“Start with why”.
Who comes to your mind when you hear that sentence? Well, if you haven’t been living under a rock, Simon Sinek is the individual who comes to mind. Why? Because in 2009, he popularised the concept of asking the right questions that begin by asking why.
“Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?”
Simon Sinek is just one of the many examples of why you should build a personal brand logo. A personal brand is much more than just a cool logo or a fancy website. A personal brand is much bigger and much more robust.
Your brand is who you are and what you do. It’s about how your target audience perceives you. It’s about what they say when you’re not in the room - both figuratively and literally.
Since a personal brand statement allows you to stand out from the crowd (and your competition), you need to invest in it. Now, I’m not saying you can go from “nobody” to a well-known influencer overnight, but you can work towards that.
Now, there are a myriad of ways to build successful personal brand statements for yourself, but webinars have proven to be quite effective in recent years. Let’s look at what they are, some types, and how they can help you ace building a personal brand identity.
Defining webinars (the easy way)
What your personal brand should consider, are webinars. The simplest definition of webinars is this: It is an event, conference or seminar that’s hosted on the internet. This means that neither the speaker nor the attendees need to be physically present to attend it. They can do so from the comfort of their own home or office. But let’s get this out there.
Webinars aren’t the only solution on the market to grow your brand and scale a business. But there are solid numbers to back them up. 73% of B2B marketers say a webinar is the best way to generate high-quality leads, while B2B companies hold almost 61% of the total webinars held each year.
Wait, there’s more. The average webinar attendance rate is 40-60% of the total registrations. You’d be lucky to have an open rate of 20% on your emails or 1% reach on your social media posts, so webinars are comparatively better when it comes to marketing yourself or your business.
Now that we have seen the efficacy and effectiveness of webinars, let’s take a look at some of the top reasons why you should employ webinars as a marketing tool to grow your personal brand logo.
4 reasons you should use webinars to grow your personal brand
Webinars work. It’s pretty much a fact now considering all the evidence that’s floating around. But there’s not much to go on when it comes to building a personal brand logo. Fear not, as we’re going to look at the exact reasons why webinars are the go-to method for growing your personal brand. What are our personal brand examples? Just stay with us.
1. Public speaking at its best
Public speaking is an important part of your brand-building strategy. Webinars are a form of public speaking. You’re still sharing your knowledge with a bunch of people. The only difference is that you’re doing it over the internet. Public speaking during webinars can help you amplify your reach and build your credibility as a thought leader in your space. Plus you can have all the information about participants in one place, thanks to automatic data gathering, statistics and reporting.
2. It allows the use of visual content
Our brain can process visuals 60,000 times faster than plain text and can retain 80% of what we see as opposed to just 20% of what we read. This creates an opportunity for you to leverage webinars, as they enable you to capitalize on the power of visual storytelling on top of your voice by using rich slides, animations, or videos. You can use tools like whiteboards, screen sharing, and document storage to provide a deeper experience.
3. Engage with your audience
Webinars are interactive by default. You can engage with your audience by answering their questions in real-time, launch pop-quizzes, or share a deal, etc. All this allows you to build a strong, one-on-one relationship with your audience that further strengthens your personal brand awareness.
4. Build your community
Until now, you have only read about how webinars can help while you’re actually conducting one. But there are other benefits. Webinars can help you build a community around your personal brand logo. You already have the registrants’ email addresses; use them to build a Facebook/Slack community or simply an email list. Once you have this community in place, you can advertise your products or services, create success stories, and continue boosting engagement within your community.
Steps to launch your first webinar
By now, we should be on the same page in terms of the effectiveness of running webinars to build and amplify your personal brand statements. If not, I suggest reading the above once again, and if you’ve got more questions then feel free to reach out.
To see success with webinars, you first need to launch one. There are a few prerequisites for creating the perfect webinar. Here are the pointers:
- Be meticulous when setting your webinar goals.
- Create an easily executable plan to launch the webinar.
- Make sure to time it right. Midweek is known to be the optimal time.
