Chapter 1
How to Create a Killer Webinar That Garners Leads
Chapter 2
How to Drive Traffic to Your Webinar
Chapter 3
Wrapping up Your Webinar Marketing Campaign
#webinars
#leadgeneration
#webinarmarketing
tl;dr
Resources
Ultimate Guide to Webinar Marketing
Webinar Marketing has emerged as a crucial tool in the digital era, proving its worth during the COVID-19 pandemic. This comprehensive guide takes you through the entire process, from ideation to execution and post-event opportunities, enabling you to captivate, engage, and nurture potential users.
While webinar marketing may initially seem intriguing, it requires extensive planning and campaigning to achieve success, demanding significant resources. However, with Llama Lead Gen's expertise and this easy-to-follow guide, the effort is worthwhile. Each chapter delves into the why and how of webinar marketing, offering valuable insights and strategies to alleviate the planning burden, allowing you to focus on delivering essential content to your audience. Let this guide kick-start your strategy for a successful webinar marketing event, harnessing the full potential of these high-value opportunities.
What is Webinar Marketing?
In today’s dynamic digital marketing world, it takes extra creativity to get leads. You have to constantly be thinking about the ways you can show potential leads the value you can offer them in the short amount of time they’re interacting with your brand. It’s not easy! One of the tried and true ways we’ve seen clients get more leads interacting with their marketing campaigns is by offering potential leads the gift of knowledge in an area they’re the expert in. More specifically, webinar marketing.
A webinar is an online event where a speaker gives a presentation on any given topic to an engaged audience. Marketers will often use webinars to generate leads by inviting interested prospects to either attend the webinar live or rewatch it on demand. This not only builds brand awareness and lets leads know where your business’ area of expertise is, but it also allows you to collect data on what your audience is interested in learning more about.
Webinar marketing is a fantastic way to get your audience interested in your product or service. Prospects who sign up for a webinar typically show more intent than if they were reading one of your blog posts. For that reason, more and more companies are using webinar marketing strategies to share information about their company and generate leads.
Some things you may be wondering about webinar marketing right off the bat:
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How do I choose a topic for my webinar?
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How do I know my webinar is good enough?
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How do I get people to register for my webinar?
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How do I know if all of the work was worth it?
There’s no straight answer to any of these questions, but luckily there are steps you can take to build a webinar marketing strategy from scratch that will get you the qualified leads you’ve been missing. Read on for a step-by-step guide to webinar marketing that includes creating a great webinar, driving traffic to your webinar, and measuring your webinar’s success.
Contacted Llama Lead Gen for sponsored LinkedIn posts to boost webinar attendance. Secured 20 high-quality leads through LLG’s targeted ad strategy. The campaign was highly successful and showcased their expertise.
Sarah Hoisington
VP of Marketing @ SentiLink
Chapter 1
How to Create a Killer Webinar That Garners Leads
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Choosing the Right Webinar Topic
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Creating Content for Your Webinar
Launching a successful webinar marketing campaign is not possible without one thing—a really great webinar. The purpose of a webinar is ultimately to educate an audience on a topic with the goal of driving leads. If your webinar isn’t interesting, relevant, and about a specific topic the audience is invested in, chances are it’s going to flop. Here are some tips for creating a great webinar that engages your audience and encourages them to take the next step with your business.
Choosing the Right Webinar Topic
Perhaps your business is in the IT industry and offers a lot of services—like cloud migration, data analysis, artificial intelligence resources, and the list goes on. This is great, but it might make it more difficult to hone in on what your webinar should be about. The key to choosing the right webinar topic is making sure your target audience is invested in the topic.
First, there’s an important distinction between being invested and being interested in a topic. People are complex. They have a lot of interests, especially professionals. Just because you are interested in SEO, doesn’t mean that you’re investing time and resources into learning more about it. You want to deliver your audience information that they need to know, not just information that is nice to know.
There are a variety of ways you can determine what your target audience is invested in right now.
Ask the audience.
Your target audience (as well as your current customers) are an amazing resource when it comes to choosing your webinar topic. You can collect this information by polling your social media audience, engaging in comments on your social media and blog posts, and sending out surveys via email, website, or chat.
