How to Make the Most of Webinars for B2B Lead Generation
Webinars remain a powerful marketing channel for B2B lead and revenue generation. It’s an incredible tool for running several types of interactive online events for building strong relationships with potential customers. Running frequent webinars can help humanise B2B brand experiences. The content format is ideal for building thought leadership and for generating quality leads for your B2B business.
Looking back at the various ways that businesses used its platform over the course of 2019, ClickMeeting’s State of Webinars 2020 report highlights a litany of viable types of online presentations, ranging from educational content to product demos and collaborative meetings.
Webinars can create magic when it comes to the time businesses spend in interacting with their prospects. What other visual content format manages to keep your audience paying attention to what you have to say for nearly an hour straight?
Running frequent webinars can help humanizs B2B brand experiences. The content format is ideal for building thought leadership.
Are you still wondering how to weave a solid webinar strategy that gets you recurring leads for your B2B business? Let’s understand how.
Draw up a Plan
When looking to create an impressive presentation, you need a good one month to do the initial preparation. It takes a while before your audience will see those promotional messages and start signing up. Here are some things to remember:
1. Define the type of webinar you wish to host: a PowerPoint presentation, a talk, a panel discussion, or an expert interview.
2. Create a strategic plan that includes the expected number of attendees and the overall business outcome from the activity.
3. It’s also essential to create a webinar workflow. Make a list of every task that goes into setting up and implementing the webinar.
4. Do away with any form of noise in the webinar room. It’s necessary to make sure no one enters while the presentation is underway.
5. Do a test run of your webinar. You can set up everything and get in-house participants to do a mock presentation.
Since a webinar is a personalised form of brand interaction, you need to take care of every small detail. If you want to achieve the desired results, then focus on quality at every step.
Brainstorm a Relevant Topic
Like any other content marketing piece, a webinar requires you to be audience-centric. Make a list of audience pain points before coming up with a topic that deals with the most critical one. The idea behind running a successful webinar is to add value to your audience.
- Start with a keyword-research and audience persona analysis to create a topic list that might work well with your prospects.
- To find a unique topic, you can do a quick competition analysis to understand the knowledge gaps in your industry.
- An excellent way is to ask your sales team for ideas - these guys speak to customers regularly and have a reasonably good idea of their challenges.
Look for something that has not been done, and that’s how you’ll be able to attract more interest from potential participants.
Promote Aggressively
When it comes to getting participation, marketing is one of your top priorities. A good strategy is to start the promotional activities 1-2 weeks in advance. Here are some tips on how to spread a word among those who matter the most:
Create a Landing Page
A landing page helps in communicating about the USPs of the webinar. Make sure to include details like the subject, speaker bio, date, and time, along with a registration form.
Write a Blog Post
Craft a promotional blog post talking about the webinar topic. Use a call-to-action and landing page link to invite your blog readers to be a part of the webinar to get an in-depth understanding of the subject.
Share on Social Media
Use catchy post images and memes to grab audience attention on your social media handles. Make sure to use the most relevant hashtags. If you're looking to reach a bigger audience, then you can try running a paid campaign as well.
Exit Intent Popup
It’s not just blog readers; anybody visiting your business website is a potential candidate for your webinar. Use an exit-intent popup to explain about the benefits of attending the session. Create a brief contact form inside your popup or direct the users to your webinar landing page.
Create Teaser Video
Doing a teaser video can be fun. You can involve the speakers while ideating a creative video that grabs audience attention. Make it zippy and amplify it on all online marketing channels.
Email Promotions
A necessary step is to send an email invite to your existing contacts. You can then send a couple of reminder emails. Make sure you send a thank-you email a day after the webinar; include a link to the recorded webinar for those who missed out.
Optimise for Mobile
ClickMeeting’s report shows that about 32% of attendees tune into webinars via their mobile devices. To ensure an optimum experience for mobile participants, consider increasing the text and visual size in your presentation. Choose a webinar platform that supports mobile devices.
Create a Powerful Presentation
The level of engagement you achieve with your webinar will depend on its content quality. Make sure to display your topic-expertise. Try to answer all the questions that your audience might have.
To offer a holistic brand experience, you need to align the communication with your brand’s tone and visual identity. It’s vital to deploy subject matter experts to lead and moderate the presentation. Getting the audience to pay attention to over 45 minutes can be a daunting task. To make it more engaging, you can add polls and questions to your session. Make your talk as conversational as possible.
Here are some ingredients of an excellent webinar presentation:
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Set the tone of the presentation by greeting your audience and introducing yourself.
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Share your experiences and knowledge to display your expertise.
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Talk about what your attendees will learn during the session.
A quality webinar presentation can help you fetch repeat attendees, create a positive brand image, and improve the lead count.
Make Your Attendees Happy
As a goodwill gesture, you can reward those who complete the session. Give them free access to a content upgrade like an ebook or a video course. Giveaways work as a high talking point while running the promotional campaign. Share a feedback survey link with your attendees to understand how you can make the next one even better.
Final Thoughts
A webinar is a terrific way to connect with your prospects from any part of the world. The educational marketing tool can work as the ultimate lead generation channel for any B2B business. It’s an ideal channel to create a two-way and real-time interaction between your business and its most prospective customers.
Generating leads from a webinar is about understanding the pulse of the audience and going out there to help them. To win over your ideal candidates, you need to spread a word about your webinar and create a presentation they love.