Webinars – How to measure your ROI
What’s a webinar?
A webinar is the best means of demonstrating, displaying and showing off your brand to the world on the go. You have a live audience, fully focused on what you are showing them, which is the best way to interact with a targeted group.
In a webinar you also get the chance to interact with your audience by encouraging them to ask questions or send feedback while you are speaking to them. Immediate feedback tells you what the audience expects of you and how you can engage them in the most effective manner by making adjustments on the go.
How to choose which product to use:
If you have just started a business and are looking for a solution that is cost-effective, gives good results and is sustainable, you should try a free product that usually comes with a trial version and later on can be used on the subscription basis. Later on, you can invest in professional tools if you wish to. But to get a good know-how of the way webinars work and to assess which tools cater your needs best, it is important to try multiple free software and then make your pick. The free tools will have some limitations, of course, but they will give you a good idea of what you are signing up for.
Investing in webinars:
No good thing comes free. So to get the most out of your webinar software, you will certainly have to pay something like the audience increases or simply when the trial version expires. At some point, you will have to make the decision on whether you wish to invest or not. If you decide that you do, you will have to be careful you are not paying for any service or feature that you are not using. For that reason, a little research would be required and you may even
have to talk to customer service cells of this software. Some tools will charge you on a monthly basis, others will charge you per user or on different thresholds of audience size. You have to decide which one suits you best.
Measuring a return on investment:
Now that you have invested in your webinar software, it is important to keep a track of what kind of return you get on that particular investment. This is no easy task. Most content marketers are clueless regarding how to measure the
return on investment of a free webinar to their business. It’s not their fault. This actually is tricky business. How would you measure the return on investment for a webinar on freelancing? Or what do you do to measure the return on investment on a product demonstration webinar? The ultimate variable that defines a return on investment is the number of deals that were closed. But there are other goals too which need to be realized and focused upon. First, you need to define the goal of the webinars. It could be one or many out of these:
1.Increasing the number of audiences
2.Encouraging customer engagement and producing quantitative results
3.Taking buyers through the journey and attracting them to buy more
4.Identify potential customers or buyers as early as possible
5.Increasing the outreach of your brand
Audience Numbers:
If there is no participation in your webinar, forget even thinking about a return on investment. The greater the number of people following your webinars, the greater the chance for more registrations. The key performance indicator here would be the number of registrations as a ratio of the number of viewers. Your goal should be to increase the number of registrations per 1000 viewers, for example.
Customer Engagement:
Some webinar platforms provide you with engagement stats. These stats tell you how many people sent feedback or questions during or after your webinar. Using this stat you analyze and classify your viewers according to age group, gender, location, and other metrics. When these metrics are coupled with engagement stats, you will get a very clear idea of what type of people participate in your webinars. Your goal
should be to focus on those groups of people and a key performance indicator would be the number of engagements versus the number of viewers. If you manage to get more engagement in subsequent sessions, you are on the right track.
Attracting Buyers:
The next metric that could tell you about your performance is the number of people interested in buying and the number of people actually buying or using your products and services. Again, this stat will be provided by many webinar software. If you analyze the trends of who makes the purchase and when you can cash in on that and improve the attraction for buyers. This stat can be especially useful when mentioned in
future webinars as a means of motivating other people to buy as well and encourage returning buyers.
Identifying paying customers:
A very good way of gauging a viewer’s interest is to throw in some content, links or references for viewers to check. Keep an eye out on who’s checking what. That would give you a good idea of who is most interested in your offerings and may turn into a potential buyer. The sooner you identify a buyer, the easier it is to mold your strategy to encourage more such users to turn into buyers. Throwing out references that are different from each other will give you the chance to assess what kind of thing your audience is more interested in.
Increasing outreach:
It would be a great idea to ask people to share their views on social media. Retweets and hashtags will not only expand the outreach of your brand, but they will also indicate which viewers care enough to play their part in helping your brand, in whatever small way they could. Study the retweets. Look at what the users are talking about and incorporate it into your future webinars.
Conclusion:
Measuring a return on investment for your webinars is no easy task, but if done right it could transform your business into a successful one with customers growing at very fast rates. Try to practice it as soon as possible as this is the single best way to reach success.