Webinars have become a great way of promoting your brand and generating leads and conversions. This is perhaps the reason why marketers around the world have started using different types of webinars to promote their businesses.
But why are webinars so effective?
One of the main reasons that webinars are helpful for brands is that they’re very informative and highly targeted.
Only those who are genuinely interested in webinars usually attend them and due to their interactive nature, they’re more engaging and informative too.
But that’s not all.
Webinars are also great because you can incorporate a variety of visuals into them and present your information in a better way.
Now that you know why webinars are effective, let’s try to understand the different types of webinars that you can use for your business.
Each type of webinar serves a different purpose and can help you achieve a variety of goals.
Let’s dive right in.
Different Types of Webinars You Can Host
Here are the most popular webinar types that you can host to grow your brand and your influence.
1. eLearning Webinars
One of the most common and popular types of webinars is the eLearning webinar. These webinars are essentially meant to cover educational topics.
They are thus popular among influencers or educational professionals who want to go the eLearning route.
The best part about eLearning webinars is that you can have both live and on-demand webinars. That way, your students can learn from the webinars whenever they want.
What makes these webinars popular?
The eLearning industry is exploding. In fact, it’s expected to become a $315 billion industry by 2025. This means that there’s tremendous scope if you’re planning on hosting educational webinars.
What else?
These sorts of webinars can be prepared for anyone, including a corporate audience. As a result, you can expect many takers in the form of companies that are looking to upskill their employees.
For the creators, these webinars are a great way to generate passive income. You can charge a fee for every person who attends your webinar or purchases your online course filled with on-demand educational webinars.
As for the learners, these eLearning webinars are a great way to upskill.
For companies, it’s a great way to help their employees skill up without spending too much time or money.
Why is it so?
Because, on average, employees have only about 1% of the workweek to upskill themselves. Elearning webinars are typically short ones that can easily fit into this duration.
If not for these webinars, the companies would need to spend money on expensive events and training sessions that may involve some traveling too.
As a result, the eLearning webinars turn out to be cheaper for corporations as well.
2. Employee Training Webinars
Webinars have become commonplace among enterprises as well. In fact, about 27% of companies average at least one webinar per week.
Image via Kaltura
But the more striking statistic is that about 75% of companies in the survey stated that they use webinars for training their employees.
So why are webinars finding so much acceptance among companies?
One of the main reasons is that 98% of people respondents said that videos are valuable for training employees faster and better.
But that’s not all.
One of the biggest advantages of webinars is that when companies need to train geographically-dispersed employees, educational webinars are a great way to go about it.
This is because your employees don’t need to travel for the training and can instead attend from any location.
Lastly, hosting webinars also empowers employees to share their knowledge, according to 93% of respondents in the same study.
How is this webinar format different from the eLearning one?
The major difference between the employee training and eLearning webinar formats is that the former is meant only for the employees of a company while the latter may be accessible by outsiders.
What else?
Employee training webinars tend to be more specific and might deal with a particular topic, unlike eLearning webinars that are meant for a slightly broader audience.
3. Thought Leadership Webinars
Webinars are also a great way to establish yourself as a thought leader in any industry. This webinar type provides you with a platform to showcase your skills and abilities to your target audience.
But that’s not all.
These types of webinars can help you:
- Establish yourself as a leader in the industry
- Generate high-quality, targeted leads (new audience)
- Create new connections
What are these types of webinars all about?
Typically, thought leadership webinars cover everything related to your industry, including the latest trends and developments.
The best part about these webinars is that you can create them for beginner, intermediate, and advanced audiences.
But how can they help you with lead generation?
Your webinar audience is essentially cold leads for your business. You can nudge them to purchase your products or services during the webinar.
Alternatively, you can conduct lead nurturing webinars to move your leads further into your sales funnel and get them to become your customers.
4. Product Demonstration Webinars
When you’re launching a new product or service, it’s crucial to promote it to generate buzz around it.
And one of the best ways of going about it is through a product demo webinar.
But why webinars?
Because webinars tend to be long and engaging. As a result, you’ll have enough time to not only introduce your product but also explain all of its features in detail.
In fact, these types of webinars provide you with the opportunity to show your audience why your product or service is the solution to all their problems.
What’s more?
They also give you the chance to make a good first impression and differentiate your product or service from those of your competitors.
And that’s not all.
The interactive nature of live webinars also makes them better than product demo videos. This is because your audience can ask questions related to your products or services.
These pressing questions can help you convince your audience to purchase from you as well.
User experience is one of the most important aspects that you need to concentrate on when you develop a product or service.
Through product demonstration webinars, you can showcase how your product is designed keeping your audience in mind to ensure a smooth and seamless experience for them.
5. Lead Nurturing Webinars
Once you’ve leveraged your webinars to generate leads for your business, you need to ensure that you nurture those leads to push them further down into your funnel.
And guess what?
Webinars can help you with the lead nurturing process as well. These types of webinars are specifically created to engage your leads.
As a result, you should present high-level information here as your leads already know what your brand is all about.
You need to present educational content about your product or service that should showcase your company’s expertise in the field.
What else?
It should also demonstrate your unique value proposition (UVP) and the approach you take to solving their problems.
Remember that these lead nurturing webinars shouldn’t be confused with sales pitches and should be separate in your marketing strategies.
Instead, try to think of them as educational webinars where you can dive into a particular problem and show how to solve it.