For your highly engaged customers or prospects, consider asking these two questions to gather more information about what they’re invested in at the moment:
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What do you wish you knew when you were getting started?
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How could my team have done a better job getting you where you are currently?
Analyze social media.
Social media can tell us a lot about what people care about. Whether you’re using a social listening tool—like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Keyhole—or scouring trending topics within your expertise, gathering this data and contextualizing it will give you a bigger picture of what kinds of topics you may want to host a webinar on.
A social listening tool will allow you to analyze conversations surrounding topics in your wheelhouse, keywords, mentions of your brand or your competitors, and provide demographic information as well as topic trends. When using tools like this, be sure to ask yourself, “how can my webinar fill a knowledge gap in this space?”
Webinar Title Examples
It goes without saying that you want your webinar title to be compelling, but here are some concrete tips you can follow when coming up with a webinar title:
Example: Are You Making the Most Out of Your SEO Strategy?
Incite an action.
Example: Learn the Basics of HubSpot in 4 Easy Steps
Solve a problem.
Example: Improve Your Company Productivity Using __Insert Your Product Name__
Hint at the outcome of your webinar.
Example: How Do You Become a Stronger Sales Leader Without Sacrificing Sleep?
Be timely.
Example: Can NFTs Strengthen Your Marketing Strategy?
Example: 5 Ways to Boost Your Email Open Rates instead of Email Marketing: How to Get More People to Open Your Sales Emails
Use your target audience.
Example: 10 Tips Every Content Marketer Needs to Increase Leads
Creating Content for Your Webinar
Look at your existing content.
If you’re not too new to the game, you’ve surely already created a variety of content within trending spaces—blog posts, emails, eBooks, case studies, etc. It’s important to analyze this content for what worked, but also to think about how you can do it differently (and better!) this time around.
For example, if you have an eBook written on a topic you know your audience was extremely invested in, you may consider turning it into a webinar. However, you’ll need to do it differently to make sure those people who have already read the e-book are going to want to attend your webinar for new, updated information.
Determine your goal.
Yes, you ultimately want to garner leads, that’s obvious. But webinars are generally a mid-funnel approach. You want to have a more immediate goal established before you begin creating your webinar content so you can ensure it will serve that purpose. Are you trying to raise brand awareness? Are you selling a product or service? Do you want visitors to set up a call? Determine what that goal is and be sure it’s clearly established in your call to action at the end of the webinar.
Choose your webinar format.
If this isn’t your first rodeo, you may know what kind of webinar format works best for your team and what has resonated with your audience. However, testing different formats is never a bad thing and is a great way to keep your audience’s interest. Here are the different webinar formats you can consider:
This format features one expert speaking to the camera. This format is best for educating your audience or a ‘how to’ presentation.
Panel discussion
This allows you to have several experts speaking on a topic. It allows you to offer your audience different perspectives from people with different skill sets and backgrounds.
Interview
Pretty self-explanatory, the host will interview a guest who is an expert in their field.
The product demo
if you’re trying to get your audience to purchase a product, demoing it on a webinar is a great way to show prospective customers what you offer.
Write a script.
No one wants to watch you read from a script on a webinar, especially if you’re on camera. However, writing one to ensure you’re delivering more convoluted information correctly and not forgetting anything is important. Follow these steps when writing your script:
Speak to people in a personable, yet professional tone
Make the script accessible
If you’re presenting this webinar to a global audience, you should make sure it’s available in multiple languages
Be digestible
No one wants to listen to a read-aloud of a long form essay about your topic. Be quick-witted. Keep people engaged while they’re learning.
Edit your script
Reading your script aloud while timing it can help you stay on track and stay within the confines of your presentation. After, you’ll edit it as needed for pacing and timing.
Create engaging presentation slides
Your presentation should complement your script by providing the important, hard-hitting points of what your presenter is saying out loud. Be concise and engaging and be sure not to give away too much of what is to come. You can use slides to introduce the next topic, touch on the most important takeaways of a topic, and add engaging visuals like graphics and charts.
