In previous posts on this blog, I’ve frequently mentioned the importance of knowing how to market yourself and your business. One way you can do this is by running occasional webinars to share your expertise and engage with potential customers.
I’ll be honest—when I first started doing webinars, I was skeptical. It felt like just another marketing tactic that everyone was doing, which usually means it stops working. But I was wrong about this one. Webinars have stuck around because they actually work, particularly for consultants.
Add Value to Your Marketing with Webinars
The use of webinars in management consulting can serve two important purposes:
- As a marketing exercise, webinars allow you to engage your leads in an interactive way.
- Webinars are a great way to share valuable information and insights which your leads and/or existing customers can put to practical use.
Webinars are not complicated to organise and execute, although since they are live events, the amount of planning required should not be underestimated.
In terms of the nuts and bolts, all you need is a platform upon which to host your management-consulting webinar and an application on which to build and display your presentation (PowerPoint is fine for this).
As long as you can put together a professional and informative slide-deck and possess the skills to present your content in an engaging and interactive manner, you’ll be able to run a webinar that adds value for those who attend.
Why Consultants Specifically Benefit from Webinars
Here’s something I’ve noticed over the years. A webinar consultant—by which I mean a consultant who uses webinars as part of their marketing—has a significant advantage over one who relies solely on written content or cold outreach.
The reason is simple: consulting is fundamentally a relationship business. People hire consultants they trust, and trust comes from seeing how someone thinks, how they handle questions, whether they actually know their stuff or are just good at writing blog posts.
Written content can establish credibility. But a webinar lets potential clients experience what it might be like to work with you. They see you think on your feet. They hear your voice. They get a sense of your personality.
A guy I know who consults on warehouse operations told me his conversion rate from webinar attendees to paying clients is something like five times higher than from his email list. Five times. That’s not a small difference.
Management-consulting Webinars: More than Just Information-sharing
The use of well-presented webinars in management consulting can deliver a host of benefits for your marketing effectiveness, including:
- Demonstration of your authenticity as a knowledgeable expert in your niche
- Identification and understanding of problems faced by your prospects
- The ability to outline potential solutions and discuss them interactively with leads/customers
- Engagement and rapport-building in a live environment
- Sharing of valuable information which your prospects and customers can take away immediately.
Compared with other forms of marketing activity, webinars get you closer to your audience and can create more buzz about your business, due to their event-based nature.
The Webinar Consultant Approach: What Actually Works
I want to share a few things I’ve learned about what separates effective webinars from forgettable ones.
Pick a narrow topic. The instinct is to go broad—cover everything you know about supply chain optimization or change management or whatever your specialty is. Resist this. A webinar on “Three Inventory Mistakes That Cost Mid-Size Retailers Millions” will outperform “Introduction to Inventory Management” every time. Specificity signals expertise.
Give away your best stuff. Some consultants worry that if they share too much in a free webinar, prospects won’t need to hire them. The opposite is true. When you demonstrate real expertise and provide genuine value, people think “if this is what they give away for free, imagine what the paid engagement looks like.”
Leave room for questions. I’ve seen consultants pack 45 minutes of content into a 45-minute webinar. Bad idea. The Q&A portion is often where real connections happen. It’s where prospects reveal their actual problems—which tells you exactly how to follow up with them.
Don’t end with a hard sell. Mention your services, sure. But if your webinar was genuinely valuable, you don’t need to be pushy. People will reach out.
Build Your Public Speaking Expertise
Finally, when you’re just starting out, the use of webinars in your management consulting activity is a great way to practice and hone your presentation skills. The beauty of webinars is that you are working with a live audience, but don’t have quite as much pressure as when presenting face-to-face. Hence you can really focus in on the conversational element of presenting, without having to think too much about your visual presence.
This is actually a bigger deal than it might seem. Many consultants I’ve worked with are brilliant one-on-one but freeze up in front of groups. Webinars give you a safe space to develop that skill. You’re in your own environment, you can have notes in front of you, and if something goes wrong… well, nobody can see you sweat.
In future posts, I’ll share some practical tips for running effective webinars in management consulting. For now though, I hope the benefits I’ve outlined will persuade you to consider the use of webinars as part of your personal brand-building strategy.