No business can survive without leads. That’s why businesses spend so much time and effort on perfecting their lead generation strategy.
Have you considered webinar lead generation?
If you haven’t, maybe you should.
Webinars are an excellent way to offer value to your audience right away. You can impart knowledge while building a rapport and relationship with your audience.
And you can then turn your real-time webinars into on-demand ones to provide value to those who couldn’t attend them too.
Also, they can also be a great way to generate quality leads.
So, if you’re frustrated by the lack of success you’ve seen from your webinars in terms of lead generation, you’re certainly not alone.
Many marketers struggle with webinar lead generation. In fact, only 15% of the attendees convert into a sale, on average.
So, let’s try to decode how you can drive up your webinar lead generation to grow your sales from them.
Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
Why Use Webinar Lead Generation to Generate Sales Leads?
Have you ever produced a webinar? If you have, you know that a great webinar takes a lot of time and effort.
So, why should you dedicate so much time and effort into creating one? Why not focus on other tactics that are less time-consuming?
Here’s why.
Generate High-Quality Leads
If you produce an amazing webinar, you’ll get a lot of leads who’ll want to learn from you.
But, it doesn’t stop at that.
The leads you get are not just people interested in your product. They are high-quality sales leads, which means they are interested in buying your product.
If someone registers for and attends a webinar, they are looking for in-depth information on the topic. Such people are more engaged and ready to take action. And the right type of webinar can just do the trick for you.
Here is a webinar hosted by Gartner, an industry leader.
Image Source: Gartner
People who want to know more about Master Data Management would be more than willing to register for the webinar. They will also not hesitate to share their information during the registration process, which, in turn, helps Gartner collect high-quality leads.
Build Trust
When brands produce webinars, they usually do so on topics they are experts at. So, when you host a webinar, you start to position yourself as an authority. And that’s exactly the thing that can get people to start trusting you.
When people think of you as an expert, they trust you because they see you as someone who’s a knowledgeable source of information. They believe the information you provide and rely on your advice.
The more people trust you, the more they’re likely to do business with you.
And that’s why webinars do better than other forms of content marketing, such as videos or e-books. You can directly interact with your audience during them. They can put across their questions and concerns, and you can address these on the spot. This helps build rapport and trust with the audience.
By showing your attendees your unique perspective, you can get them more interested in your brand as well.
Get Leads from Anywhere
Many businesses have been using in-person seminars as a tried and tested lead generation tool. But, these seminars are very restrictive in the sense that they’re location dependent. You will probably only get attendees from in and around the location.
However, webinars give you a global reach.
This means you can use them to engage potential leads from the other side of the globe too.
And this can help you amp up your lead generation efforts and get you potential clients from all over the world. This can enable you to expand your customer base without a lot of investment.
Even if you are targeting locals, attending a webinar is much more convenient than driving all the way to a seminar. So, webinars can help you cast a wider net there too.
7 Webinar Lead Generation Tips to Help You Generate Sales-Ready Leads
People expect webinars to be content-packed, professional, and polished. Only informative and effective webinars can help you generate leads that meet your business objectives.
So, where should you start?
To begin with, follow these 10 webinar lead generation tips to ensure your webinars generate the maximum leads for your business.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Before you can provide your audience with what they want, you need to understand who they are in the first place.
How else would you go about customizing your webinar to suit their tastes?
Creating a “buyer persona” can help you target the right people. It gives you a clear picture of who you are marketing to.
The image below shows the various factors to keep in mind when creating a buyer persona.
Image Source: Pinterest
When you know who your ideal buyer is, you can develop effective, targeted content in your webinars that addresses their goals and challenges. And that’s exactly what can help you significantly improve your sales conversion rate.
Once you know the specific pain points of your audience, you can craft your webinars such that they address these points and resolve them. This can help you cement your reputation as a reliable source that solves their problems, and it could help with lead generation.
But, how do you know what their needs or pain points are?
You can use the following methods to design your buyer persona.
Surveys
You can organize surveys to identify what your potential customers want from your brand. These surveys can help you figure out their pain points with ease. The wider the audience of these surveys, the better will your buyer persona be. And this can ensure that your insights for the webinar topics are better too.
Social Media
Use social media to check out brands that sell similar products or services as the ones you plan to promote in your webinar. Go through their posts to see what kind of messaging their customers are most responsive to.