Make the webinar worthwhile
Your audience members are likely busy and have a lot on their minds—like hitting their company goals while learning new things to develop themselves as professionals—so taking that next step with your company may not necessarily be top of mind for much longer after your webinar. While you may have delivered an engaging webinar, jam-packed with the need-to-knows, you need to urge your audience to take action while they’re still engaged with your webinar—whether that means filling out a form, making a purchase, or setting up a call. You can do this by providing each attendee with a gift or offering a discount on the product you want them to purchase. The best way to use either of these strategies is to offer them for a limited time, so they act quickly.
So you’ve created the content. The next step is getting as many eyes on it as possible. Let’s discuss how to market your webinar and get those potential audience members not only signed up, but actually attending.
Chapter 2
How to Drive Traffic to Your Webinar
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What is the goal of your marketing campaign?
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Create a landing page for your webinar
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Promote your webinar to your existing audience
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Promote your webinar to new audiences
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Utilize your sales team!
If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? Is a great webinar truly great if no one is there to watch it? If you’re a marketer, your answer is probably no. But don’t worry, we won’t let that happen. After all, why would you want to spend all of that time, all of those resources, and potentially a chunk of change creating a webinar that no one will see? There are a variety of tactics to use to drive traffic to your webinar. Read this next chapter as we discuss how to drive as much traffic to your webinar as possible in a few easy-to-follow steps.
What is the goal of your webinar marketing strategy?
A good webinar marketing strategy is necessary for getting people to come to your webinar. But more specifically, you’ll want to choose a metric that you can hone in on after the campaign is over to measure its success. Is it registrations? Is it leads? Is it direct sales? You may have different goals for each channel you’re marketing on—like followers, increased engagement rate, increased click-thru rate, etc.
Create a landing page for your webinar
Think of your landing page as your webinar’s home base. Your audience will learn everything they need to know about your webinar by visiting this page, and it’s what you’ll link to for all marketing efforts—whether it’s paid or organic social, emails, retargeting, website popups, etc. Here’s a short list of what your landing page must include to get the job done:
The date and time of your webinar
How your audience will benefit from attending
A registration form
Here are some nice-to-haves on your landing page:
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Social proof—Share customer success stories from people who have worked with you or, even better, attended past webinars.
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A guest list—FOMO never fails. Seeing all of the other amazing thought leaders attending your webinar may motivate prospects to not want to miss out.
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Multimedia—Webinar video promos, clips from past webinars, branding videos, etc. can all be useful to spruce up your landing page, while not entirely necessary.
Webinar landing page example
Here is a well-done landing page we’ve seen that can serve as inspiration for yours:
Promote your webinar to your existing audience
If you place your website banner where visitors are likely to see it (places that don’t disrupt the flow of your website) and use clear and engaging copy, this is a great way to get webinar sign-ups (or at the very least drive traffic to your webinar landing page).
Website pop-up
Pay attention to timing (in other words, don’t have it pop up right away!), prominent CTAs, and frequency when you make a pop-up ad. Also, make sure the ad is easy to close so you don’t increase your bounce rate.
Website content
Analyze your website for well-performing pages and include CTAs on relevant blog posts, eBooks, etc.
Retargeting
Send out your webinar info to people who have recently interacted with your brand, because it will be top of mind for them.
Email marketing
Email drip campaigns are a crucial way to generate awareness and build anticipation for your webinar, focusing on people who have already opted in to receiving communications from you.
Promote your webinar to new audiences
To market your webinar to new audiences—aka people who have never engaged with (or maybe heard of) your brand—you’ll want to meet them where they are. Here are some of the ways you can market your webinar to new audiences:
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Paid ads — you can also create your campaign using “lookalike” audiences, or audiences that are similar to your existing one. Google Ads and Facebook Ads easily allow you to do this.
For an in-depth guide to marketing on Facebook, read this free ebook. If you’re hoping to use LinkedIn for your marketing efforts, read this comprehensive guide to LinkedIn marketing.
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Ask your speakers to help promote — Engaging with new audiences organically takes a little more leg work, but ultimately is worth it. If you have speakers on your webinar or a partnering brand involved, ask them to share with their audiences to expand your reach.
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Browse relevant threads on social — You can also browse Reddit and Quora threads, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social platforms to join in on the conversation about your topic by responding with your webinar landing page.
Utilize your sales team!
