In today’s “always-on”, “instant gratification” society, ease and speed have become more important than ever. When it comes to your mortgage company’s buyer seminars, this is something you should definitely take into consideration. Having to sign up for an event that is going to take place in the future and then get in a car to drive to that event when there are people online giving the information away for free makes it that much more difficult for a lead to want to attend your seminar. Because of these factors, you should be considering turning your traditional buyer seminars into online events. Today we want to share with you our favorite 3 ways to accomplish this.
Easy Webinar
While seminars are live, in a physical location at a specific time, and live webinars can only be viewed at the time of streaming, a recorded webinar that can be viewed in an “on-demand” setting by your prospects is the gift that keeps giving. Easy Webinar is a webinar platform that allows you to run evergreen (A.K.A. automated webinars) that you can use to generate leads and customers daily while leveraging your time. For instance, you can run Facebook and Instagram ads that advertise your upcoming first time home buyer seminar. When the lead clicks through the ad they are taken to Easy Webinar’s totally customizable signup screen where the lead can choose when they wish to watch the webinar. You can choose to set it up “on-demand”, or make your webinar available during a few specific times each day.
With on-demand webinars, generally, it’s understood if the viewer has questions, the button they click to ask a question during the webinar will be answered by email at a later time. Easy Webinar has a great feature though allowing for more real-time interaction. They’ve integrated their platform with Skype and SMS capabilities allowing you to actually respond to seminar attendees that have questions, during the actual event, without you having to be logged into it.
The platform can send email notifications both before and after webinar events and offers a full reporting dashboard you can use to analyze attendee behavior and the next steps that need to be made with that person.
YouTube
If automated and evergreen is a little too impersonal for you, there are a couple of other great options out there. One of which is YouTube. While almost everyone knows that YouTube is the world’s largest video sharing platform, not as many people know that they also allow users to use their platform for free to hold live webinars.
As with all free things, there are some steps you need to follow to get things set up and ready to go. Specifically, you need to set up a landing page on your website where you can put the YouTube embed code to display your webinar, and you need to connect the chat feature so you can chat with people attending your webinar.
Another added benefit to Youtube is once you are done doing your live webinar, you can take the recording of it and actually host it on your YouTube channel so it can be viewed by potential clients at a later date. Remember, like we just mentioned, YouTube is the world’s largest video sharing platform. Not only that, it’s the 2nd most used search engine on the Internet. Having these videos saved on their platform and easy for people to find will help you do more business.
This is a great option because it’s relatively painless to set up and it will allow you to do highly personalized, live buyer seminars to as many attendees as you wish, unlike a pre-packaged solution like Easy Webinar. An even more attractive added bonus is that you can host these webinars on your own website. You have the ability to promote your brand and not the brand of a third party webinar provider. So in other words, you have full control.
That said, it does lack some features that many out of the box solutions offer. For instance, you cannot run pre-recorded clips of content during your webinar. You also are unable to use virtual whiteboards or conduct polls of your attendees during your live stream. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, YouTube lacks the analytics you most likely want to view to gauge attendee interest.
Facebook
If setting up a landing page and connecting chat to it are a little too technical for your liking, a great alternative for holding a live webinar is Facebook. Now in order to successfully hold a live webinar, you have to use a third-party tool that will broadcast your computer’s webcam or desktop to Facebook. The good news is there is a wealth of tools out there, both free and paid that can help you accomplish this.
There are many benefits to Facebook’s live streaming platform. Because it is so easy to stream from a mobile device or camera on Facebook’s platform, you can even take your in-person, live seminars and stream them online, giving you access to an entirely new group of leads that perhaps didn’t know about or couldn’t make your physical seminar.
Facebook’s live streams also get priority in the news feed. Their algorithm pushes live streams to the top of people’s news feeds because they are live events that are most relevant at that moment. Additionally, Facebook automatically records all your live streams and posts them to your business page, so you can easily share them with people after the event to get even further exposure.
As with YouTube’s streaming webinar feature, there are some downsides to Facebook’s platform as well. One issue many users report is stability. To combat this, our recommendation is you start the live stream to your webinar early. Simply put up a title slide for your online seminar and put “starting soon” somewhere in the graphic. That way it will start to buffer and reduce the likelihood that it will freeze on people once you begin presenting your content.
A second issue that may impact you is the fact that while it’s easy for leads to get logged into and watch your live webinar, Facebook will not give you their email address or other contact information. So if your plans are to hold this online seminar to leverage future phone, sms or email campaigns, an all-in-one solution like Easy Webinar might be a better platform to suit your needs.
PRO TIP: When holding your Facebook Live Seminar, we’d suggest you have an iPad or a separate laptop handy and logged into the event. This will allow you to monitor comments being made by the users watching and also to make sure the video you are broadcasting is streaming correctly.
There Are More Ways Than Ever To Hold Seminars
While these are our 3 favorite ways to turn buyer seminars into online events, the truth is there are tons of options out there. The most important step to modernizing your buyer seminars is to realize that you need to go where the people are. People are online consuming content, learning, and choosing who to do business with every day. Choosing a platform that is easy for leads to access, and allows you to provide them valuable content that will establish you as the thought leader in their mind will help ensure that they are choosing to do business with you and your brokerage.
Take Your Mortgage Seminars To The Next Level
