Hosting a webinar marketing is a great way to generate leads, build brand awareness and authority, and develop relationships with both internal and external prospects. Unlike a physical event, webinar content can also be saved for others to view and review after the session has ended.
It is a set of techniques aimed at promoting specific goods and services, improving brand awareness, entertaining and more importantly educating your audience. Hosting webinars also helps brands show their expertise and thought leadership in a certain field and helps to nurture leads.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, it is found that 58% of B2B marketers use webinars as promotional tools. While 73% from ZoomInfo, stated that B2B marketers have said that webinars are the best way to generate high-quality leads.
What is webinar marketing?
Webinar marketing is an inexpensive way to engage with the audience on products or services that you offer online in real-time. The term “webinar” comes from the words “web seminar”.
One way a company can generate leads from a single activity is with webinars. Webinars usually consist of a presentation followed by a Q&A session. Because they are a visual medium, webinars can help presenters connect quickly with participants. Most people will also grasp the information faster than if it’s just written down.
Companies use webinar marketing to:
- Demonstrate products and services
- Expand on content published in a blog post
- Showcase their expertise
Tips to develop a successful webinar marketing
Focus on interesting topics to drive sales & leads
One of the easiest ways to drive traffic to a webinar is to ensure that the event has an interesting topic. The more specialised and concise the topic is, the better and the more reason people would want to attend.
Create topics from the perspective of the problems the audience regularly faces and also consider including certain business-related keywords in your titles. This could help drive more people to the webinar who are not listed on your subscriber lists or even late signups.
Leverage on existing connections to promote the event
Spread the word through existing connections in your network. Whether it is through business partners, colleagues or invited speakers, promote the event by asking your contacts to forward it to anyone whom they may think would benefit from it.
While it may be right for your subscribers to know about your event first, at the same time, you can ask them to forward the details to as many people that they think would benefit from it. Likewise, the same applies to business connections as well.
LinkedIn reports that a business employee has 10x more connections than any company has. Provide your employees with the necessary links to share, so that they will be able to share them out to their own network and on their social media pages.
Invite quality guest speakers to increase interest
Upon deciding on the topic, another key area to consider when hosting and developing a successful webinar marketing would be the acquisition of speakers. Invited speakers can be based on industry experts, business founders, leaders or even high profile speakers from well-known brands.
Additionally, if there is more than one speaker, have them form different opinions and discuss the topic in-depth, making the webinar a discussion rather than two different monologues.
LinkedIn is a great place to access experts of different businesses, related industries or even someone who is a well-established thought leader.
The trick is to promote these speakers based on name, company and position to showcase their credibility and thought leadership on the chosen topic.
Provide valuable content to maximize effectiveness
Ensure that the audience receives the same value for the time they invested in the webinar. If the content or topic is not beneficial or up to scratch, it will eventually do more harm than good to feedback or to any future new events.
In addition, do not oversell when it comes to products and services. Instead, focus on educating the audience in the information that would help solve their problems, rather than selling them upfront just because it is beneficial for them.
Interact, engage and keep in touch with the audience
Share website links, contact information, future upcoming events, social media accounts or discussion groups to reconnect with them after the end of the event. This would also allow visitors to go through older content and increase the chances of them signing up for future sessions.
How to measure the success of your webinar marketing?
Lead generation
During the registration process of a webinar marketing, people often give their contact information. Market to these contacts, they are still leads. Ensure you are tracking and engaging with people who have registered for your webinars, even if they do not attend in the end.
If the click-through rate is high, but registration is low, it would suggest a couple of things. Firstly, the registration page may not be attractive or the copy may not be concise enough, as it does not deliver the message and offer any form of solution to their business pain-points or challenges.
Secondly, it may also mean that your messaging is off. Does the message on your email or other promotional material match the message on your registration page? Do any of them lack the sense of urgency and without a call to action to close the deal?
At the end of the day, the whole objective of business webinars are to generate leads, so keep a close watch of who is registering, attending, and the why, will help you ensure you are attracting a lot of quality leads.
Audience engagement
Knowing how many people attended your webinar is important, however, how engaged your attendees are is also imperative. Are your attendees asking questions, answering polls and surveys or downloading the assets you have prepared for your presentation?
Even if all webinars session is pre-recorded, adding any form of audience interaction gives it a live feeling, and more importantly, retains their attention from start to finish.
There are a number of tools that can help you with this. If your Zoom is in a ‘Webinar’ instead of a ‘Meeting’, there will be Q&A feature found at the attendee panel, that encourage your audience to submit questions for the Q&A session at the end of the main presentation or panel discussion. You can even turn your session into a live chat by encouraging them to turn on their video and to speak directly when it is their time to speak.
