Small businesses and entrepreneurs around the country have been significantly impacted by the restrictions surrounding COVID-19. While these precautions are absolutely necessary to keep everyone safe and healthy, many financial professionals are questioning how to begin marketing in this new environment.

In this episode of Money Script Monday, Dan provides an extensive walk-through on how to start hosting and marketing webinars so you continue to remain the authority in your community.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version of it!

Video transcription

Hello there and welcome back to another episode of Money Script Monday.

My name is Dan Tatulli, and today, we're going to be talking about something that may have significantly impacted you over the last few months.

You may have built your financial practice off of public events, whether they were educational workshops or dinner seminars.

You were wining and dining them, and shaking hands with everybody, your business model has drastically flipped on its head over these last few months.

And really, as far as we'd like to say that things are going to get back to normal in the next month or two months, the future is unknown.

I can almost guarantee that to have a room filled with over 30 strangers without masks to sit at a restaurant and to listen to your sales pitch is going to be far from now.

We may be looking at four months, six months, a year, might even be two years, before things start to normalize.

So, we believe the solution is you need to start marketing through online webinars right now.

That's what we're going to be talking about -- how to shift your marketing from public events to online webinars.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, "Dan, there is no reason I should be marketing right now.”

“It's doom and gloom out there. People are holding on to their money. They don't trust anybody. I am not marketing."

And that is the exact reason why you should be marketing. A lot of advisors are taking a step back from their marketing efforts.

So, over these next few months, it's your goal to capture a larger portion of the market share.

That way when things finally normalize, and maybe some advisors start jumping back in, they're going to be too late to the game, and they're going to be out of it.

And you're going to be at the top of people's minds when they start thinking about a trusted life insurance, annuity, investment advisor.

With that, we're going to be showing you how to actually create a webinar.

If you're thinking about, I don't even know where to start, we're going to talk about some of the recommended platforms that we use, some of your pricing options, then you're going to deep dive.

I'm actually going to jump on the screen and show you step by step how to create a webinar and also the registration page.

Lastly, I'll be showing you some of the ways you can start marketing your webinar and start getting people to register for it.

So, if you stay tuned, towards the end, I'm going to be showing you how to get started right away. With that, let's jump to the screen.

Webinar Platforms

1. GoToWebinar
2. Zoom

The first thing you want to do is select a reliable webinar platform.

One, that's going to give you a seamless experience, not only for you, but for your prospects.

As you can see here up on the screen, we recommend GoToWebinar. This is the very platform we at LifePro have been using for over a decade now to host our webinars.

An alternative to GoToWebinars, a company called Zoom. I'm sure you've heard of it. It's been very popular over these last few months.

Regardless of whichever one you choose, whether it's Zoom or GoToWebinar, it's really just up to you.

It's more of a comfort level. If you've been using Zoom, maybe for personal use, go with Zoom.

If you've been doing GoToWebinar, or you want my recommendation, a lot of our advisors are using GoToWebinar. Next let's talk about pricing.

Pricing

1. GoToWebinar Pricing
2. Zoom Pricing

I am on the page here for GoToWebinar, as you could see, there are a few different options. We recommend starting out with the light option.

It's $49 a month, and this is annual pricing.

$49 per month, you get up to a hundred participants on each webinar, which we've been averaging about 20, 25 attendees per webinar.

So, if you have over 100 people, that is a great problem to have. So $49 a month for GoToWebinar, let's go to Zoom's page.

Zoom has a few options to what we recommend is going towards the pro package. So that's $14.99 a month.

However, you have to scroll down here and they have an additional option. Add video webinars starting at $40 a month.

You actually have to add the $40 a month on top of the $14.99. So it's going to cost you about $54.99 if you go ahead with Zoom.

So whichever one you choose, I want you to create an account right now, go click one of those buy buttons, fill in your information, your credit card, get that started, and I'll meet you inside on the dashboard.

Creating the Webinar

1. Login
2. Schedule Webinar
3. Create Title
4. Select Live Event
5. Thursdays at 6:00pm

All right, let's create that webinar and get that registration page so we can start marketing this right away. I'm in the dashboard of GoToWebinar's account.

If you're using Zoom, it's going to look a little bit differently, but they all have kind of the same features. So, the things that I'm going to show you will translate over to the Zoom account as well.

Log yourself in. I'm going to click this button "schedule" up at the top here "event title."

I'm just going to copy and paste the title. This is one of the titles for our LifePro programs. We've been testing it. It's been working really well over these last few months here.

I'm just going to put live webinar at the top. Is this a live or recorded event? We're recommending you do it live.

You really need to learn how to walk before you run before you record and create this perfect presentation, you don't even know how your close is going to be.

What's your closing rate? Is it 10%? 20%? 50%. What we want to do is conduct quite a few live events, get super comfortable with it, and then flip that into a recorded presentation and turn that thing on autopilot.

We're going to recommend live webinars right now. I'm going to do this once starting next week.

Let's go for Thursday, June 11th. I'm recommending Thursdays, Thursdays have been the most popular days that we've seen the attendance rise.

We're going to do 6:00 PM here, last an hour, Pacific time.

Make sure you've got that correct in your time zone because that's what's going to send out those email reminders. So, they need to be on time with that.

How do you want to interact? We're going to choose webcast. Some of the pricing packages, that's what they're going to offer you right away.

Let's click this button and schedule the webinar. So here we go. We've got this webinar now scheduled, so you can see the title up here.

