Webinar Marketing Strategy – Practical Guide to Get Results
Webinars have evolved as a new and effective marketing strategy as technology continues to transform the traditional marketing tactics. Since the static slide presentation with unseen speakers has been replaced by live chat, professional video and other dynamic innovative features; webinars have gained utmost attention by the audience.
As a result, more and more individuals and organizations are turning towards webinar marketing strategies. However, there are certain things that need to be kept in mind while implementing it effectively.
In this guide, we will shed light on everything that you need to know about webinar marketing strategy in 2022. From lead generation to follow-up.
What is Webinar Marketing?
Before we dive deeper, it’s imperative to understand what exactly is webinar marketing.
So, what is a webinar? Well, webinar is basically an online event where a speaker or a group of speakers deliver a presentation to a responsive audience. When we talk about webinar marketing, it means the art of creating and delivering the right content to the right audience in order to gain high-quality leads.
So, what can you market through this virtual seminar? Webinar marketing is often considered as a good prospect for customer marketing and B2B marketing strategy. It could be about a SaaS, an eBook, a blog post, or online services depending upon the type of services you are providing. And the content of the seminar totally depends on your end goal. For example, whether you want to bring awareness, educate them or want to sell your products to the customers.
Why is Webinar Marketing So Important?
Before the COVID pandemic, hosting in-person events were in demand but ever since lockdown, people began to embrace the concept of virtual and hybrid events. That resulted in businesses accepting the virtual seminars and webinars at a greater speed.
4 Reasons Why Webinars are an Important Strategy for Your Business
1. Webinars Drive Conversions
While selling online for a business, there are numerous methods like sales letters, product launches, social media, that you can adopt in your marketing strategy.
However, when you have to personally sell to an audience that’s interested in buying, you will always feel a short of time. Now imagine, addressing 100 people, the potential buyers, at the same time for the same product and 50 or even more of them immediately convert into confirmed buyers. Well, webinars when done rightly can help you achieve that number.
2. Webinars Generate Leads
Webinars can perform as a great lead magnet. In fact, 35% of marketing managers say that the main goal of their webinar marketing strategy is to generate leads.
All you need is to place this lead magnet on your website in a way that the audience easily gets the value of what you will be sharing in your webinar. Once people find your webinar significant, they will share their contact information to join your webinar, thus helping you gain quality leads with your offerings.
3. Webinars Retain Viewer Attention
Webinars are not forced like advertisements. Instead, people who sign up for your webinar are most likely to watch it from the beginning till the end. Now, that gives you the benefit to establish your brand’s unique presence and credibility before you begin with sales pitch.
The people who take the time to attend your webinar are most likely to be genuinely interested in the topic. Either they’re experiencing the same problem that you’re talking about, or they want to keep up with the latest industry trends or gain relevant insights.
4. Webinars Let the Audience Remember your Brand
Since, people sign up for your webinar on their own will, it implies that they are interested in your offered content. Maybe they are at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey and are aware of the problem. They just are looking for ways to solve a problem. If your webinar tries to offer them the quickest and easiest possible solution, chances are they would remember your brand for a longer time.
6 Steps to Enhance Your Webinar Marketing Strategy
Webinar creation is not rocket science but it does require certain things to get started. Let’s have a look at some of the major points to be considered when creating an effective webinar marketing strategy.
1. Determine the Purpose of Your Webinar
First and foremost, before beginning with the preparations of your webinar, you need to identify the purpose of your webinar.
Now, why is this important? Because, once your purpose is clear, you can easily create the content for your webinar, thereby making it easier for the audience to understand what to expect from the webinar. Whether it is for selling a product or launching a new one, your focus should be to keep the vision of the webinar clear.
2. Focus on the Value, Not the Sales Pitch
When you are planning a webinar marketing, your focus should be to create quality content that the audience can easily connect to and find relevant. Remember, when you add valuable content, you automatically attract the audience and once your audience has attended the seminar, there is a high chance they will get converted into leads.
Nobody likes a pushy salesman, so instead focus on levelling with your audience and dive into the problem statement – a common industry problem that your attendees also experience. Once they really feel the problem, they naturally start looking for a solution. That’s when you introduce your solution to the problem in the form of a product, service or an online course.
3. Content Quality is Crucial
As mentioned above, the quality of content is important. With high-quality content, you can attract a high number of leads. But remember, your content and topic should align with your audience’s goals and interests.
For example, if your audience is interested in knowing about your new blog post, you cannot serve them with content on how to create an e-store.
