Webinars - Good, Bad or Indifferent?

Webinars are a great way to bring your audience together and present a new product or service, perform a training session for people who can't make the meeting or can be tied in with a marketing strategy to attract and qualify new accounts.

The difficult thing about webinars is getting the crowd to the show. You might have the best presentation prepared but if there's no one to watch, it's a waste of time. There are a number of ways to attract numbers to your webinar and the more general ones I have viewed have been through email marketing. But like always, the dental industry is a personal, relationship based market. For attracting dentists a more direct approach is required with an incentive.

A webinar wouldn't be the right solution for a small lab for several reasons. The first is having the numbers to make the webinar worthwhile. The second being what if it worked and the lab suddenly experiences a massive spike in production demand. But for the medium to large size lab a webinar integrated into the website or linked to an email campaign could reap some large numbers attending the webinar and educate or gain more dentists.

To empower the webinar even more you can use an event, like a tradeshow, convention or training session, to use the numbers attending to draw them to the webinar essentially high jacking the event. If you were to also get the permission and endorsement of the event then even more acceptance and attendance of the seminar could be achieved.

So there aren't too many applications of the webinar, but for the medium to large sized lab that has reached a plateau in their marketing efforts a webinar could be just the thing to create interest and build the relationship with many dentists all at once.