How To Make Webinars Effective For Hot Lead Conversion
By Mohammad Farooq
Webinars are an important component of any content marketer’s strategy. This is clear because over 60% of marketers use webinars in their marketing efforts. Even though this is clear, according to Smart Insights, 47% of businesses did not have a digital marketing strategy in 2016. In effect, it is also safe to assume that a significant number of marketers do not have a clear strategy for webinars.
A robust digital marketing strategy consists of six key stages. These include planning, attracting, retargeting, converting, engaging and measuring/experimenting. One doesn’t have to be a digital marketing specialist to prepare a strategy. Although if you are one, you’re good to go. When it comes to webinars as a content marketing strategy, a similar approach needs to be adopted. In this article, we will take a look at some of the key strategies that marketers use for effectively converting leads.
1. Attract the right audience.
In 2015, the ON24 Webinars Benchmark Report conveyed that the attendance in marketing webinars was only 35% to 45% of registrants for live events. The average live webinar viewing time has also steadily risen from 38 minutes in 2010 to nearly 56 minutes in 2015.
Webinars can be expensive to organize and run. This is especially true when you are trying to attract attendees through paid promotions. One can make use of webinar software like Clickmeeting to get started. It is important to show your ads to a highly targeted niche in order to ensure high viewership and engagement.
So, the question is, how do you attract the right audience for effective lead conversion?
The answer is when they are at the prospect stage of your sales funnel.
Why? Because, at this stage, the person you want to attract has already shown interest by giving you their personal information in exchange for some content you have offered. They are interested in finding out more, before deciding whether to purchase or not. Another benefit of targeting prospects is that you can make your webinars less promotional and more educative instead. This will further attract audiences instead of making them look for the information that they need elsewhere.
Additionally, how will you manage to attract the prospective audiences?
Depending on the type of audience, you can choose promotional platforms like Facebook or Instagram or even Snapchat to prospect and manage your audience.
2. Catch your target audience’s attention with an attractive exclusive offer.
There are several ways that you can catch your audience’s attention. You should definitely mention all the benefits of attending the webinar including most of the key talking points that will be discussed. However, if you want to catch even more attention and attract the right audience, you need to make your webinar attendees feel special. A good way to do this is to offer an exclusive offer such as a live one-on-one demo, or maybe a free e-book with useful information.
3. Optimize your landing page.
Once you have attracted your target audience with the right messages and offers, the landing page is probably the most important tool that will ensure your target audience registers for the webinar. You need to test what works for your audience (and what doesn’t work) through rigorous A/B testing so that the content on your landing page makes the most impact.
Through A/B testing, you can find out the best placement for your registration form, how many fields your registration form should have, where to place the call to action on the landing page, whether an additional offer is necessary and so on.
Example of a landing page from wishpond.com.
4. Get the word out.
According to the 2016 Demand Generation Benchmark Report, the top channels used to drive leads include Email (77%), SEO (56%) and Social (47%). By far, email is still the best way to get the word out about your webinar and therefore you need to focus on doing it right. The best way to get it right is through a lot of A/B testing since each audience and business has its own peculiarities. A/B testing your emails will ensure that you have high email open rates as well as high conversion rates based on the emails that are opened.
Specific areas of the email that you need to pay close attention to include the Subject line, From line, and the placement of your call to action which are often not given enough attention. Furthermore, setting up confirmation and reminder emails at the right time will ensure that your webinars are attended by everyone interested in your content.
You can even optimize your email signatures using tools like Wisestamp to get attention from the right set of audience who might be interested.
Example of a webinar invite by email by ubounce.com.
5. Let your audience gain easy access to your webinar.
Once you have done the hard work of ensuring that your audiences are interested in attending your webinar, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to attend. Finding the right webinar software for your content plan is critically important to ensure a great attendee experience. It is also important to decide how long your webinars should be. Usually, webinars are about 1-hour long with the first 45 minutes dedicated to the main content and the remaining 15-minutes to a Q&A session. Some say that the sweet spot is a 30-minute webinar, 20-minutes for the content and 10-minutes for a Q&A session.
6. Re-engage and follow up with your audience.
You will need to re-engage with your audience a day or two after the webinar. This way, you can reach out to them while the information is still fresh and when they are still motivated to take action.
Activities that you should engage in after the webinar include:
- Sending thank you for attending e-mails.
- Gathering metrics and analytics.
- Converting the analytics gathered into actionable follow-up.
- Developing a post-webinar nurturing campaign to re-engage interested registrants.
- Learn from the webinar and get ready for the next one.
Conclusion
Done right, the strategies highlighted here should allow you to attract, engage and convert the right audience to your webinars. More importantly, both you and your audience will have a lot to benefit from the experience. Your audience will get the information that they need in an engaging format while you will get the much needed sales that you are after.
Mohammad Farooq works as a Social Media Analyst. When not doing anything related to social media, he goes backpacking around India. He regularly blogs about travel, movies, political issues and a lot of other things on his blog ReveringThoughts.