Registration Page

1. Create Description
2. Select Record Option
3. Add Branding, Logos, and Images

We're now going to add in a few different features to create that registration page.

This box right here, the description, this is the body of the text that you're going to see on the registration page.

I'm just going to copy and paste some of our proven texts that we've been using for our LifePro webinars.

Scroll down here, organizer, LifePro events. Sure. This is going to be your account. So, it'll say your name up there.

We're going to skip over add payment. This would be if you're charging somebody, which we are not at this time.

Settings, yes, we'll want to automatically start the recording. So this will actually record your webinar as you're hosting it.

It's always great to have a backup. And then we ourselves have been leveraging the replay webinars and actually sending that to the non-attendees.

The audio you'll have a phone number with some of the pricing packages. It will be like a web only base.

So that's up to you about that. I'm just going to skip some of these things right now.

Branding and colors. So let's add in our logos, I just uploaded those two logos. So we've got our LifePro logo to the left side, and then just a nice image on that registration page.

Scroll down, you can get crazy with this, you know, calm down. We're just going to choose the gray and blue for right now.

But yes, you can customize some of the colors on your landing page. And then there it goes. It shows you a preview of that.

Let's scroll down here, share the event. So, this is the most important part. The thing that I'm highlighting right now, registration URL, this is the URL that you're going to market.

Whether it's through email, Facebook, all of that good stuff, that's the URL that you're driving people to so you can get people to register for it.

Your webinar ID, let's move down to registrations. These are some more advanced features.

I'm just going to kind of skip over that for right now. You can track your total registrations.

Email Notifications

1. Reply To Name
2. Confirmation Email
3. Multiple Reminder Emails
4. Follow-Up Emails to Attendees and Non-Attendees

Let's click on emails. This is super important right now, reply to, so this is what the name's going to come out as.

For us, if we were to email you right now, this would be LifePro events. You could do your company or your personal name, whatever you want to do there.

Reminder email click that. And yes, we want to send as many reminder emails as possible.

What we recommend one hour before, one day before, and then we're going to add in another one, we're going to do six hours before the event.

Basically, the morning or early afternoon. So again, three reminders right before that live webinar, because people forget.

You definitely want to have that in there. They already have the copy for you.

You can add in some custom texts if you'd like, but we're just going to save that. Confirmation emails. Yes.

We want to send confirmation emails. So when somebody enters in their information, you want an email to go immediately to them.

Again, they already create it for you. You can add in some copy if you'd like to.

Follow up emails now. So, these two options right here, click this one. Yes. We want to send follow-up emails, not only to attendees, but to non-attendees.

This is for attendees. It already has the subject line. You can customize that.

What you would want to do right here is add in your call to action saying, "Hey, if you already didn't book an appointment, you should definitely do it. Give me a call, go to this URL."

Whatever it may be, this should be your call to action, click save.

And then to absentees, of course, yes. Send another email to those folks who missed the webinars.

So again, maybe directing them to a replay of your webinar, inviting them to the next one, or just skipping ahead and saying, "Hey, book your consultation today."

Click save and engage with your attendees.

Here are a few additional options. You get to survey, polls. You can do some PDF worksheets. If you have any of that to interact with the people who are viewing your webinar.

I'm going to skip over that for right now, but it's definitely a recommended option to engage, make this an engaging webinar with your audience.

Let's scroll up here and now let's see what the registration page looks like. So here we are. This is our official registration page.

This is where you're driving traffic to. So people can register for your webinar.

We've got the title we've created, the time, all the descriptions, the bullet points, that image that we uploaded, and then they enter in their information and they click register and get that confirmation email.

Now that we've got this built, let's show you how to market this webinar.

Webinar Promotion

1. Organic Methods
2. Paid Methods

Many advisors think the only way to drive traffic to webinar pages is through paid ads. And that's simply not the case. I made this worksheet for you guys.

It's on this page. You can scroll down and actually download this resource and fill it in with us. But I just to show you all of the options that you have available for you.

These are some of the organic methods. Something that to promote your webinar without having to spend any money.

The first one here, emails. Think about your database right now. Think about all the prospects and clients you've accumulated throughout the years and send them that registration URL.

SEO. This could be on your website. You can literally have events and event tab on your website now.

Facebook, I'm not talking about paid ads. I'm talking about your business page, personal page, Twitter, LinkedIn, all these other resources for you.

And yes, there are paid methods. The first one here is social advertising.

That's the one LifePro can help you out with. We do Facebook advertising for our advisors.

That's how we're driving most of the traffic there, but I just wanted to show you and look, native advertising, banner ads, search engine marketing.

There's a myriad of different methods out there. And I want you to download this and just start thinking about how you can market your webinar right away.

I hope you found that to be valuable. I hope you found that information to be valuable now.

Everything that I just went over, LifePro can actually help you out with, so even some of the pricing options that I talked about.

We have a master account where we can create a sub-account for you, where the prices will drop.

And if you need help going through that webinar and how I was copying and pasting the title on the descriptions, we have all that tested copy for you.

So, we can actually supply you with the bullet points, with the titles, even with the presentations themselves, so you don't have to create anything really.

We can help you all throughout the process, and we can help you market it. So, whether it be through emails or the Facebook advertising that I talked about, LifePro can help you with it.

So, if you're interested, if you want LifePro to help you do all of these for you, I have a button down below this video.

If you want to click that, fill out your information and a representative will be in touch with you to talk more about how to get started on online webinars.

Thank you very much.

Additional Resources

1. GoToWebinar
2. Zoom
3. Webinar Promotion Worksheet