Planning Your Next Webinar with an Influencer

Influencer marketing has gained ground with the growth of social media. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media sites play a key role in the emergence and growth of ‘Influencers’.

In simple words, influencers are those with a large social media following, and whose opinions, lifestyles, and fashion have a significant following among their followers. They are the new-age celebrities. Realizing their growing popularity and potential, many brands collaborate to increase their reach and popularity.

If you want to gain success as a business, you cannot ignore the digital sphere in which influencers play a key role. 

Webinar with Influencers

Webinars can also be promoted using influencers. Due to the pandemic, webinars have become a popular way to reach your target audience, gain new customers, and keep in touch with the existing ones. 

Using influencers in your webinars can provide you with the following benefits:

• Building trust: As influencers are popular among the target audience, including them in your webinar will help you build a rapport with the audience. Your brand name will be associated with the influencer.  This will convince the followers of the influencers to follow your brand.

• Influencers will help in increasing your organic reach. You will benefit greatly from the reach and connections the influencers possess.

• Influencers will be able to promote your webinar effectively as they are proficient in marketing and networking. They can also help you in planning the strategy and the medium for promoting the webinar.

• Your webinar will be more engaging as influencers are quite apt in holding the attention of the audience. They have experience in marketing themselves through social media. This skill will come in handy when you conduct a webinar with them.

Planning Strategy

Now, we will need a strategy if you want to conduct a webinar with an influencer.

First, you will need to get a hold of an influencer and then finally conducting a webinar; you will need to go through the following steps:

Searching for the influencer

The first step is to find influencers. The best place to find one is a PR agency. PR agencies will be able to contact a social media influencer if the former is well established.

To get the right influencer from the PR agency, you will first need to communicate your needs and requirements with the agency’s account manager. They will then suggest some influencers. You can strike out those who are not related to your industry and shortlist those who are. 

You can also search for influencers independently if your company is well-established. You need to see which influencers have a great following, the past webinars hosted by them, if any, as well as their communication and engagement skills.

After the shortlisting, you then try to contact them and see who is available.

Working with the influencer

After you have selected the influencer, you need to start getting to work. To make your webinar a success, you will both need to coordinate and cooperate.

If you have identified the influencer on your own, you will have an added advantage of the first contact. To get the first contact right, you will need to give the influencer an attractive offer and establish that you consider the influencer to be valuable for the upcoming webinar.

Even if you have identified an influencer through an agency, you will have to establish a connection with him or her.

The contract

For any business endeavor, an agreement or a contract is paramount. Without it, the parties involved will not have insurance in case the other defaults on their commitments.

The agreement should be all-encompassing. It should include the date of the event, the amount of money payable to the influencer, the terms and conditions, the client’s corporate identity and the influencer, and so forth.

It should clearly state the expectations of the company and the offers and benefits given to the influencer. It should not leave any room for ambiguity. It should be precise, clear, and to the point.

Both you and the influencer should be satisfied with the contract.

The campaigning

Once you have agreed on a date and signed up for the contract, you have to start campaigning. You need to gain an audience for your webinar.

You have to sign up to a webinar hosting site, be it Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams. Among these, Zoom is a better option as it has more users and higher popularity. After this, you will need to have a marketing plan in place, through which you will promote your webinar.

You can campaign in various ways. You can send direct mail invites through email. For this, you will need an email marketing plan. You will need to make use of content marketing to ensure that you will get an audience that is invested in your company.

You can also make video shorts to attract more people and keep the momentum going on.

The webinar

The final stage is the webinar itself. You need to ensure that the webinar is smoothly conducted. The influencer should be in sync with your corporate identity; otherwise, the influencer may end up getting all the attention. Your company needs to be visible during the presentation.

You need to avoid goof-ups, as it will reflect poorly on your company.

If you follow these steps properly, you will be able to organize a great webinar that will keep your audience engaged and improve the reputation and reach of your company.

The influencer can be a great partner. They can help your company get the best out of the webinar.