- Extend invitations to people who haven’t heard about you before.
- Promote the bejesus out of it but don’t be spammy.
- Draft a script and stick to it.
- Check all the technical details before starting the webinar.
- Keep your audience engaged - before, during, and after the webinar.
- Do a practice run before the day of the webinar.
- Don’t forget to follow-up with registrants and attendees.
Now, to the part of creating the webinar. As you can guess, you need software to do that. There are several options available out there, but we’d have to be a bit biased and recommend LiveWebinar simply because it’s awesome and will serve all of your needs.
LiveWebinar is a piece of webinar software that enables you to stream meetings, share screens, record sessions, and a lot more. It’s an all-in-one webinar marketing tool built for all purposes including personal branding. But don’t take our word for it. See what our customers say about us.
Here’s how you can get started and schedule your first webinar:
1. Sign-up on LiveWebinar’s website: Head over to the website and sign-up for the software. They have a free version that you can use forever without paying a dime. You can sign up using your Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts besides going the traditional way of using your email address.
2. Check out the onboarding guide: Next, you will arrive on the onboarding screen. For your benefit, please go through the tutorial before trying to create a webinar.
3. Create your first event: Kudos for completing the onboarding process. Now, it’s time to launch a webinar. Click on the Schedule Webinar button (green colored) in the top-right hand corner of the screen and fill out the details. Once you’re done, click on Schedule at the bottom of the page.
4. Spread your webinar far & wide: It’s time to share the webinar with your immediate community and prospective attendees. You can easily copy the webinar link (Room Browser Address) and share it via email and social media, etc.
As you can see, it can take less than a minute to create a webinar. LiveWebinar embodies this policy: you focus on building your personal brand logo while LiveWebinar takes care of your webinar needs.
Top webinar formats for building your personal brand
Alright! You’ve created your first webinar using LiveWebinar. But have you planned out what kind of value the webinar will deliver? More precisely, what’s the format of the webinar? We have for you also some webinar types where personal brand statement examples can be used.
To be honest, you’re limited only by your imagination. You can create your own unique webinar format or choose from some popular ones, as illustrated below.
1. Educational webinars
Educational webinars are those online events that take a topic and explain it to the audience in great detail while highlighting examples. If you’re a copywriter, you can create a webinar to explain the concept of skyscraper content to your audience and how it helps to boost website traffic.
For example, Kai Davis, a consultant for freelancers, has this pre-recorded webinar for roadmapping a proposal and getting paid for it.
2. AMA
Personal brand statement examples can be used in AMA or Ask Me Anything. It is a type of online webinar in which the expert (i.e., you) goes live in a community or from their website (or social media profile) to answer pertinent questions related to a particular topic.
For example, this AMA on how Goodr Sunglasses is using data to adapt to the new normal is a classic example of branding for Goodr, who talk about how data has helped cope with the changing tides of the pandemic.
3. Teardowns/product reviews
What about using personal brand statement examples in product reviews? If you’re an authority in a particular niche, you can teardown or review products from that niche. A teardown is nothing but a third-party explanation of a product. These are generally unbiased opinions, giving your audience a chance to make an informed decision about whether to purchase a product or not.
For example, in his latest video, Hugh Jeffreys tries to tear down the latest iPhone 13 and checks whether it is repairable or not (owing to Apple’s latest aim for zero climate impact by 2030).
The right way to promote your webinar
Now that you’ve set up your first webinar, it’s time to promote it. But registrations won’t happen by magic. When you have picked the type of webinar and chosen your personal brand statement examples, you need to promote the event. Marketing your webinar is crucial, as it helps you fetch registrations from both existing and new audiences.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a SaaS copywriter, an online cooking course instructor, or an ecommerce podcast host, you simply can’t ignore this step to build your personal brand statements through webinars. Yep, it’s promoting the webinar.
