Webinar Marketing: A Practical Guide to Grow Your B2B Sales

If you are a B2B tech startup, picture this… You announce a webinar, 100+ registrations received within two weeks, 40 people attend your super interesting session and, very next week, you book 5 demo meetings. 1 month later, you sign up two BIG customers! Sounds like music to your ears? Then continue to read on. You are just 5 minutes away from unlocking the key to webinar success.  

Overview:

When it comes to B2B lead generation, webinars are a powerful method to establish credibility and generate warm leads. You probably know that. What we need to figure out is how to get it right. “Over 95% of the marketers globally have considered webinars a key for their content marketing strategy. People love content that helps them get hands-on experience to solve their problems.” But to get your webinar ‘right’, the first step is to let it go ‘wrong’! The first time, there will be many gaps, you’d wish you had done it differently. But that is ‘par for the course’. As we conduct 2 or 3 webinars, you’ll get the pulse of what works for your target audience. With that said, here are a few key points that you need to address. I’ve divided them into 3 stages of building your webinar-led sales pipeline.

• Pre-Webinar prep
• During the webinar
• Post webinar engagement

Let’s breeze through these 3 stages:

What goes into Pre-Webinar?

Surely, you need an appealing topic: Pick your topic based on market feedback. It is quite natural to think of some esoteric topic within your domain, but time and again we notice that what people care for is more basic. An example of a complex topic: “How To Score your Leads in the Sales Funnel” An example of a simple yet attractive topic: How to grow your sales funnel digitally   If you can get the content right, surely the webinar can be repurposed and used as gated content post the webinar and delivered on-demand. So, choose a topic that appeals to the practitioner, the buyer persona in your target audience.  

Now let us look at 5 ways to drum up your registrations.

• Amplify your webinar on LinkedIn LinkedIn is the best bet to get your word out. Why? Research shows that B2B companies generate close to 45% of social media traffic via LinkedIn. You can directly reach out to people relevant to your target market based on company size, titles, skills, or geographic location.

TIP: Make use of LinkedIn lead forms, this will capture all the form details asking the person to only hit the CTA for registering. 

Quick Question: Have you built a network of relevant people on LinkedIn? If not, get started on steroids NOW, it’s never too late.

• Focused Email Campaign Cold emails tend to have poor results. But a focused drip email campaign reaching out to all your dormant leads? Well, that usually wakes them up and you do get a few signups. Wondering what email copy to write? Here is a proven 5 part drip email sequence that you can reuse. (Drip email sample)
• Co-Host The Webinar If possible, co-host the webinar as a joint collaboration with a renowned person or established company. Your co-host is going to announce it on their LinkedIn network as well. So, collaboration can open up your reach to new and well-curated audiences.
• Advertise On Online Portals Identify online portals where your target audience is a member. You can display a banner over there and also get into their weekly email newsletters for a fee…
• Make it your Email Signature Include the webinar announcement in the email signature of all your team so that every time they send out an email for communication, your audience gets to know about the event.

Win with creative digital assets:

Every webinar needs to be backed by a set of digital assets.

• Posters: Create attractive images that resonate with your audience with clear communication of the event and why I should attend.
• Teaser Video: In 60 secs you need to be able to address the question “why should I attend this webinar?” Teaser or trailers are super effective in a world where the video is the primary method of consumption
• Landing Page: Use Zoom webinars on GoToWebinar’s landing page builder and keep it simple. No fancy 8 field forms. Just 3-4 form fields.
• On Your Homepage: To announce the webinar, put a visible panel on your website home page and link to the registration page. Agreed your website isn’t high traffic, still, when a prospect drops by, you don’t want to miss the opportunity.
• Giveaways: Decide a set of giveaways for webinar participants. This could be a checklist, a best practices PDF, or some asset that will be valuable to your audience. Make it with a professional designer, branding, and all…

  Wondering if webinars are right for you? “Click here for some eye-opening stats on webinars”  

Converting registrations into attendees

This is a real problem, isn’t it? Industry benchmarks say that 25-33% of people who register end up attending. But even that needs tremendous follow-up.  Relentlessly follow up to get your registrants to attend. In one of our events, we actually sent calendar invites to the participants so it shows up on either outlook calendar. served as a reminder and had a tangible improvement in attendance… Reminder Notifications Set up a separate Drip campaign to keep the registered people reminded of the event ‘cos people can forget. You can send a reminder a week before, a day before, and an hour before the event starts. Usually, the webinar tool has this figured out.  

