This post was updated in September 2022.

As a webinar platform, we obviously understand the importance of webinars from a business stand point. However, it’s easy to overlook many of the benefits that can come from running webinars in your business. The purpose of this post is to showcase 10 of what I think are the most important reasons why webinars are valuable for every business.

These may or may not all apply to you, and frankly, there are tons of different kinds of webinars that you can run. In this article, we’ll stay more on the “marketing and sales” side of webinars.

Reason 1: You Can Deliver Tremendous Value

This is one of the main reasons that businesses start doing webinars in the first place. Webinars are truly unlike anything else; if done right, you can keep your audience engaged for hours on end and that’s something that videos put simply, struggle to do. Not only that, but your audience can also ask questions and get real-time feedback on the training.

Even better, you can ask your audience questions and tailor your content in real-time to better serve your audience. You can get your audience to take action and have some small micro-wins of their own. This leads to transformations throughout the content, and it can happen within a super short period of time. This explains why webinars are some of the highest converting forms of marketing.

Reason 2: They Position you as an Expert in your Field

It’s a free webinar… Who cares? Well, your audience does. And just because it’s “free” doesn’t mean they’re not exchanging anything for the content. To attend a webinar, your prospect has to register, put the date in her calendar, set aside time for the event, show up at the right time, and then give you 1–3 hours of her time. She’s doing ALL of this just to listen to you talk about a certain subject; this positions you as an expert before you even start teaching the content.

Reason 3: You Can Make Sales without Selling Hard

With the right kind of content, your webinars should soft-sell your prospects without ever having to “hard close” anybody. A lot of businesses make the mistake of teaching and THEN selling, when in reality, the best webinars teach AND sell at the same time.

Effective webinar content should showcase problems, kills objections, and deliver value without teaching too much. The content should teach your audience WHAT to want. The “what” is your product, and by the time you make the offer, the entire audience already wants it. This makes the sale much more natural, and no hard selling is required.

Reason 4: You Can Communicate with Hundreds of People from Anywhere in the World

This is one of the greatest reasons why webinars are the best. The ability to have a conversation with hundreds of people… virtually, right over the internet. Oh yeah, and did I mention that you never even have to leave the comfort of your computer chair, beach chair, or whatever chair you prefer?

It’s no question that having a 1-on-1, in-person conversation with a prospect would be the most effective way to earn your business a new customer. But is traveling around the world to do 1-on-1 prospect meetings really plausible? Maybe… if you’re doing 6, 7, and 8-figure deals. For every other business, the logistics just don’t work. But doing a remote webinar that allows you to connect with hundreds of people all over the world in a 2-hour timespan? Well, yeah, these logistics make sense.

Reason 5: They Keep Your Audience Engaged

Webinars are special for two main reasons. First off, they’re one-time events that happen LIVE. If your audience shows up late, they miss part of it. If they don’t show up at all, they miss all of it. This is the power of scarcity, and it’s the foundation of any webinar campaign. With a video, the viewer knows that she can pause it and come back at any time… that’s not the case with webinars. If your prospect leaves or misses the webinar, she will feel the pain of missing out.

The second reason is conversational engagement. With webinars, your audience gets a voice. They can chat, vocalize opinions, asks questions, answer questions, and more. When someone is asking questions and chatting about what they’re being taught, they’re more focused and engaged by default.

Reason 6: You Can Generate New Leads

Almost every business is driven by leads. A business with more than enough leads will never struggle to grow. Unfortunately, most businesses lack high-quality lead-generation, and webinars are a great way to attract new eyes, generate new leads, and ultimately convert new customers.

With webinars, some kind of registration is expected. People are familiar with submitting their name, email, and sometimes other information in order to register for an upcoming webinar event. They’ve highlighted themselves as a lead that is interested in whatever you’re teaching, and they’ve opted in to hear more about it.

There are many ways to actually promote a webinar and drive registrations, but we won’t go in too much depth on that in this article. To name a few, you can run paid advertising, you can feature webinars on your home page, you can get affiliates to promote, and you can leverage the audience of guests. Of course, you can promote webinars internally to your existing audience with emails, but we’re mainly talking about generating new leads here, not qualifying existing ones. We’ll save that for the next reason…

Reason 7: You Can Qualify New Leads and Build Relationships

There’s no better way to build a relationship than by giving value first. Generally, the first step in making a sale is related to education. Webinars give us the opportunity to teach our leads and help them understand why our product is valuable in the first place. Webinars will allow your audience to place a name with a face and a voice with a name. They allow you to build personal relationships and have real-time conversations.

Just short of visiting your prospect in person or jumping on a personal phone call, webinars are the best way to build personal relationships with your leads. The best part is that it works with new leads just as well as it works with “seasoned” leads. You can leave a great first impression on people who are hearing from you for the first time.

Reason 8: You Can Invite Guests and Leverage Their Audience (And Credibility!)

When you invite an industry influencer or specialized guest to your webinar, they’re usually more than happy to help leverage their audience to drive attendees.

Please note: just because they’re usually happy to do it, doesn’t mean it’s their job to. You can’t expect them to promote it — that’s your job. This is a great way to expose yourself and your business to a whole new audience, generate new leads, and leave a great first impression in the process. 

Besides for just getting exposure, you can also borrow your guests’ credibility! Bringing on an industry expert will position you further as an expert, since that person is associating their name with your brand. It will increase overall excitement, attendance rates, and social media sharing.

Reason 9: You Can Attract Affiliates with a Proven-to-Convert Webinar

I could write a whole post (or maybe 10) about the affiliate world, but we’ll save that for another day. To keep it short, affiliates want something that A) will convert well and B) will deliver value to their customers. If they’re not going to make money from sending traffic, then they’re not going to promote. If affiliates sent traffic straight to your homepage, the conversions would be absolutely horrible. However, if affiliates sent traffic to a proven-to-convert webinar campaign that also delivers a lot of value, then they’ll generate a lot more commissions overall.

The great news is that once you run a webinar for the first time, you’ll have stats for your webinar — stats such as earnings per registrant, earnings per attendee, and earnings per click. These stats (along with a replay of your webinar) will help you attract influencers and industry partners to promote your webinar. Since they know the average earnings per registrant, they’ll have an idea of how much $ they can generate in commissions before ever even starting the promotion.

(Pssst! If you’re just getting started with webinars and you want to have some benchmarks to forecast results, check out our webinar report with the most important virtual event stats.)

Reason 10: You Can Speed Up your Sales Process and Get an ROI Faster

As a company, it’s revenue that helps your business grow. Companies live and die by cash flow, especially if you have a bootstrapped company like we do. So, the faster you can convert a lead into a customer, the better of you’ll be. Webinars can really help speed up this process. Why? Simply because they take all of the initial funnel-steps and merge them together; they let you build trust, deliver value, and kill objections in a small period of time.

For example, if you can drive qualified webinar registrations for $10 each, and your webinar instantly gets an average earnings per registrant of $10, then you’ve already broke even. In this example, any revenue that comes from these leads after the webinar is pure profit — good ‘ole cash flow.

I Think you Get Why Webinars Can Help Your Business…

Webinars are powerful, and certainly there are a lot more than 10 reasons to run them. Hopefully this list inspires you to get out there and use webinars in your business, whether they’re for lead generation, sales, training, or all of the above. The point of this article is that the downside is much smaller (if it even exists at all) in comparison to the upside — the potential.

Can you think of any reasons that I missed? Let me know in the comments below!

Interested in running your own webinars? You can grab a free trial of Demio today. Otherwise, explore some Demio reviews to see what others are saying.