More About Those Zoominars
Not to be an alarmist, but many prospects are testing positive for Zoom fatigue.
Well get over it. Zoom is your new best friend when it comes to business development.
Time and distance are keeping you and your prospects apart. If you serve clients that are located throughout the country or even in different countries, the silver lining to the pandemic is the widespread adoption of Zoom.
This has given rise to the Zoominar, a virtual seminar that allows you to host inexpensive meetings for people from anywhere.
While generating high-paying clients through small-scale seminars is a proven marketing strategy for agency owners, times have been tough. Many agency owners are frustrated that you can’t gather prospects into a room like you used to. Others are frustrated by a lack of turnout for the Zoominars they do host.
Here are steps to increase attendance for your next lead generation event on Zoom:
- Chose clarity over cleverness when writing your Zoominar invites.
- Develop a checklist and timeline of your pre- and post-Zoominar activities.
- Determine your target audience of prospects. LinkedIn is a great tool to find people if you know details about them (we entered all that info about ourselves in LinkedIn and it is searchable).
- Use informal research to pretest the topics to make sure the one you choose has the most appeal for your target audience. A great option is always: “The Three Biggest Blunders _____ Make When Doing ___________.”
- Make sure e-mails, social media postings, web landing pages, and LinkedIn messages convey a first-class image for you.
- Confirm registrations forty-eight hours before the event by e-mail. If you want to be a business development ninja, reach out and call prospects to tell them you are looking forward to meeting them and ask if they have any specific questions or areas they want you to cover.
- Deliver seminar content that is of real value. Make it a no-selling zone. Delivering a thinly disguised sales pitch is the kiss of death.
- Make it easy for the prospect to have a strategy call later. Offer this briefly during the seminar and send the follow-up offer by e-mail. Make it clear it is a no-selling call and honor that.
- For the strategy call the recommended agenda is to get clarity around their goals, assets, roadblocks and to learn from you how others have gotten from where they are to where they want to go.
- Conduct organized follow-up to stay in touch with the people who signed up to attend but did not make it. These are the forgotten few. They are interested in the topic, but something came up, and the easiest item on the day to say no to is the Zoominar. About 50 percent who sign up do not show up, and they are still great prospects.
- Measure, measure, measure. Be sure to measure all aspects of the program to see what could be improved. Measure how many were invited, how many accepted, how many attended, how many who attended booked a strategy call, how many kept the call, and how many of those callers became clients.
Because the number one challenge for agency owners is creating new clients, Zoominars are a dignified way to network with prospects and develop new referral sources.
One more thought about being clear rather than clever. As management visionary Peter Drucker once said, you must answer certain questions: What is our business? Who is our client? What does our client consider valuable? The secret to Zoominar business development success lies in the answers to those three questions.