Of course, you can teach them new things and also promote multiple aspects at the same time, but you need to take care of the quality. However, always choose topics connected to your audience’s needs and to which they can easily turn to for solutions.
4. Use Visual Aids Abundantly
A webinar is not just about a speaker. Instead, you need to incorporate compelling visual aids to your presentations. When you use impactful visuals, you can communicate your ideas and messages more effectively – doesn’t matter what your audience type is.
With visuals, you can grab the attention of your audience easily and for a long time. Visuals are also a great way to keep your speech on track. A good way to do that is switch between showing your slides mainly, and then showing yourself speaking, to emphasize a point.
5. Webinar Needs to be Interactive
An important way of creating an incredible and engaging webinar is by incorporating two-way communication in it. Give your audience the chance to take part in the conversation. Help them clear their doubts and concerns. An effective way to do that is leave 10-15 minutes for Q&A round at the end of the webinar. The best webinar platforms have special features to gather questions, allow audience to vote on questions and mark questions as answered.
When you plan your webinar in this way, more people will be willing to attend it, thus increasing your chance to showcase the solution.
6. Call to Action for the Audience
No matter what your webinar is about, it must have something for the audience to take action on accordingly. Be it by directing them to your new blog post or asking them to check your product, there has to be something that your audience can take away from the webinar. Now this can be crucial for your business, so make sure to utilize this feature constructively.
Typically, for sales webinars the call-to-action is about purchasing a product or a service.
When to Use Webinars in Marketing?
Webinars when done rightly can easily position your products and services in your customer’s mind and drive leads into your sales pipeline. With webinars, you can share content in an engaging way, which can motivate the buyers to purchase your products and services.
However, make sure to try the different format of webinar to keep your audience engaged and interested.
6 Engaging Formats to Create Compelling Webinar Content
Try these 6 out-of-the-box webinar formats to leverage the maximum benefits.
1. The Interview Webinar
The interview format is the most convincing way to have a conversational engagement with an industry expert. This format enables you to ask questions related to your field and relevant to your audience.
What you can do is approach entrepreneurs, thought leaders or industry experts to create a more powerful impact on the audience. When you bring in the right influencer to the table, you can bring the most value to your target group.
This is an excellent webinar marketing strategy, because your guest will do most of the talking. You just have to prepare the questions. This is usually an excellent way to start with webinars. A lot of people love to share their expertise, especially to an audience that’s genuinely interested.
2. The Ask-Me-Anything Webinar
Most people believe that running the slide and presentation is an engaging way is the only way to host a webinar. But in fact, it is not. When you give your audience the liberty to ask questions and address doubts, you are making them invested in your webinar, thereby increasing the engagement.
An Ask-me-anything sessions are the best way to do this. To avoid awkward silence or running out of questions, make sure you have made the preparations from your end. Keep a list of back-up questions ready or what you would like to give away to your audience.
3. The Panel Discussion
In this format, you have a panel of speakers that are managed and controlled by a moderator in charge. The moderator is there to make sure every panellist gets a fair amount of time to converse and perform.
Most industry experts find panel discussion a more efficient and easy way of webinar marketing as it is more conversational and requires less preparation.
4. The Case Study Webinar
Case study webinars can be highly efficient in converting visitors to leads. You can repurpose your old videos, written case stories or blog posts, or create anything new, anything that could talk about your services.
The best case study webinars have one thing in common – great storytelling. Make sure your speakers have a proper narrative and storyline including the problem, resolution, and the ending.
5. The Online Event or Conference
If you are looking to increase the audience and extend your reach, you should try the online event format for webinar marketing. The online event can be an add-on to your physical event and can increase your event’s life-cycle.
An online conference is a bit different from a traditional webinar. A webinar is typically a one-time event, but a conference can feature many webinar sessions through-out several days.
6. The Expert Debate
An expert debate or a battle is a great alternative to webinar chat. The battle can create a bit of conflict between the speakers, thus maintaining the engagement. In the debate, each participant gets the chance to give an opening statement in a given period of time after which the moderator asks a series of questions for the speakers to comment on.
Webinar Marketing Strategy Key Takeaways
Webinars can be an effective way to make a lasting impression on your audience. But executing an impactful webinar means you have to be strong in your marketing strategies. Therefore, you must design a strategy that gets the basic idea of your webinar and lets you talk around it.
Make sure to listen to your audience, involve them in conversation, offer topics that you have expertise on, practice for smooth presentation and undoubtedly track your results and ask for feedback.
Feedback and webinar metrics are your best tools to constantly improve on your webinars, so that you’ll absolutely nail your webinar marketing strategy.