Webinars engage users, showcase your brand's expertise, and are great go-to offers to nurture leads further along in their journey. You can use webinars for any stage of the funnel, so long as your topic is educational and valuable to your audience.
Webinars can be used strategically at all stages in the buyer's journey to improve your lead generation performance. The lead generation potential of a well-planned, well-executed webinar is huge.
Here are tips on how to plan and run a great webinar that produces high-quality, engaged leads at all stages of the funnel.
When coordinating a webinar for your company, the biggest advantage you can give yourself is time. Nothing screws up a webinar like having to rush everything at the end. Plan properly by backing up your webinar strategy to give yourself at least an 8-12-week runway to get things done. This will allow you plenty of time to configure your presentation format and platform. It also ensures you can promote it to your audience with enough time to optimize your campaign as data comes in.
Build a comprehensive plan for your webinar that includes:
Expert Tip: The deadline clock truly only starts running the moment you push your registration page live that includes a specific date and time. You can always push it back further if you need to before that. The extra time is worth a well thought-through strategy. Allow enough time in advance to have created a sound strategy with ample time to promote the webinar and optimize your campaign for better results as data comes in.
Technology can make or break your webinars. Avoid day-of technology mishaps by selecting a high-quality webinar platform to host your presentation. Some of the most popular platforms are GoToWebinar and WebEx, and there are many other good options as well.
When selecting a webinar platform, consider key features like:
Make sure you test your platform-of-choice rigorously before the live webinar presentation. Be sure to schedule a dress rehearsal a few days before the webinar to work out any technical kinks.
Today’s B2B buyers are not particularly trusting of companies that wish to do business with them. Studies show that by partnering with an outside organization, user trust will increase for the webinar. Try partnering with a complementary service provider or partner, or even one of your happy clients, who can help bring your message to life.
You'll also drastically increase your potential audience reach. Showcase the logo and headshot for all presenters, include this information in your promotional assets, and work in tandem with the other organization on promotion.
Set up your webinar registration form with lead generation in mind. Lead generation isn’t just about generating a high number of leads. You need qualified leads with valuable data attached if you want your efforts to result in closed deals.
Configure your form fields to collect information that is most useful to your sales and marketing teams, but that is not overly burdensome or pushy for your registrants to provide. Use drop-down fields (over open text fields) to easily segment and analyze your contacts later on.
Some valuable form fields to consider including:
If you’re marketing to a group that includes leads who are already in your database, use progressive profiling on your forms to gather new, additional information about your registrants.
Don’t stop there. Use these insights to tailor the content of the presentation to align perfectly with your audience and what they’re struggling with. During the webinar, conduct audience polls to gather additional information that will be valuable to your sales and marketing teams. Consider adjusting your post-webinar lead nurturing strategy based on the insights that you gain.
Get the word out about your webinar by any strategic means that make sense for your industry, audience, resources, and budget. Build a promotion strategy upfront that includes promotional assets like:
Make sure that someone from your company other than the presenter is available to support and moderate your webinar. The moderator’s role is to keep the presentation organized, facilitate Q&A and polls, and to address any technical issues that attendees report, such as an issue with the sound. Your moderator should open up the webinar by introducing him or herself, the presenters, and your company. The moderator should cover things like:
Hosting an interactive, live Q&A session at the end of your webinar is a great way to engage attendees and showcase your company's knowledge. Develop some pre-planned questions and thoughtful answers in advance that your moderator can ask in case your audience needs some help getting the ball rolling.
One of the most valuable parts of a webinar is the lead generation potential of the recording. When you record your webinar presentation, you can immediately flip your offering from “register for the live webinar” to “watch it on-demand.” This allows your webinar to generate leads for you perpetually.
Be sure to create post-webinar versions of all of your promotional assets, including your webinar registration page and any CTAs throughout your website and blogs. As soon as the live presentation is complete, update all of the assets to their post-webinar version.
If, for any reason, your initial recording is not useable, simply re-record the presentation separately, and use that version as your on-demand offer.
At the conclusion of your webinar, be sure to give attendees an opportunity to continue the conversation and further engage with your brand. Do this by including a call-to-action that directs users to a related offering, such as an ebook or consultation on a similar or related topic. You’ll want to promote an offer that is the natural next step in their buyer journey. If you are hosting a top-of-the-funnel webinar, consider promoting a middle-of-funnel offer, etc.
Build a lead scoring model specifically for your webinar registrants and attendees. This will help you identify which of your webinar attendees are the most engaged with your brand, so that you can hand off the warmest webinar leads to your sales team.
Include scores for:
After the webinar, be sure to follow up with all your attendees. Make good on any promises that your moderator made, such as sending the slides or the recording, and include a CTA to encourage attendees to convert on the follow-up offer.
Use one or more lead nurturing campaigns to deliver tailored content to your webinar attendees that aligns with their goals and needs. Consider setting up separate lead nurturing campaigns based on the different segmentation criteria that you collected on the registration page. For example, consider building two separate lead nurturing tracks for two different industries. Or, create one “general” lead nurturing track and one industry-specific track for a specific audience.
Continuously monitor the data that comes in as your lead nurturing campaigns run. Make sure that elements of your lead nurturing campaign, such as email opens and clicks, are built into your lead scoring model.
If webinars are working well for you and your organization has a good handle on running them smoothly, try taking things up another notch by building a webinar series. Use data to determine what topics would be of the most interest, and then use coherent branding to promote the series as a whole. Combine promotion of the overall campaign with promotion of each individual webinar, and you’re almost certain to get continually improving registration numbers throughout the life of the campaign.
Webinars are a powerful tool when used strategically. Follow the best practices above to take your webinar lead generation to the next level.
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