A webinar is a virtual event attended by an online audience willing to gain more information about a brand, product, service, or offer. We often call it a web event, online seminar, web lecture, or webcast. It is quite an interactive form of one-to-many communication where a presenter reaches a large group of online viewers and provides the requested information. Such webinars facilitate powerful interaction and encourage the audience to take action. It’s a smart tool that marketers and business owners find essential to improving their sales.
What are the benefits of using webinars as a lead magnet?
There are several benefits of adding a webinar to your lead generation strategy. Here are some of them worth mentioning:
Convenient for potential clients to attend
Webinars are quite convenient because your potential clients can log in and attend them from virtually any part of the world. Such flexibility helps them save the time and effort required to travel to a specific conference to gain the same information or offer. Most importantly, webinars give clients control over the content. They can fast forward to the parts they are most interested in and save time. This makes webinars a less disruptive form of content and marketing strategy.
Ability to reach a wider audience
Why not use a strategy that is location-friendly? Webinars help marketing managers to distribute their webinars to other cities and even countries — saving the time and effort it needs to bring in a large number of attendees to a central location. Also, the idea of consolidating a large audience in a physical venue might come back and bite you, especially if it has a limited seating capacity. Webinars are free from such constraints.
Extremely cost-effective
Webinars are budget-friendly and help save your marketing budget while producing massive results. What do you need to create a webinar? A solid content structure, an irresistible offer, a good quality camera, microphone, and good lighting — that’s all you should focus on to create an effective webinar. The total cost of running a webinar-driven marketing strategy is significantly lower than hosting a physical event at a conference hall.
Can be recorded seamlessly
Webinars can be viewed live or can be recorded to be watched later. Most webinars are recorded as part of the broadcast. This allows the target audience to choose the time they want to view the webinar and gain the information. Viewers can revisit the webinar whenever they want and understand it better. This significantly improves your campaigns’ recall value.
Now that you are convinced about the use of webinars for lead generation, let’s dive deeper and understand what makes a webinar a ‘good webinar.’
What are the characteristics of a good webinar?
What are successful webinars made of? Where lies the difference between success or no success? And what should you include in a webinar to make it super impactful? In this section, we address the characteristics of a successful webinar. Let’s discuss them in detail.
Successful webinars have educational content
What is the purpose of a lead generation webinar? It is to trade exceptional value in the form of educational content and inform the target audience about an opportunity or offer — all this in exchange for their contact information. Successful webinars double down on making absolutely certain that the content of a webinar is highly educational and informational. The target audience should know how your products or services can help solve their problems.
Successful webinars have relevant information
Is the content in your webinar relevant? This is a critical question you should answer with all honesty. The content delivered through the lead generation webinar should be relevant to your target audience and should excite the audience by the value it holds. However, to deliver the relevant information effectively, marketing managers would want to deploy segmentation. This tactic helps set up your webinar in a way that each segment or group receives the webinar that is relevant to its needs. Couple segmentation with personalisation and you’ll have one high-performance lead generation webinar.
Successful webinars have digestible content
Wouldn’t it be great if you create a 10-hour long webinar that goes through every minute detail and helps the audience understand how it can use your product or service effectively? No, it won’t. This is because – 1) nobody has so much free time, and 2) it will wear the audience out. You don’t need an exhaustive webinar to make your lead generation strategy work. All you need is a webinar with succinct and valuable content. The idea is to deliver content, tailored to each audience segment, that focuses on major pain points.
Successful webinars are authoritative in nature
Marketing managers want to portray their organisations as leaders or industry experts. Therefore, the focus should be on delivering educational and digestible content with some authority. What makes content authoritative? Facts and figures. Make sure you add enough numbers and resist the temptation of making any inflated claims. Be persuasive. The presenter should deliver the content on a positive note without hesitancy. The idea is to show the target audience that you understand and care about their pain points.
How to create successful webinars for lead generation?
We have outlined some of the best tactics that will help marketing managers focus on producing the most effective lead generation webinars ever. Let’s discuss them, shall we?
Run promotions before launching the webinar
People got to know that you are launching a webinar. Create the hype your webinar deserves using promotional campaigns and messages on social media and emails. This way, you can collect some of the most frequent questions and make the required changes to the webinar content. Couple the webinar with a giveaway that will make the potential clients sign up for the event.
What’s your hashtag strategy?
Attach a hashtag to your webinar. The hashtag will turn the lead magnet into a social media sensation. Use the hashtag throughout the webinar marketing campaign. Not just that, make the target audience ask questions related to the webinar by using the dedicated hashtag along with the question. This will significantly improve your webinar’s online discoverability. The hashtag can also be used to follow up on unanswered questions. Make sure to use a unique hashtag!
Have a moderator or host for the webinar
Your webinar might have one or more speakers to share the expert information and details. However, all webinars should have at least one host or moderator. This is crucial, especially for the live event when you are first broadcasting the webinar. The host does the job of introducing the speakers, regulates the webinar during the Q&A session, and concludes the session.
Develop eye-catching content
You have got to keep the viewers engaged for the time your webinar will run on their screens. You need to give them something that is appealing to their eyes. In other words, you should create a visually appealing slide deck. Focus on capturing the potential clients’ imagination by creating image-heavy slides and quirky copies. Don’t go black and white or your target audience will tune out.
Add different types of media
A highly interactive webinar is one that leverages all kinds of content. Don’t limit yourself to just pictures. You may add videos, animations, gifs, and more to make your webinar content highly engaging and entertaining. If it won’t entertain, it will hardly educate. This is important because you first have to gain the target audience’s attention. You may even share your screen to make a point.
Perform audio and video checks
Technical problems happen all the time. Therefore, it is important that you are well-prepared for them. Do your best to perform audio and video checks before launching the webinar. Check if the audio on the webinar is clear and does not have an echo. The video should be of high-quality, preferably HD.
Final remarks!
Lead generation webinars are extremely useful lead magnets that have the potential to bring in highly-qualified leads and transform your business for good. However, it will happen only when you follow the best practices mentioned above. Make sure your webinars have all the characteristics of a successful lead generation webinar. The information shared in this extensive guide will help you create webinars that are mutually beneficial.
