To get familiar with webinar marketing, we will first define a webinar. The word “webinar” is a combination of the words “web” and “seminar,” which shows what it means! A seminar, lecture, or presentation online and live (in real-time) can be called a “webinar.” Webinars can provide a wide variety of content, such as training (online courses, online classes, training sessions, workshops, masterclasses, etc.), in-house training (for your employees), and product demonstrations (demonstrating your product or service).
Marketing webinar
In this article, we will review marketing webinars, which typically feature educational content, industry insight, or product or software marketing. By posing a question, we will examine the article’s main topic.
Why are webinars an essential part of your marketing strategy?
Webinars can be an excellent tool for generating a communication chain, especially for B2B marketers. Today, webinars are a very effective and essential part of marketing strategies, replacing face-to-face meetings, events, and trade shows. With a little tweaking, you can achieve the same marketing and sales goals through webinars. For example, you can use webinars to:
- Build relationships with current customers, potential customers, and industry peers.
- Create your intellectual agenda by sharing your industry expertise.
- Create a communication chain by getting the contact information of the webinar participants.
- Income, it goes without saying that the ultimate goal of forming a communication chain is to convert them into revenue.
To start creating a webinar marketing strategy, we need to address another fundamental question.
What is a webinar funnel?
Just as you think about the marketing and sales funnel when planning events and trade shows, you should also consider the webinar funnel when planning your webinars. Potential webinar attendees make up your webinar funnel. Here, we emphasize “potential”.
Because attendees who sign up for your webinar but don’t attend are still an essential part of your webinar funnel. Your ultimate goal should be to move your potential webinar attendees down the entire funnel and convert them into customers. We can divide the funnel into three main parts:
1- Top of the funnel
You are This section is strengthened before the webinar date by creating a webinar marketing strategy. That time when you promote your webinar on all relevant channels and sources.
2- Middle of the funnel
By proving that your brand can add value during the webinar, you’ll have a better chance of driving your webinar attendees to the middle of the funnel. Depending on the nature of the webinar and your webinar marketing strategy, this can be a soft push (simply by sharing industry expertise) or a hard push (showcasing your product, service, or software).
But remember that your webinar funnel also includes potential attendees who registered for the webinar but could not join for whatever reason. You can still drive these potential attendees down your webinar funnel by sending the webinar recording and even a series of promotional emails after the event.
3- The bottom of the funnel
Suppose you get positive responses to your follow-up informative and educational emails. In that case, you have a real chance of getting your webinar attendees down the funnel and converting them into customers!
This is where your sales strategy comes into play. After answering the above question, we want to answer this question: “How to run a successful webinar?” Here are some critical steps and webinar marketing best practices to help you create a successful webinar.
Webinar Marketing Best Practices
Design a strategic plan for your webinar!
Having clear goals and personas before the webinar will help you identify the correct type of content to prepare and help you fine-tune your marketing plan. Reach out to your sales, support, and after-sales teams to discover what problems your prospects and customers face today.
Providing solutions for these problems should be the focus of your strategic plan. If you ignore this step, your efforts may go to waste because you’re producing great content but marketing it to the wrong audience! You may also be creating content that attracts an audience that is not a good fit for your company’s strategic goals. So, keep your business bottom line clear from the start and at the core of your webinar marketing strategy. As part of this step, you should also determine the expected attendees and identify the webinar software or platform that best suits your business needs.
Choose your date and duration.
Give yourself at least one month before the marketing webinar to prepare the webinar and ensure that you provide quality content that adds value to the audience. One of the key findings from the State of Webinars report over the past two years is that Tuesday is the best day to host a webinar. Of course, as with most metrics, you should experiment and see what works for you.
Run tests for different days of the week and times of day to see what works best for your audience and region. It would help if you also ran tests for the ideal duration of your webinars. The average time of webinars in the past years is reported to be 84 minutes. Your audience may prefer shorter, more rather than rich and long content, longcontent that meets the needs of the audience.
Your content should match the target audience you identified in your strategic plan. It should also be in tune with current times and industry trends. You can use a quick search or Google Trends to understand the needs of your audience. Your content should be specific to you and your brand. Remember that hundreds of thousands of webinars are relevant to your business, so yours needs to stand out. Conduct a quick competitive analysis to identify knowledge gaps you can fill.
Set up a login page.