During the webinar:

What you do during the webinar is undoubtedly the most impactful. If you believe in ‘I’ll just show up and go through my deck…’, you’ll miss out on a ripe opportunity to deliver impact. Here are some good practices that have worked well in the past. Not that it will be a direct copy and use in your context, but give it a read and see what you can adopt.

1. Compelling presentations need practice. First-time presenters tend to provide an intro that goes on for 2-4 minutes. That’s a sure way to lose your audience’s interest. Then how do you start?  Well, watch this great video on how to communicate.
2. Polls to interact: Prepare a presentation flow that does not feel like a lecture, throw in some polls every 10-15 minutes. Here are examples of two polls you can use.
3. Question time: Provide adequate time for attendees to ask questions. Participants may not fire away the moment you open doors, so have a few of your friendly audience ready to ask a question to kick start things
4. Tweaking your presentation based on registrant profiles: This is super important. For example, if you have 20% of your audience from the automotive sector and you are presenting how enterprises can go digital…then the examples you take, the use cases you discuss should surely include automotive isn’t it?  LeadWalnut has created a 3 part framework on how you can contextually design your deck to deliver greater impact with your audience. Hit us up if you’d like to know more.
5. Survey: End of the webinar, run a quick survey with a compelling giveaway. It could either be a checklist, toolkit, proof of concept, or a free audit depending on what you can offer.  You can use tools such as Typeform and Google forms to build the survey questionnaire
6.  

This last one is probably the most important tool in your webinar event. It sheds a light on who is interested and about what. See an example survey form here, at least 5 questions you can directly reuse.

Post webinar engagement:

Webinar tools provide very interesting insights on your attendees. Who interacted with your polls, who paid attention and did not go away to another browser tab, what was the poll answer given by that individual …all this and more is available as a download. This greatly helps your sales development rep to refine and prioritize the high-value leads to reach out tight after the webinar. Another handful of actions you need to consider post-webinar…

1. Approximately one-third of the registered people would prefer to watch the event on-demand. So it would be great if we could send out an email to participants and registrants who missed the webinar with a recording link.
2. Also, make short ‘highlights’ videos out of your webinar. Not many are going to sit and watch an entire 45 min recording. Instead, compress the webinar into a 5-8 min highlight that crisply informs your audience. Many youtube interviews begin with highlights in the first 3 minutes so you end up watching the next 45 min.
3. It’s no use making videos and hiding them in our cupboards. Need to go ballistic with broadcasting the content. Upload to YouTube or Vimeo, post them on LinkedIn, put them up on the website, and send them to people via email.
4. Make the webinar a gated piece of content available on-demand. And also you can write a blog on how the webinar went.
5. Participants tweeting or appreciating on Linkedin: It’s important that some of your participants go on Twitter, Linkedin and appreciate the webinar. That has a powerful trust factor and is great for your future webinars signups.

TIP: while including multiple channels to promote the webinar, make sure you measure them regularly. This will help you allocate resources to those that generate a higher percentage of leads.

winning with webinars

These days every other SaaS company has begun to conduct webinars, but that doesn’t guarantee that people will sign up and buy their products or services.

What differentiates a great webinar from the also-rans are just these 3 things:

• Making sure people who registered attend the meeting: After registering people tend to deprioritize the webinar and life gets in the way of the attending. What have you done to
• The impression you created in the webinar: How much value and knowledge you added in the webinar will linger on much after the webinar. Make it so good that your audience feels indebted. Remember the contextual tweaking of your content stated above.
• Post webinar targeting: Continuing the communication after the event keeps prospects active in the pipeline. Ask your sales team to secure 1×1 meetings with the appropriate person in the client organization. Announcing future webinars, sharing success stories, broadcasting an article & sending a quiz could be ways to be of value to your webinar prospect.

Some of our clients say, a webinar conducted the previous year in August ended up with an enquiry next July and a closed deal by November. That’s a 15-month sales cycle.

Conclusion:

Webinar-based marketing gives you a great opportunity to establish your knowledge authority and drive quality leads into your sales funnel. It’s worth persisting with… And by the way, if you would like some help with setting up your webinar-led sales engine, you are welcome to talk to LeadWalnut.