Looking to Build Your Brand as an Influencer? 5 Reasons Webinars Can Help

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Thanks to social media, blogging, and other digital tools, influencer marketing has become a widely accepted and popular form of advertising. Major companies will often partner with influencers in an effort to strengthen their own brand image or to reach a new audience.

But, if you’re trying to become an influencer yourself, building your own personal brand will prove essential to landing these lucrative partnerships. By showcasing your personality and providing something unique to your particular niche, you will build a loyal following, which in turn will lead to new marketing opportunities.

While building your own influencer brand can seem overwhelming at first, there are plenty of resources to help you strengthen your personal image. You don’t have to limit yourself to social media. With the help of webinars, you can build an even stronger brand image — here’s how:

1) Demonstrate Expertise

Many influencers build a strong brand based on the unique knowledge and perspective they provide to their niche. Though social media provides a relatively limited space to share your expertise, a webinar can serve as more of a long-form knowledge-sharing opportunity.

According to Jakub Zielinski, senior content marketing specialist at ClickMeeting, “Almost anyone can say they’re an expert, but very few personal brands actually have the content to back it up. Webinars offer proof that you know what you’re talking about and that it actually works. When choosing topics, note what questions pop up in the Q&A or chat sessions. Use those to create future webinars.”

You can enhance your ability to showcase expertise by using a webinar platform that allows you to screen share from your computer to give audiences a “behind the scenes” look or a private chat feature that allows users to submit questions that you answer on the fly. These extra touches will go a long way in showing that you actually know what you are talking about.

2) Showcase Your Personality

Influencers don’t gain a large audience simply because of their knowledge. Your personality — your way of sharing informative or entertaining content — plays a significant role in whether or not someone chooses to follow you online.

Webinars serve as an ideal opportunity to build upon the personal attributes you’ve already shared through social media posts. It doesn’t matter whether your writing tends to lean toward snarky or inspirational.

When you stand in front of a video screen and speak in an enthusiastic manner that matches your other messaging, you’ll make a powerful impression that strengthens your personal branding.

Giving your content a ‘personal’ touch is always key to building influencer relationships. When brand partners and followers see your face and hear your voice, they’ll form a much stronger personal connection with you.

3) Promotional Opportunities

Influencers don’t always need to come up with webinar content for their own personal brand. Many companies are actively looking to partner with influencers to host their webinars.

As Hira Saeed, Founder of Tech Geeks Pakistan, notes, “Influencer webinars are amazingly effective for breaking into new audiences. A successful partnership doesn’t require an existing audience in that niche – the influencer is connecting your content with their audience.”

Because of this, you should consider each webinar you do a trial run for landing other webinar hosting opportunities. The more engaging you are as you present your own content, the more likely another company will want to reach out to have you host their webinar. As you perfect your hosting skills, you’ll get more partnership opportunities, which can lead to a big uptick in revenue.

4) Simplify Content Generation

Consistently posting quality content can sometimes be a challenge for would-be influencers. Though post frequency tends to vary by industry, there’s no denying that followers of social media influencers are constantly craving new content.

Studies have found that the more you post, the more engagement you’ll get — with some Instagram users seeing likes increase by 13 times and followers increase by 56 percent just by posting at least seven times per week.

Webinars can serve as a way of burgeoning your current content output. Before the event, you can make promotional posts to ensure your followers know about it. After the event, you can save the video to YouTube or share short highlights on your Instagram feed.

You could even repurpose information you shared during the webinar to craft new posts. This way, even those who can’t attend your webinar will still have opportunities to engage with your content.

5) Talk Directly to Fans

Q&A sessions often play a big role in webinars, and these create the perfect opportunity to speak directly to your followers and help them become even more engaged. This is especially true of “micro-influencers” who have less than 100,000 followers.

As Luis Congdon explains, “Unlike big accounts that blow up and render the owner overwhelmed and unable to respond back to their fans, smaller accounts grow because of intimacy. Fans of smaller accounts like these accounts not just because of the content, but also because of the connection.”

Webinars are another avenue to foster this connection, which can prove quite appealing to brands. When businesses see that you have a highly engaged audience that is relatively small, they’ll be more willing to take a chance on an advertising partnership. When they think you can deliver a stronger ROI, you won’t have to have a huge audience to make a living as an influencer.

Building a Stronger Brand

Whether you’re trying to sell your own products and services or simply build your social media following so you can score more lucrative marketing partnerships, webinars can go a long way in helping you accomplish these goals.

As you share relevant and entertaining experiences through live video streaming, your audience will become more engaged than ever before.