You hired them for a reason right?! Your sales team is an invaluable resource when it comes to getting in front of both existing audiences and new ones because they have an understanding of who would be most interested in the webinar. To best prepare your sales team to properly promote your webinar, you’ll want to do the following:
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Provide them with promotional packages—images for social media, landing pages, ad banners, relevant copy
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Incentivize them—If possible, encourage your sales team to drive webinar sign-ups with additional sales bonuses or commission
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Utilize their personal pages—Especially if your sales rep is influential or active on LinkedIn (or other social channels) with followers that mimic your target audience, you’ll want to encourage them to post about the webinar, too.
Once you’ve hosted the webinar, it may seem like an easy next step to count your registrants, follow up, and move on. However, you’ll want to dig deeper to determine if your marketing efforts were successful, if they were worth it, or if you’ll want to tweak them for your next webinar.
Chapter 3
Wrapping up Your Webinar Marketing Campaign
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Revisit your marketing goals
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Review your performance
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Continue to utilize the webinar content
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Create a killer webinar marketing campaign
You’ve created a quality webinar, marketed it to everyone and their mothers, and presented it to a list of qualified leads. You’ve done the heavy lifting… Or so it seems. The most crucial part of your webinar’s success is actually determined after all of this, when you analyze the success of your marketing efforts to determine whether or not they were worth it! Let’s dive into what you should do after your webinar—like determining the success of your marketing efforts, and reviewing how your attendees felt about the webinar and what to do with those sentiments, and even utilizing the webinar content in other ways.
Revisit your marketing goals
Remember when we talked about choosing a metric to measure the success of your webinar? Let’s look at those metrics first.
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Registration numbers
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Attendee Engagement—This can be measured in a variety of ways, mainly surrounding how webinar attendees interacted with your brand after the webinar—whether it’s on social media, on your website, opening your emails, clicking through links, etc.
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Subscription rates—Be sure to keep an eye on your email subscription number growing after the webinar.
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Social engagement/ following—During your webinar, you’ll want to plug your social channels somewhere near the end so your attendees know where they can turn to find out about future events.
Review your performance
Apart from these concrete numbers, you’ll want to analyze how your audience felt about the actual content of the webinar because ultimately, it was all done for them! You can gather these sorts of insights by sending out customer satisfaction surveys via email, posting them on social media, or even tagging it onto the end of your webinar to engage people while they’re still in the webinar mindset.
These are the kinds of questions you’ll want to include in your customer feedback survey so you can get a clear picture of how your audience felt about the webinar and what you should do differently next time:
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How did you find out about this webinar?
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Did you find this webinar helpful?
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Would you like to learn more about this topic?
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What percentage of the information in this webinar was new to you?
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Rate the speaker’s knowledge of this topic.
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How accurate was the session description?
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How did the webinar compare to your expectations?
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How likely are you to recommend a webinar with [brand name] to your colleagues?
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Please rate your overall experience.
Continue to utilize the webinar content
You spent time researching and analyzing to pick a topic your target audience is invested in. You vetted your speakers and host and presented need-to-know information in a clear, concise, and engaging way. Just because the live webinar date has passed doesn’t mean you can’t continue to use this content for marketing efforts in the future. After all, you know the information presented in the webinar is important to your audience and will get the clicks. Here are some ways you can repurpose your webinar content after the webinar:
Repurpose the information in your webinar into a digestible, shareable blog post that you can continue to use in sales emails and on social media.
An eBook
If your webinar is longer and you feel it’s too much information for one blog post or article, break it into an eBook with multiple chapters.
Gated content
To continue your email collection efforts beyond the webinar, position the webinar content as a downloadable that prospects can access after they fill out a lead form.
On demand webinar
House the webinar on YouTube or your website on a landing page where people can rewatch it if they weren’t able to attend the webinar live. You can send out this on demand webinar to people who registered but didn’t attend.
Create a killer webinar marketing campaign
These steps can help you create and market a webinar that sets you apart from your competition and garners the qualified leads you’ve been missing out on. If you feel like you need help getting started or need a push in the right direction, Llama Lead Gen can help you. Set up a call today to begin the webinar marketing journey that can introduce you to a breadth of new customers.
