When it comes to lead generation and sales, webinars can be your greatest ally.
Webinars are most commonly used for hosting virtual seminars, presentations, lectures, and workshops. But now a new kind of webinar is emerging — the deminar.
The product demonstration webinar, or deminar, offers your marketing and sales team a whole lot of value without spending an excessive amount of money on marketing, advertising, and event planning.
Deminars are relatively easy to set up and run, which lowers your customer acquisition cost and extends your marketing efforts, especially when you record your presentations and upload them online to serve as evergreen content.
Deminars also give you an opportunity to make a first impression with your audience and collect useful data that will improve your marketing and sales tactics after your event has finished.
A carefully formulated deminar will help your audience take the next step in their buyer’s journey, double your sales conversations, and multiply your win rate three-fold.
What is a Deminar?
In the simplest terms, a “deminar” is a combination of a “demonstration” and a “webinar.”
Deminars are a more interactive way to demonstrate your product to prospective customers online, and are considerably more cost-effective than hosting a product demo in a physical venue.
6 Key Components to Planning and Hosting a Successful Deminar
Here is our list of the top six components to include and guidelines to follow to get the most out of hosting a successful deminar.
#1) Don’t Just Talk the Talk, Truly Demo Your Product
Ever watch a YouTube unboxing or product review where the person just talks about the product, but never actually shows you how to use it? It’s unengaging and unfulfilling.
If you don’t actually demonstrate your product or service, you can expect quick drop-offs in your deminar.
Instead, be hands-on and actually use your product in your demonstration. Use screen sharing, live streaming, and showing pre-recorded clips to supplement your presentation.
#2) Let Your Audience In On the Action
The benefit of hosting a deminar over a video review or demonstration is that it’s interactive and exciting for your audience. Sure, you could just record a video and put it on YouTube, but it wouldn’t be as effective or fun for your potential customers.
By making it interactive, you can include your audience and give them an exciting experience that’s more likely to convert. And then after it’s finished, you can upload your deminar to YouTube, extending the life of your marketing piece.
#3) ALWAYS Allow For Questions
Your prospective customers can ask you questions in live time, which is immediately gratifying for them, and also gives you good user data to refine your marketing approach or to create an FAQ page about your product.
Getting questions and answering them is key and can act as an opportunity to really sell. Take questions throughout the deminar, not just at the end in a Q&A.
This can be achieved by allowing for a live comments section and polling your audience regularly through your presentation to get their live insights.
#4) Follow-Up Quickly and Effectively
Your audience is most likely to engage with you on the next steps at the end of your deminar and immediately after it has finished. Act quickly to further interact with them, or risk losing their interest.
Provide valuable content, such as videos, blogs, and reviews that will encourage further interaction with your company and product after your deminar has finished.
Collect your attendee’s email address and phone numbers to set up a strong email drip campaign and launch an SMS campaign. This way you can send regular emails and texts to your audience with the purchase and sign-up links.
It can often take several points of contact to close a sale, so don’t be shy about sending follow-ups to your audience.
#5) Don’t Forget an Exclusive Offer or Free Trial
A major benefit to attending a live product demonstration is getting an exclusive offer, whether it’s a pre-order, discount, or signing up for a free trial or beta test. Not only does this make your attendees feel special, but it will also help you track the success of your deminar.
This conversion rate can be measured and analyzed to improve your planning, execution, and follow-up process for your next deminar.
#6) Targeting Current Customers? Upsell or Cross-Sell With a Deminar!
Naturally, it makes sense to send invitations for your deminar to your existing customers. These are people who have already converted before and will be more receptive to your products and offers.
If you’ve come out with a completely new product, try to cross-sell it with your existing customers. They’ll probably be interested in checking it out. Or if your current product or service has been upgraded, try to upsell your customers to purchase the latest version of your product.
Deminar Planning Checklist: Tips to Get You Started
Now that we’ve gone over our preferred top 6 tips to hosting a high-converting deminar, we’ll offer a few planning suggestions that can make your deminar run more smoothly and efficiently.
Don’t Go Overboard
Now is not the time to go into a two and half hour in-depth guide to every feature of your product. You wouldn’t have any audience members left at the end of your deminar to follow-up with. You also don’t need to overdo your deminar in terms of production elements.
Remember what people are there for — to see and understand your product.
Instead, try to keep your demonstration to 15-20 minutes, and allow time during and after your presentation to answer questions.
Save your in-depth guide for YouTube, and use it as a piece of content that your customers can watch on-demand later.
Use a Virtual Event Platform Built to Foster Customer Relationships
The advantage of using a virtual event platform for your deminar over a YouTube live stream, for example, is that you gain access to valuable customer data. This data gives you more insights into who your customers are so you can create a more meaningful relationship with them over time.
Many virtual event platforms offer integrations with your existing CRM, automatically inputting attendee names, email addresses, and phone numbers, which saves you time from manually entering this information.
Virtual event platforms also give you more interactivity options so you can poll your audience, get applause, answer Q&As, and let them create user profiles.
Consult and Align With Your Sales Team
One mistake that marketing teams make is not involving their sales team during the planning and implementation process. When marketing and sales teams align, your product’s messaging and conversion rates improve.
Your salespeople generally know what works and doesn’t work when selling to your audience, particularly if you’re marketing to your existing customers.
They understand the pain points and language used by your customers that will help you communicate more effectively during a deminar.
Check out Sales and Marketing Alignment: How to Bring Them Together in your Virtual Event Strategy to make sure both of your teams are on the same page.
But DON’T Aggressively Sell
Aggressive sales techniques are the number one way you will make your company and product seem suspicious. It won’t help you sell products, and will actively turn away prospective customers and hurt your brand.
Instead, be warm, friendly, practical, patient, and thoughtful. You can be assertive, and lead your audience, but never be aggressive.
For instance, you can offer a limited-time offer at the end of your deminar that might push them to act quickly, but don’t guilt or shame your customers for not taking advantage of the offer.
Create a Deminar That Excels With SpotMe
SpotMe Studio helps you effortlessly create and broadcast professional deminars.
Unlike YouTube or other live streaming services, SpotMe lets you use your own branding, invite your guests using custom registration pages, and lets you add your favorite engagement tools. No app downloading is necessary. All your audience needs is a browser to attend your deminar.
With our remote guests feature, you can bring in up to 6 guests as presenters and panelists. SpotMe Studio’s built-in video conferencing can live stream your deminar to your virtual audience directly. Just share a link with your audience to have them attend your product demonstration.
Add custom colors and branding to your live stream, add pre-recorded on-demand content, live-streams, screen share, or share slides with your audience to enhance your presentation.
Our Q&A feature allows you to moderate your chat to keep your messaging on-point. Pass along interesting questions to your speakers and guests, and share them as they’re being answered. Our Polling feature also keeps your mobile audience engaged, allowing you to seek their feedback to create an engaging demonstration.
Once your deminar has wrapped, it will become immediately rewatchable with our instant replay option.
Best of all, our detailed analytics come built-in, which gives your sales and marketing team valuable insights into audience data. Now you can see exactly who watched your stream, how long they watched, who asked the most questions, and polling summaries. This is incredibly useful for score-leading and engaging with prospective buyers after your event.
Looking for more ways to maximize your webinars? Read our blog posts 5 Ways to Maximize Your Webinar ROI [+ Key Metrics to Evaluate] and How to Transform a Webinar Series Into a Lead Generation Machine.
Ready to take SpotMe’s webinar platform for a spin? Contact us today to start your free trial and receive a personalized walk-through of our webinar platform.
