Webinars are one of B2B's go-to marketing tactics for a reason. They are equal parts brand builder, lead generator, and customer engagement tool. They can be repackaged, repurposed, and reposted to support content efforts across your owned and operated channels. And, although they can be resource-heavy, they are achievable for all team sizes and budgets.
Webinars can loosely fall into one of two buckets:
Webinars for potential customers
Goal: Generate leads
Format: Thought leadership, demos, orpanel discussions
Webinars for existing customers
Goal: increase engagement and loyalty
Format: Tutorials, Q&As, live workshops, or updates and announcements
In this article, we're going to look at bucket number one, sharing 7 steps that will help you cut through the noise and improve the ROI on your webinars.
7 steps to generate webinar leads that actually convert
Improving the ROI on your webinars isn't just about getting MORE leads, it's about getting the right type of leads and wowing them with content that is memorable, actionable, and positions your brand as a thought leader who understands and can help solve their challenges.
To do this, follow these seven steps.
Step 1. Define lead quality
If generating high-quality leads is your goal, you need a clear definition of 'quality' and a means of measuring it. Even if you already defined your ICP and MQL, you may need to do some narrowing down to identify the specific audience you want to target for the webinar. This will help you develop your webinar topic, speakers, and content, and your promotional strategy and messaging.
To define quality, consider things like:
Industry
Job title or role
Seniority
Business size
Technical knowledge or skills
This information can be used in a fit scoring model — then when a new lead registers for your model, you can automatically score them based on their fit
You can also build out a battle card that includes qualitative data like challenges your audience faces or their top goals. This can help you and your wider team better visualize your audience to aid in topic development and pre-event marketing materials.
Step 2. Measure success
To measure the success of your webinar, you will need to track attendance and engagement using metrics like:
Total number of registrants
Attendee %
Rewatch %
Opens/click-throughs on follow-up emails
When you have this information, you can layer it onto your fit score to qualify your leads. It might look something like this, with the top items being the most heavily weighted, and the bottom being more 'low touch' engagement:
Fit score is 4 stars or above
Registered for webinar
Attended webinar
Rewatched webinar 30% or above
Clicked through on follow-up email
Opened follow-up email
Setting this up before your webinar even begins means you can quickly and easily monitor how many registrants fit your ICP and where they came from. This information will help you to make quick optimizations (channels and creative) to generate more high-quality registrants.
When your webinar ends, you can use this model to define success or continue to make optimizations on the post-event replay promotion.
Step 3. Clearly define webinar content and partner involvement
The audience-defining exercise probably set the wheels in motion on webinar topics — you might have identified a frustration or challenge your webinar content could help solve, or a goal you can help your audience achieve.
Webinars are typically 45 minutes to an hour long and the time absolutely flies by, so getting more specific will help ensure you can go deep and offer real value in your webinar. It can also help you perfect your messaging to generate better-fit registrants.
Consider adding a partner or partners in a panel or workshop-style webinar to extend your reach Look for individuals or businesses who are complementary, but not competitive, and ensure that all partners involved agree on a promotional plan ahead of time.
With this information, you can piece together the value proposition for your qualified lead and start to draft up a webinar lead page and invitation. Visit our 6-step guide to promoting a webinar for more on building landing pages and other promotional materials.
Step 4. Find your leads
Now you know what you’re promoting, it’s time to go lead hunting. Naturally, you will want to invite your existing audience (both customers and leads) to attend via email, promote your webinar across social platforms, ask hosts to promote across their channels, and create pop-ups or in-app messages to drive registrations.
The tricky part comes when finding new leads. Consider where these individuals spend their time and how you can show up there, and convince them to register. Organic channels may include Slack groups, LinkedIn groups, Reddit threads, trade press, or your employees’ professional networks. Paid channels may include lookalike campaigns on social or search, media placements including podcasts, relevant newsletters in the industry, or even influencers in the space.
Step 5. Capture the right data on your leads
If you’ve followed our 6-step guide to promoting a webinar, you will already have a landing page including a form. But if your goal is to attract high-quality leads and convert them into customers, you need to consider how the information you gather from that form landing page can be used to segment your list and send them relevant content.
In addition to the obvious (name and email address), you may also wish to include things like:
Industry
Location
Company
Company size
Role
Goal (reason for attending)
Not all of this information will need to come from form completions. You can also use data enrichment tools to gather relevant data, and ensure you are using identity resolution software to ensure you have the fullest possible picture of your audience’s behavior and information.
Step 6. Plan your webinar content
You do not want your entire webinar to be a sales pitch, but it is important to demonstrate how your product or service is connected to the problem your webinar helps to solve or the goal you're helping the audience reach.
In some cases, the product alignment is enough and a short mention at the start and end is enough — you can let your nurture sequences do the heavy lifting for sales. In other cases, running a live troubleshooting session that showcases your product or service or includes a short demonstration of your product and its capabilities will be appropriate.
In terms of format, most webinars have four sections:
Introduction to the speakers and the topic (5 minutes)
Interview, panel discussion, or demonstration (25 minutes)
Q&A (10 minutes)
Closing remarks (5 minutes)
As you can see, in a 45-minute session the bulk of your content needs to happen in 25 minutes. It's not a lot of time, especially if you have more than one speaker. Use it wisely and rehearse several times to ensure you cut the fat and keep your audience engaged.
Make sure to do at least one run-through with the tech you will use in the same space. This will go a long way to helping ensure there are no technical difficulties on the day.
Our webinar checklist will help ensure all hosts and guests to ensure they are prepped and ready for the big day. Download it here.
Step 7. Follow up with your leads
If your goal is leads and conversions, this is the most important, but most frequently neglected, step in the process. Think of your webinar as that first meeting at a dinner party. Now you want to form a real relationship with this person, and you need to proactively reach out to them.
Firstly, you want to follow up with these new leads with relevant content, speaking to them as if you know them (because you do). This starts with audience segmentation:
Attended webinar (fit score 4+)
Did not attend webinar (fit score 4+)
Attended webinar (fit score 0-3)
Did not attend webinar (fit score 0-3)
Next, plan follow-up emails in a lead nurture journey. Start with the webinar recording, along with any bonus materials like templates, cheatsheets, or answers to the questions received in the webinar.
From there, your best-fit leads may be sent information that is relevant to their industry and the challenges they face, while the rest of your audience is sent down a different path with more generalized information related to the webinar.
Once your high-fit registrants become qualified leads, hand them over to your sales team. Other leads can continue to be nurtured for further qualification.
Finally, remember to update your landing page and upload the replay video to repromote your webinar. You may also want to slice and dice the content, create spin-off articles or infographics, and create social and newsletter content to expand your reach and bring more quality leads into the funnel.
Final word
Webinars can be an incredibly valuable lead generation tactic — the key is narrowing in on a specific audience, delivering content that speaks to them and serves a purpose, and then taking it home with a powerful post-webinar nurture sequence.
