When a real estate professional builds an email database of prospects, the common thing to do is only email them newsletters or new listings.  There is no interactivity in this, and so it limits your ability to build relationships with these people.  It’s been shown the didactic mode of teaching (IE teacher talks, students listen) so universally prevalent in our schools and marketing in general is far less effective than engaging learners in an interactive fashion.  Having a webinar (IE web based seminar) can be a very effective way of informing your prospects by interactively engaging them.  By doing this you get to learn more about your prospects needs and wants, helping you better understand them and your target market in general.

Here’s why interactive learning far exceeds didactic learning and why you should use it.  The University of Toronto’s renowned Faculty of Education OISE (Ontario Institute For Studies In Education) once published an academic journal exploring the use of drama as a means of educating students.  In one study a French class used role playing.  Students were given a scenario in which they often faced a moral or otherwise difficult dilemma, and they had to talk about how they would resolve this dilemma, but they had to do so while speaking in French.  At least one female student was given the following scenario: “You are a working closely with one of your current professors as a paid research assistant.  It’s the Christmas season, and this professor gives you a gift.  It’s a very expensive, very beautiful silk scarf that perfectly matches your winter coat.  When you tell your boyfriend about it, he gets very upset, saying this professor is coming on to you and has inappropriately crossed the line between teacher and student.  He demands you give the scarf back to him.  What do you do?”.  It was found that this interactive role playing technique made these student’s learning rate absolutely skyrocket.

So when you begin creating your webinar’s content, think about some of the things you would like to know about your target market.  Some things you can ask on the registration form, and some during the webinar.

One of my associates has a business doing email campaigns for clients.  He has noticed the prospects most apt to work with him are the ones who have done in-house email campaigns themselves already.  So he likes to ask his attendees on the registration form whether or not they’ve done their own email campaigns.  For those that have, he likes to ask some of them during the webinar to talk about their experience with email campaigns.  This interaction not only engages these prospects by getting them to give their opinion about email marketing, but it also serves as unbiased reporting of great interest to those attending the webinar who haven’t tried email marketing.  Asking registrants this particular question is a key way he funnels prospects: he knows the ones who answer “yes” are better, more qualified prospects than those who indicate “no”.