Webinar Marketing: A 3-Part Strategy to Win New Business

Webinars can be engaging educational events that garner attention, create awareness and drive lead gen. However, they require proper planning to ensure all teams and tech involved perform efficiently to meet quick deadlines and deliver results. With so many moving parts, it’s easy to lose sight of purpose. To ensure the event is successful, it is important to keep influencer positioning and lead generation top of mind.

Maintaining focus for pre-event promotion, the event itself, and follow up activities assist your team in generating measurable results. This 3 step graphic provides key best practices your team can leverage to deliver to your goals and objectives.

Setting Up a Successful Event

Activities leading up to a webinar often take a significant amount of time for everyone involved. Spending this time wisely gives your team a better chance of making sure your target audience attends and converts.

To maximize lead generation for the event, focus your pre-webinar efforts in these three areas:

Preparing Resources for Easier Communication

Creating ready-to-share assets will allow your sales reps to promote the event more efficiently on social media and in 1-to-1 communications with prospects and leads.

Resources that can help your team quickly get the message across include:

• Scripts: Craft a script or outline that sales reps can use when pitching the webinar on calls, and in LinkedIn messages. The script should focus on takeaways and benefits for attendees. And be sure to craft personalized scripts and messages for top prospects, existing customers, and partners.
• Email content: Create a customizable email template promoting the webinar that includes a call-to-action button for registration. You can also create a custom email signature that sales reps may use to promote the event in daily communications.
• Landing page: The landing page should be the destination for the call-to-action in all communications for the webinar. Develop an engaging landing page to use for ad campaigns, social posts, and follow-ups with prospects, leads, and partners.

Targeting the Right Audience

Casting a wide net with your webinar promotion is important, but so is inviting prospects that most closely match your ideal customer. In addition to focusing your outreach on prospects, keep in mind that webinars are a great way to nurture your existing customers while also supporting upselling opportunities.

You will want to target a large enough group of correct persona prospects with a healthy blend of marketing and sales development efforts.

Use a prospecting automation tool like ZoomInfo will quickly find contact details matching the job titles and other details of the type of person you’d like to invite. And, while webinars are great tools for generating net new leads, don’t overlook the leads already in your system!

Use these social media tactics to further promote:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: narrow down LinkedIn’s 756 million members by several characteristics to find prospects who are interested in your webinar topic.
• Paid social campaigns: use the same personas and identifiers that you search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build your audience for social ads.
• Organic social: Implement a tool like the Dynamic Signal platform to craft organic social posts about webinars and other company news that sales reps can share to their personal profiles.

Managing the post event follow-up and sales conversions requires a dedicated team for optimal success. If your in-house team is challenged, it may be best to outsource those efforts so you don’t miss out on quality lead-gen opportunities.

Collaborating with Partners

Tapping into the audiences of other companies by hosting or participating in joint webinars is a great way to expand your reach. Just as you do with your sales team, offer to create the promotional assets to make it easy for your partner to promote the event through their marketing and communication channels.

If your company has a channel partner program, you should include those partners in your webinar promotion and even in the webinar itself, it’s a clever way to garner more attendance. And consider hosting some of your webinars as a joint event with a channel partner or offering to participate in a webinar they’ll host. This increases the likelihood that the featured partner will help promote the event, and it can be a great way to highlight the partner’s expertise for their audience.

Lastly, incentivize partners to invite their own leads, prospects, and customers as part of your efforts to maximize revenue from channel partners. One way to do this is through gamification, where partners compete to sign up the highest number of registrants for a prize.

Making the Most of the Webinar

While the webinar may be a one-time scheduled event, it has the potential to generate future leads.

You can maximize the life performance of your webinar by recording it to send to attendees after the event, and to those who registered but didn’t attend. Recorded webinars also make great gated content to promote post event as on-demand content to capture new leads.

Ensure your webinar provides website suggestions or downloadable content where the audience may engage further and learn more on the topic. Including these resources makes the recording more valuable to the audience and encourages them to re-watch and share with colleagues.

And consider hosting the webinar recording, select an option that is mobile-friendly or has a widely-used mobile app, like YouTube. Hosting your webinar in a way that’s easy to watch across any device will make it convenient for future audiences to view and share.

Post-event Best Practices

The end of the webinar doesn’t signify the end of the sales team’s work. Creating a post-webinar strategy will help you qualify leads and schedule sales appointments.

A strong follow-up strategy includes automated messages with:

• A survey: Find out whether attendees found the webinar’s call-to-action compelling and are interested in learning more. The survey can qualify leads for a sales call while also offering suggestions for improvements in future webinars.
• Nurturing content: Share the webinar recording as well as other resources related to the webinar’s topic. Make sure the audience knows where to go to get more information.
• Cross-selling content: Alert attendees to future webinars, events, and product launches.

Based on survey responses, you can follow-up with interested leads directly. For those who aren’t quite ready for a call, you should continue to nurture them with content.

Another option for your post-webinar process is to let a lead qualification and appointment setting organization handle the follow-ups and nurturing for a more personalized approach that typically out-performs automated nurturing. That partner schedules appointments for your sales team so that they’re only spending time on top leads that are ready for a call.

Turning Your Webinar Into Opportunities

When a webinar is approaching, it can be easy to focus your efforts on making sure the event itself runs smoothly. However, the pre and post event strategy are equally if not more important, especially for your sales team. Sales reps play a critical role toward ensuring the right prospects are invited and the event generates strong leads.

It is important to dedicate the time developing a winning webinar strategy so your lead-gen efforts always deliver sales appointments and conversions for optimal performance.