Pay attention to reviews and testimonials too to understand what’s working for them and what’s not. You can accordingly tweak your products and their messaging in the webinar.
Interviews
Identify a few prospects and try to learn about their preferences and habits. You can conduct one-on-one interviews with these prospects to dive deeper into their needs and problems. While this would be a small sample group, it can offer deep insights that you wouldn’t otherwise get from surveys.
Webinar Registration
The information you gather from the webinar registration form can be used to further refine your buyer persona.
Instead of just the name and email address, try and gather some additional information like in the example below. It can help you gain better idea of your audience demographics.
Image Source: Pinterest
2. Create an Outstanding Landing Page
Every webinar needs an outstanding landing page to connect with its target audience.
Your landing page should be built keeping the buyer persona in mind for maximum impact. It is important to target their pain points, needs, wants, and challenges to get them to fill up your webinar registration form.
What’s more?
While your landing page copy is important, it should also be simple and straightforward to enable a smooth browsing experience. When things are explained in simple words, your audience will understand them with ease and it can nudge them to register for your webinar.
You should also use attractive images to engage the page visitors further. It can make all the difference to your webinar lead generation rate.
Here are some other landing page optimization tips for a high-converting webinar registration page:
- Write a compelling headline to get your audience to open your landing page.
- A good meta-description is also necessary to improve your SEO results.
- Incorporate a short video to explain what the webinar is about. You can check out the example below.
Image Source: Neil Patel
- Simple but effective copy that highlights the benefits of your webinar. Don’t forget to add a call-to-action.
- Place the webinar form at the right spot.
- Include client testimonials and social media comments as social proof.
- Create urgency. Use a countdown timer, a note on limited spaces, or whatever that works for you. By creating urgency, you encourage your visitors to take action right away.
- Ensure that you include a brief bio of the speakers to add credibility.
- Use SEO best practices to ensure your webinar registration page reaches the maximum number of people.
Pro Tip: If your goal is webinar lead generation, you may want to offer the webinar for free. Don’t forget to mention that it is “free” so more people sign up.
3. Offer On-Demand Webinars
People are pressed for time. They want to consume content as and when it is convenient for them.
Allowing attendees to watch your webinar content on-demand after the event has passed may encourage more people to sign up for the event. The best webinar software allow you to easily record your live webinars and turn them into on-demand ones.
Here is an example of an on-demand webinar.
Image Source: Wistia
They can easily view the recording at a later date and get the same feel of watching the webinar in real-time.
Pro Tip: There is another benefit to offering on-demand webinars. You can continue promoting the webinar even after the live date, which translates to continued webinar lead generation.
4. Consider Joint Venture Webinars
You should consider partnering up with another company to offer joint venture webinars. Just by bringing in a co-host, you can significantly improve your webinar’s reach (and lead generation, of course!).
You’ll be able to promote your webinar to your own audience, and also to the audience of the other company. The more the number of people you are able to reach, the more effective your webinar lead generation will be.
Here is an example.
Image Source: Pinterest
Another advantage here is that the other company will put an equal impetus into promoting the webinar, which can further enhance your reach and lead generation.
Pro Tip: Research well about potential partners. Your webinar lead generation strategy will only be effective if you partner with someone who offers high-quality content fit for your audience.
5. Promote Your Webinar
If your goal is webinar lead generation, promoting your webinar is a crucial step you can’t afford to miss. Promoting your webinar right will boost its reach, and that’s exactly what you need to drive its lead generation.
Here are a few tips for promoting your webinar to ensure effective webinar lead generation.
Leverage Email Marketing
Start by creating an email marketing campaign promoting your webinar with your existing subscribers. They know and trust you, which is why they are more likely to register for the event.
Once you have covered your existing audience, you can expand the reach of your email marketing campaign with cold emails.
When you send an email to your audience, ensure that the content of the email focuses on the webinar only. The CTA you use should also direct your audience to the webinar registration page, as in the example below.
Image Source: Gmail
Pro Tip: Use email marketing tools to start a drip email campaign to drive better lead generation.
Use Social Media
You can use avenues like Facebook Events to post social media updates about your webinar. Similarly, you could create posts about your webinar and share them on various social platforms.
LinkedIn Events is another good choice to promote your upcoming webinar.
The key is to use multiple channels for a wider reach.
What’s more?