Polls and surveys are also effective tools for lead generation and marketing. They help to understand your viewers and attendees better while gauging whether your content is understandable and conveying the right message and meaning.
Exploring these little details can give you an insight into what works and what does not. It can also help you segment your audience and create your marketing personas.
Customer engagement is an important webinar success metric because it tells who in your data set is actually engaged, but also how engaging your content was on the whole.
Audience retention
Knowing how many people attended your webinar is important, however, how engaged were they is also imperative. Showing up is great, but are your attendees asking questions, answering polls and surveys and downloading the assets you prepared for your presentation?
One of the biggest metrics you can use to measure the success of your webinar is how long people actually watched your presentation or webinar.
Ensure you are monitoring the average time your attendees actually spend on the webinar, so you can spot any trends and the success rate. For example, did everyone drop off after your introduction? That could only mean that your promotional strategy did not quite hit the mark.
Was there a decrease during the 40-minute mark? Maybe the presentation is not as concise as it should be and should consider trimming it down. Tracking audience retention and these moments will allow you to make changes to keep them engaged.
Increased brand awareness
Brand awareness does not always mean return of investment (ROI), it is an important metric when brands and businesses are thinking about their webinar program and overall marketing strategy in general.
How do you measure brand awareness when it comes to webinars? That can be difficult, but you can measure it using social media. You should already be using social as part of your webinar promotion, but are you measuring the social interactions after the webinar event?
- Driving increased traffic to your social media sites before and after your webinar event is an indicator that your brand has made an impression on your attendees.
- Increased web searches and direct traffic.
Think of it as increasing your brand and business exposure. By measuring that and letting it inform how you market, you can increase the effectiveness of any webinar marketing campaign.
Attendee feedback & testimonials
Consider asking for formal feedback in your follow-up email to your attendees, but you can also look for other methods of communication. Social media is an ideal place for this. E.g: If you used a hashtag, keep an eye on it after the webinar to see what sort of feedback you receive.
Attendees would also use the chat or Q&A function to give their feedback, so make sure to pay attention to it when monitoring for more than just questions.
What happens if you do not get any feedback? It could mean that you are doing well and the webinar went smoothly, but at the same time it may not have wowed your audience.
Benefits of webinar marketing
Enriching with user-generated content
We all know content is king. User-generated content refers to content that is created by the users themselves of a specific brand or business. It ranges from anything like comments, reviews, and images to social media posts.
According to the Nielsen Consumer Trust Index, it is found that 92% of consumers trust organic, user-generated content more than traditional advertising. This is mainly because brands do not pay for user-generated content, it is unbiased and created because your attendees like the offerings of particular type of business. As a result, UGC is perceived to be more authentic and honest.
In addition, by including user-generated content, it greatly reduces marketing costs. Your brand or business will not seem to be too “salesy” trying to sell products or services to people at every opportunity. Instead, it will be like a friend who cares and is trying to provide them with the necessary information that they need.
Online webinars in general can be recorded, post edited and then repurposed as part of content. For example, the entire event can be uploaded into YouTube, transcripts can be reuse as blog posts and social media updates or specific sections can also be added under the training section of a company’s website.
Educating the audience & establishing authority
People often flock towards those that have the answers they seek; be it business organizations or an individual that is considered an expert in their own field. Through a webinar, you can establish yourself or your brand as an authority in the market with insightful topics and valuable information for your audience.
Once the audience attends the webinars and finds them to be informative, because it addresses their primary concerns and questions, the chances are they will also be bound to start looking at your brand as an authority in the field. This also means that your brand will come to mind whenever your target audience is in search of informative content.
Maximizing a wider audience reach
Webinars are accessible to a global audience. Businesses can extend their reach to anyone across the world effortlessly and conveniently, provided that they have access to internet-enabled devices. Businesses are now no longer limited to only marketing their services or products to the customers within their geographical reach, but also expanding across borders and oceans.
How can Hashtaqs help?
Hashtaqs curate programs and develop webinars for clients from speakers’ acquisition, program development and webinar execution
Hashtaqs uplifts business through brand transformation and marketing advisory and implementation online and offline, internationalisation through business matching and community development.
Our consultancy work is supportable with the funding scheme of up to 80% for local SG businesses. Contact us for a consultation at +65 8868 1418 or email us at [email protected]. For more info, visit www.hashtaqs.com.