As previously stated, generating leads is one of the key benefits of hosting a marketing webinar. To get it, you need to have a landing page that is easy to use, clear, and comprehensive. Enter the fields you need to add chains to your database (e.g. name, company, email, phone number, industry, etc.).
Work with your design team to ensure the page is visually appealing; poorly designed pages have been proven to lead to poor communication! On this page, also include all the essential information related to the webinars clearly and concisely. Highlight the date, time, and speakers specifically. This is the critical information your potential customers will be looking for.
Consider a marketing plan for your webinar.
Once you have chosen the webinar date, it will determine how much time you have to prepare and promote your webinar. Remember, a great webinar with great content means nothing if you don’t have an audience! Promoting your webinar is as essential as preparing for it. Create a multi-channel marketing plan to announce your webinar.
Consider the following channels: social media marketing, advertising, influencer marketing, email marketing, and paid partnerships. Don’t forget your network is an important marketing channel here. Your connections on LinkedIn, your followers on Twitter, fans of your Facebook brand page, etc., probably want to hear what you say. After all, they have followed you this far for a reason!
A pro tip: if you host a marketing webinar with an influencer, business partner, or expert in your industry, you’ll automatically increase your potential audience by using them.
Prepare presentation content with visual images.
Start the program by introducing yourself and your company; note that you can make a lot of sales in this section, so consider the best introduction! You don’t want to lose your audience from the start by giving them the impression that you’re here to talk about yourself or push your product.
Focus on the value and service you intend to provide and leave the decision and choice to your participants! You can also encourage them to stay until the end by promising a reward that will be announced at the end of the webinar in exchange for quizzes and answering questions.
Often, we spend so much time fine-tuning the content of presentations that we neglect an equally important step: presenting that content in a visually appealing way! The average time that participants spend on webinar content is 53 minutes. Therefore, visually appealing content can be a great asset here.
Engage the audience
Yes, visually appealing content can help keep an audience’s attention. But you also need to engage your audience actively! Standard tools for this are interactive polls, questions, and answers raised throughout the webinar. Not only is it a great way to keep your audience engaged, but it’s also a great way to create exciting insights on the spot.
Webinar platforms that allow participants to talk to each other via text chat also help with audience engagement. Finally, giving rewards or gifts is another means of interaction. If you can offer your audience a free offer, do it! For example, you can make paid content accessible for attendees or give them a free demo of your product or service. Doing this leaves a good and sweet taste in their mouth!
Test run
Find a place where you can control noise levels. This can be quite a challenge; do your best to ensure your setup goes as smoothly as possible with minimal disruption. Test your webinar. Practice with a colleague or friend and test before the event. Do a mock presentation to ensure it doesn’t exceed your allotted time for the webinar, and leave room for questions and answers. If you are hosting a webinar, you should practice with your co-hosts to create a cohesive flow.
Start the webinar with notes before it starts.
Clearly explain to your audience the format you have chosen for your webinar. For example, explain how the questions should be asked in the webinar. Will this question be by show of hands, in a text or voice chat at the end of the webinar? Is there a question and answer after each challenge or at the end if it is in panel format?
If you choose interactive features (polls, etc.), you should explain how it works initially, rather than interrupting the webinar with instructions. If you’d like your audience to tweet about your webinar using a specific hashtag, mention it at the beginning!
Don’t forget your attendees after the webinar.
Our funnel and webinar section mentioned the importance of driving potential webinar participants to the end of the funnel through education and awareness. After the webinar, share a recording of your marketing webinar. This will keep you in the minds of your audience, and they may refer to you in the future. In the same email or series of emails, start growing and educating your webinar attendees by sharing more information about your brand, product, and service and how it can benefit them.
The more you can personalize it (by personality or industry), the better your chances of getting a positive response. It would help if you also created separate email streams for attendees who joined your webinar and potential attendees who signed up but didn’t join.
Your goal should be to nurture and grow as many leads as possible so your sales team eventually converts them into customers. While this step happens after the webinar, you should prepare it in advance during your webinar planning to ensure there are no delays. Set up automatic sending of emails so that the attendee list is loaded after the webinar.
Now that we’ve covered all aspects of webinar marketing, you’re probably wondering which online class-enabled tool or webinar platform to use for your next webinar?! There are many different webinar platforms, each with its advantages and limitations. In