Make sure you use high-quality images and appropriate hashtags to capture audience attention.
You should also respond to comments on social media and engage with your audience. This will encourage them to share your webinar details with their friends and colleagues.
Pro Tip: Hashtags can help you expand the reach of your organic content on social media. Use hashtag generator tools to find the best hashtags for your posts.
Use Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is an amazing way to target new audiences. Pick advertising platforms that allow audience segmentation so that you can improve your targeting.
Segmentation helps create groups of buyers with common needs. This allows you to get your message in front of the right people. It also improves your ad’s effectiveness, leading to better utilization of your budget.
Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads are some of the paid advertising options you can explore.
6. Build Excitement
Have you attended every webinar that you have signed up for?
Perhaps not.
You may have had something urgent come up. Maybe you just lost interest in the webinar or simply forgot about it.
That’s why it’s very important to generate excitement around your webinar. It is equally important to send timely reminders to your attendees so that they don’t forget about the webinar. You can accomplish this through drip email campaigns.
Ensure that you send out a series of reminder emails to your webinar attendees. Your webinar attendees should start getting emails reminding them of the webinar at least a week before.
Here’s an example from SparkToro.
Image Source: Gmail
The more attendees you get, the more potential customers you have, and the more sale opportunities.
Remember the following when you send reminder emails:
- Ensure that the date, time, and link to attend the webinar are available on the email.
- Include a link in the email that adds your webinar to the calendar app of the attendee.
- Highlight the benefits of your webinar in the email.
- Add your brand story to help new leads familiarize themselves with your brand.
- You may also include a survey to learn more about your audience’s problems. It could help you gather some very helpful webinar data.
Here is an example of a reminder email.
Image Source: Neil Patel
7. Use Features That Increase Engagement in Your Webinar
It’s a lot easier to connect with people in real life than virtually.
When hosting webinars, how do you interact and engage with your audience in a way that feels more “real” and “natural?”
We recommend including the following features to engage your audience.
Q&A
When you keep your webinars interactive, it’s easier to generate interest around them.
One way of going about this is by allowing your attendees to submit their questions directly to the presenters. You may also allow others to upvote questions they would like to be answered on priority.
This will allow your presenters to answer the most pressing questions first.
Want to add a personal touch?
You can have multiple Q&A rounds during the webinar to answer as many questions asked by people as possible.
Public Chat
In a live event, you can strike a conversation with your audience instantly. But this can be a bit challenging in virtual events, such as webinars.
However, you can always use a chat box.
Encourage your attendees to ask questions, or put down their thoughts and opinions in the chat box.
Have a moderator monitor the public chats. If there is no activity, the moderator may post a question to start a discussion. It’s a great way to spur engagement in the webinar.
FAQs
Q1. How do you generate leads for webinars?
A. Here are 5 tips to generate leads for webinars:
- Create a profile of your ideal buyer
- Prepare webinar content that speaks to potential buyers
- Promote your webinar
- Consider partnering with other companies
- Create a powerful landing page for the webinar
Q2. What do you do with leads from a webinar?
A. You should do the following with your webinar leads:
- Use lead scoring to prioritize your leads
- Ensure your sales team targets hot leads directly
- Personalize a post-webinar email campaign for lead nurturing
- Start a retargeting campaign for attendees
- Follow through on webinar marketing
Q3. Is a webinar a lead magnet?
A. Yes, webinars are lead magnets as you’re providing them as a resource in exchange for contact information. In fact, they are one of the best ways to generate qualified leads and fill your sales funnel.
Q4. How do you nurture leads after a webinar?
A. After the webinar, look at your webinar stats and send an email survey to gather feedback from your attendees. Study the feedback to understand what clicks with them and accordingly start communicating with them further to nurture them.
Q5. How do I attract more people to my webinar?
A. You can attract more people to your webinar with these tips:
- Pick a relevant topic
- Promote your webinar
- Offer high-quality content
- Simplify the registration process
- Connect with industry experts
Conclusion
Webinars can prove to be great tools for lead generation, but only if you’ve got a carefully crafted strategy for them. From creating the right landing page to sending out emails, there are many things you need to take care of.
The key is to understand your audience well and craft your webinar and its supportive messaging such that they’re attracted to it. This can help you get targeted leads who can become conversions too.
Do you have more questions regarding lead generation through webinars? If you do, please leave them in the comments section.
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