05
Webinars
Delivering a qualification rate of up to 40%, webinars are an essential tool for marketers to master. They’re relevant all the way from top-of-funnel lead generation, right through to qualifying contacts as they get ready to buy.
Creating a range of webinars is the most robust approach, including:
Roundtables
Masterclasses
Live Q&As
Chat shows
Product webinars
Customer success stories
Webinars help you create authority within your market and boost brand equity while educating your prospects – a real workhorse of a format. You’ll need to invest in a platform, but the webinars themselves are cost-effective to produce and run, and can easily function as evergreen content.
There are a lot of elements that go into building a great webinar, from ideation to content creation, production, and promotion.
Firstly, map the goals of your webinar: what are your key performance indicators (KPIs), who are you trying to engage with, and where are they in their buying journey?
When deciding themes and creating a program plan, use your team’s content strategy as a guide to which pain points that your audience is interested in solving (and how you solve them.)
That way, your messaging and value proposition stays consistent – and you can be confident that your webinar is delivering value.
Certain webinar ideas are better suited to achieving engagement than others, such as:
01. A detailed exploration of a niche topic with a fresh angle
02. A panel discussion covering an important issue in your industry
03. A thorough, example-driven ‘how to’ tutorial with a subject matter expert (SME)
04. An interview with industry thought leaders
05. An outcomes-focused conversation with your customers
Make your topic specific, and ensure you’re clearly outlining the expertise of your speakers and what actionable benefits the audience will gain by attending. Webinars aren’t something that you throw at your entire database. A scattergun approach might get more sign-ups and, yes, the numbers may look good – but sign-ups aren’t leads.
Top tip: Use the psychological principles of the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and Loss Aversion in your promotion to build a sense of urgency and convince your audience that they’re losing a huge learning opportunity if they don’t attend.
It’s vital that you grab your audience’s attention in the first few minutes and encourage engagement throughout the webinar to ensure they stick around and absorb the full discussion.
You can do this with interactive features, such as polls, chat, or a live Q&A, so your audience can interact with you and your speakers in real time. According to the webinar platform ON24, customer engagement with webinars is doubling year on year – it’s what sets them apart from standard videos.
Gathering feedback is a great way to measure your success and improve future broadcasts. Have you been speaking to the right people? Are you converting the right leads? Is this webinar topic hitting the right message? You need to be able to show that your webinar delivered on its targets and provided the right experience for your audience.
Building extra content around our webinars extends their value and means you can use each broadcast to support more touchpoints.
For example, a blog post detailing the highlights can contribute to your website traffic and pop up in an email nurture campaign.
You can also atomize the video into bite-sized chunks to share on social media, linking to the on-demand version.
When combined with other marketing channels, webinars are the perfect way to reach wider audiences and maximize exposure by tagging in partners and influential speakers.
Including related content resources in an email follow-up is also a great way to broaden your nurturing opportunities. If the prospect attended, you’ll already have a good handle on their intent and interest in your topic (some webinar platforms also track audience engagement data for more nuanced lead scoring.)