The end goal of these webinar formats is to build brand trust among your leads so that they’re convinced to buy from you.
Here are some of the various webinar types you can conduct when it comes to lead nurturing webinars:
- Case Studies: One of the best ways to show why your product or service is great is through case study webinars. In these types of webinars, you should demonstrate how your customers used your product or service to achieve their goals.
The idea is to give your leads proof about how well your product or service works.
- Research Summary: If you’ve conducted some research in your industry, a research webinar is a great opportunity for you to share the results with your leads.
When you share such valuable information with your leads, they’ll start seeing your brand as an authority figure in the industry and might be more inclined to buy from you.
- Live Workshop: One of the best ways of showing how your product or service is helpful for your audience is through a live workshop. During the webinar, you can ask your attendees to submit their problems to you.
Then, use the webinar as a platform to show how your product or service can solve these problems. This proof can nudge them to purchase from you.
6. Customer Onboarding Webinars
The customer onboarding process is one of the most important steps in the brand-customer relationship.
Why, you might ask?
Because this is the first interaction that the customer has with your brand after they purchase your product or service.
This is the very interaction that sets the tone for the rest of the relationship. So, it’s crucial for you to get your customer onboarding process right.
While live chat support or a phone call might be a good idea, nothing beats a webinar when it comes to customer onboarding.
But why?
Because webinars give you the opportunity to explain your product or service in detail with both audio and video.
As a result, you’ll be able to give a detailed overview of how to use your product or service with ease.
At the same time, your customers can ask all of their questions during the webinar so you can answer them in real-time.
Such webinar formats can make a big difference to the overall customer experience and are a must-have part of successful marketing strategies.
7. New Feature Webinars
Every once in a while, you may launch a new feature for your product or service. While it’s great to write a blog post or create a video related to it, a webinar can also work wonders for you.
But why?
Typically, a webinar is longer and through it, you can explain all the latest developments in your product with ease. You can also elaborate on the features through tutorials.
These types of webinars can be both live and on-demand as well.
So, when the new feature is launched, you can have a live session where you can take your customers through the new features.
During this webinar, they can ask all their questions in real-time too.
You can then create an on-demand webinar using FLOW to make it easy for other customers to understand the new features whenever they want to.
These webinar formats are especially helpful when the new features are opt-in ones, which would require your customers to pay extra.
By explaining them well through the webinars, you may be able to generate more sales.
8. Corporate Communication Webinars
Webinars find applications in corporate communications too. These types of webinars aren’t used to market your product or service but are instead used by businesses to communicate with their employees.
These webinar formats tend to be very helpful for companies that have a globally distributed workforce. They enable the companies to engage with their remote employees with ease.
Whenever there’s an important event, you can broadcast it live to your employees around the globe and get them involved.
What’s more, you ask?
These types of webinars can also be used to obtain feedback from your employees. You can also answer some of their questions.
9. On-Demand Webinars
One of the biggest disadvantages of live webinars is that you may not be able to get your entire audience to attend it.
This is because they may have time constraints.
But that’s not all.
Live webinars are usually one-time events. So, your audience may not get to refer to it again.
In such a situation, on-demand webinars are a great option. They can simulate the live webinar experience whenever your audience wants to see them.
This means that you’ll be able to reach a wider audience because they can attend your webinar whenever they want to, on-demand.
You can use FLOW to create such on-demand webinars. Our Autoflow feature lets you simulate the live webinar experience by combining polling interactions and live presentations with pre-recorded content.
Image via FLOW
All you have to do is create content blocks and automate them to get your webinar ready.
10. Panelist Discussion Webinars
Panelist discussion is yet another webinar type that you can host. As the name suggests, during these webinars, you can have a panel of industry experts discuss a particular topic related to your industry.
These discussions typically have a moderator as well. The idea here is to showcase your business as one that hosts such informative events regularly.
What’s more, you ask?
You could also have a short Q&A session at the end of the panel discussion during which your audience can interact with the panelists in real-time.
Hosting such sessions can help you reach an audience that’s interested in your industry. As a result, you’ll have highly targeted leads that look up to your business as an authoritative source of information.
11. Branding Webinars
Finally, webinars can be great for building brand awareness and you can do this through branding webinars.
These webinars are hosted with the primary goal of establishing your brand as an industry leader.
But how are they different from the other types of webinars?
The key differentiating factor here is that the materials of these webinars are all branded. So, the webinar’s materials and web room will both have your brand’s logo at appropriate places.
This can help improve your brand awareness and recall.
The content of these webinars can be similar to any of the other types of webinars. You could address the latest industry updates and build your brand authority.
Ready to Get Started?
Webinars are a great way to generate brand awareness and leads. You can leverage different types of webinars to reach out to your target audience and collect their contact information.
You could host eLearning webinars to teach new topics related to your industry. Alternatively, companies can leverage employee training webinars to upskill their remote teams.
Using webinars, you can also nurture your leads, demonstrate your products, and even establish your business as a thought leader.
What’s more?
Webinars can also be used for customer onboarding, corporate communications, panelist discussions, and to announce new features.
You could also include your branding in the webinars to improve your brand awareness.
Lastly, you can leverage on-demand webinars to make it easy for your audience to attend them whenever they want and still derive the experience of a live webinar.
You can create them using the Autoflow feature on FLOW.
Do you have any questions about the webinar formats mentioned above? If so, let us know in the comments.