful way to help your customers feel that they’re getting extra value from your wellness business – more than they paid for.
Examples: A corporate wellness provider might invite its corporate clients to a webinar featuring the human resources vice-president from a well-known company discussing “Lessons Learned: How Company ABC Took Wellness To The Next Level.”
A personal training studio in the Rockies might invite a local snowboarder to share war stories in a webinar on “Airdog: The View From Above.”
4. Enhance revenue by selling information products
The concept: Deliver a live webinar. Record it. Sell the recording.
Why? You can usually offer a recorded webinar at a lower price than the original live event because your potential market is so much larger. Since customers can watch it when they please, selling the recorded version makes it available even to people with crazy schedules. And it gives your business an easy path to expand its reach by selling products online.
Here’s the catch: webinars sold as products need to be carefully-structured around specific deliverables and results. You can’t ramble about the benefits, or waste time talking on and on about obesity statistics. When people have paid for your guidance, make sure they immediately feel that they’re getting value.
You also need to make sure you’ve planned in advance for getting and responding to questions related to the material. A webinar alone usually doesn’t meet client needs.
Examples: A nutrition coach could offer a webinar on how to makeover your favorite family dishes, with principles that can be applied to all kinds of recipes.
Your personal training director might offer a webinar on how to prepare for bodybuilding competitions.
5. Strengthen your network by creating opportunities for peers
The concept: Invite other professionals in your network to present at webinars hosted by your business.
Why? Successful businesspeople value the opportunity to increase their name recognition, enhance their brand and polish their image and reputation.
Examples: If your health club targets folks in their twenties, invite a local realtor to present a topic like “The Big Move: Surviving Your First House.” You’ll help create a sense of community among your members, and you’ll position your club as a business that understands its customers.
Your yoga studio might invite an acupuncturist or osteopathic physician to give a talk on “Fibromyalgia: Drug-Free Answers.”
The bottom line: successful webinars start with a clear strategy designed to accomplish a specific business objective.