Before we dive into this, there’s a prerequisite. You need a killer landing page for your webinar. No, this isn’t the one your webinar software provides. This is a custom page that clearly illustrates:
- (1) what the webinar is about
- (2) why someone should attend it (the value proposition)
- (3) the date & time of the webinar
- (4) a simple way to register for the webinar and add the details to a calendar slide
This is non-negotiable. If you want the webinar to be a success story, you will need to invest your resources into creating a landing page.
Now that you’ve created one, take a look at some of the tried and tested ways to promote your webinar and help it reach its target audience.
1. Email marketing
59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions. No matter what others say, email marketing is here to stay. Regardless of what you’re selling, email marketing still plays an instrumental role in growing a business.
It’s especially important when you’re promoting webinars. You can create an email sequence leading up to the day of the webinar and a follow-up sequence to upsell attendees your products or services. You can use ConvertKit or ActiveCampaign to create these sequences. The bonus part? They seamlessly integrate with LiveWebinar.
2. Social media
There are 2 methods that you can employ to promote a webinar on social media.
- Personal profiles: I assume that you already have brand handles across channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Pinterest, or whichever are applicable for your niche. Personal profiles play a pivotal role in fetching registrations. Folks want to hear from a person and not a lifeless company (if you have a separate one). Make sure to assign a story to your post and break down your USP succinctly.
- Private communities: There are certain communities on social media platforms like Facebook, Slack, and Reddit, that are extremely active. Find the ones that are relevant to your niche, ask the admin’s permission (if necessary), and repurpose your personal profile post for these communities. They’re a great source of acquiring new registrations, especially from people who haven’t heard about you before.
3. YouTube
YouTube, the 2nd largest search engine in the world, is a great way to gain traction for whatever you’re promoting. In our case, it’s a webinar that’s relevant to your niche.
A simple way to gain some traction is to create multiple teaser videos and post them on your YouTube channel. Of course, you’d need to follow the necessary YouTube SEO techniques. But a few simple videos can boost your registrations.
4. Event Hosting Places
This is an underrated technique that most marketers don’t utilize (God knows why). You can host your webinar on free event hosting platforms because these sites act as ‘event discovery’ search engines where people look for events to attend.
Some of these sites include Eventbrite, Meetup, and Facebook Events (you need a Facebook page for that). You’re simply piggybacking on the site’s traffic to get your share of registrations.
Oh, and ensure that the webinar customer service being implemented is thorough. This is simply taking care of your registrants’ and attendees’ questions and issues. Hosts often ignore this and end up being called out for not delivering enough support or being present when needed. Be they on Facebook, personal messages, or email, please don’t forget to solve users’ problems, politely and patiently.
Real success stories
Alright! By now, you should have a brief idea of how webinars can accelerate your personal brand statements and help you grow your business seamlessly. But a strategy isn’t complete without a few success stories that are inspiring and make us believe that it works.
#1 Jenna Ford from YouCanBrand.com
Maria and Jenna hosted a webinar together that landed $5,000 from an audience of 30 people. Just 30! Think about that for a second. With a 16% conversion rate (attendees to sales), it’s by far one of the best examples of a webinar aiding the uplift of a brand. You can check out the full case study here.
#2 Karla from Karla Dennis & Associates
Karla runs a premier accounting and taxation service company for small businesses that provides its own accounting software. Kenneth Dennis, along with Karla, created a webinar called the “Online Tax Saving Program” that generated $72,000 of profit within 30 days of launching. It’s phenomenal to see how webinars can change the way a business grows. More on this case study here.
#3 Recall & Arketi
Arketi helped Recall (a global leader in document management) create a webinar campaign on the theme “Your Roadmap to Total Information Management”. This single webinar went on to generate a potential revenue pipeline of $290,000. 28% more people logged in to the live event than the targeted number. This is truly the ideal example of how a webinar can grow a brand while generating sales opportunities. Check out the full success story here.
Parting thoughts
That’s all I have to say about how to launch a webinar and grow your personal brand to the next level. To summarize, a webinar allows the use of visual content that our brain perceives faster than text, enables you to interact with your audience in real-time, and builds a moat around your personal brand logo. And what are your personal brand examples?