Conducting Successful Webinars For Lead Generation

According to Inside Sales, 73% of B2B sales and marketing leaders consider webinars the best way to generate high-quality leads. A study by Curata has pointed out that 79% of buyers prefer sharing information when invited to register for webinar events. Other studies reveal that 87% of marketers consider webinars as an effective lead generation strategy. 

Now, people are more interested in webinars to learn and develop new skills. Hence, now is the best time to launch your webinars and get more from your lead generation efforts.

Best Lead Generation Strategies For Webinars 

You should check the current strategies and revise them if necessary to generate more sales-ready leads. Here we have compiled some practical strategies you can add to the mix before and after launching webinars.      

1. Defining Ideal Customer Profiles

Start with defining the customer profile whom you want to register for webinars. The easiest way to identify ideal customer profiles is to use these insights on your targeted audience.

• Prospects you want to send invites
• Choice of topic and subtopics
• Duration of the event
• Marketing channels to promote the event
• Presenters and speakers of the event
• Key points to feature on the registration page

Once you have identified the customer profiles for your webinar, create a list of people who are likely to make purchases later.

2. Creating webinar content for target audience

The next step in converting a webinar into a lead generation machine is to work on the content. Focus on visitors who are interested in your products, emails, social media posts, or website. Then, optimize your webinar content based on those profiles and their problem areas. Position your product or services as solutions to those pain points. Remember that your ultimate goal is more significant than generating webinar registrants or attendees. You need the webinar attendees to invest in your product or service. 

Besides their problem areas, you need to decide the formats that appeal to your customers. Here are the three most effective formats of webinars and how they work:

• Educational webinars are the most popular format. These webinars are used to show step-by-step actions or tips to solve your prospect’s pain point. Webinar titles containing “how-to” generate a higher number of registrations and attendance rates.
• Product demo webinars are perfect to target people from the later-stage of the buying journey. These leads demand detailed information about the product or services before making purchases. Product demo webinars engage attendees by demonstrating how to make the best use of products to solve problems. Instead of adding sales pitch, focus on creating training, tutorials, and workshop content for these webinars.
• Case studies are a useful format to nurture sales-ready leads with informative product details. 42% of B2B customers see case study webinars as valuable in the later stage of the buying cycle.

3. Promoting Webinars

There are various ways to promote webinars strategically to target your prospects. Here are few effective ways to publicize webinars:

Email Marketing:

Use your email list and segment based on your ideal customer profiles. Create topics based on profiles, job titles, job functions, and industries. Create an email cadence and creative content and automation to schedule emails to the targeted lead segments.

Social Media:

Create social media promotions that resonate with targeted leads with design teams. While publicizing your webinars, choose channels mostly used by your targeted registrants. LinkedIn and Twitter are top-picks for webinar promotions. Focus on other media your ideal customers frequently engage with similar webinars.

Other than email and social media, you can also promote webinars via paid advertising. Paid advertising is an excellent channel to target people who are not your customers. It also helps control your marketing budget and promote as per your goals.

4. Set Up A Webinar-centric Lead Scoring Protocol

Webinar data contains valuable information about the status of your leads. Set up a webinar-focused lead scoring model to qualify leads before sharing with the sales team. Assign values to leads based on set criteria to identify sales-ready leads. While setting criteria for scoring webinar leads, take these determining factors into account:

• Behavioral data indicates the level of engagement and interest in the subject matter. Behavioral data consists of duration, history, Q&A, feedback, content downloads, and social media engagement.
• Registration data includes signup data and necessary details such as job title, departments, firm size, industry.
• Miscellaneous data includes firmographic data, technographic data, and purchase history.
• Do you have an existing lead scoring protocol in place? Add these webinar-centric lead scoring protocols to score your attendees.

5. Segmenting Webinar Leads

Segment your webinar leads based on behavioral data points that point toward content consumption. 

• Segment leads based on content consumption to help your sales team qualify leads. Create a sales pitch for people who watched 100%, 50%, and who asked questions during webinars.
• If it is a product-focused webinar, segment leads based on viewing duration data and use the data to create detailed pitch. Also, create a full demo for people who asked for a demo during webinars and watched the entire webinar. Thus, you can save your efforts for viewers who closed the window after a few minutes of watching.
• People who watched more than 50% and recorded versions of webinars are already interested in your solutions. Add these people to your nurturing track. Guide your sales team to create a lead follow-up process for leads that viewed more than 50%.   

6. Post-webinar Lead Nurturing

If you already have developed nurture plans for different segments of webinar leads, let us show how you can add more power to it. Use these tried and proven effective tactics to engage unqualified leads.

• Provide on-demand versions to leads who asked for them, as well as anyone who missed the event but has shown interest in your solution. The on-demand version helps focus new leads with your content.
• Offer post-webinar relevant content to leads who engage in your live Q&A section of webinars. Create nurture tracks with feedback surveys and relevant content. 
• You can use downloadable, blog, and video solution content to educate, inform, and nurture those webinar attendee leads. Do not start working on new content before checking existing content repositories. 
• You can repackage existing and top-performing webinar content into infographics and e-books. Help webinar attendees to solve their problems and challenges by using downloadable content they can keep handy. 
• Leverage email marketing to send repackaged content to targeted leads and nurture through the sales funnel.

7. Finally, Follow Up With Webinar Attendees

Follow up with leads that are warm and enthusiastic about your products and information to turn them into sales-ready leads. Use thank you emails containing content links and surveys seeking feedback on webinars. Follow up practices can improve lead quality and indicate people who might participate in your future webinars.

Conclusion

We are here for you if all these tips and techniques on generating leads from a webinar sound like hard work. We can help you convert your webinars into lead generation machines. From strategies, execution, to managing webinar campaigns – we can start from scratch to success. It starts from a simple “Hello” at experts@marrinadecisions.com. Or else, you can DM us via Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.