How to generate higher quality leads from your webinar

Between developing promotion materials, developing a run sheet and script, running rehearsals, and setting up reminder and follow-up emails for registrants, webinars can be a lot of work and often involve multiple departments across your company. 

There are two types of webinars businesses include in their overarching strategy:

1. Webinars for existing customers (goal: increase engagement)

2. Webinars for potential customers (goal: generate leads)

In this blog, we’re going to focus on the second type of webinar, showing you how you can turn this time crunch into a machine that generates a higher volume of higher-quality leads, and how to nudge them closer to conversion.

Defining and measuring high-quality webinar leads 

Before you even consider your webinar topic, hosts, promotional strategy, or anything else, you need to clearly define what a ‘high-quality lead’ actually means for your business in this context.

It’s likely your business has multiple types of leads. For example, if you’re a B2B SaaS like Ortto you may serve different industries including B2C, ecommerce, not-for-profit, agencies, and other B2B and SaaS companies. A wide net is a wonderful thing, but when looking at developing a webinar that generates high-quality leads, it’s important to home in on a lead type to ensure your webinar content resonates with your audience.  

Start by answering these questions:

1. Where are your existing leads experiencing the biggest ‘aha moment’ in your product demos, sales calls or during free trials?

2. What are the most commonly occurring questions new leads ask? 

3. What are the most common problems leads are looking to solve with your product? 

4. Where does your product demonstrate the clearest competitive advantage? 

5. Which customer category, type, or industry experiences the fastest and biggest gains from your product? 

6. Where is your sales team seeing the biggest and fastest wins?

   1. Alternatively, is there a gap this webinar needs to plug to bring more leads of a specific type into the funnel? 

Now take a look at the information you’ve compiled and you’ll likely start to see a trend. For example, perhaps these answers appear: 

1. A specific feature in the product that saves hours each week for B2C companies with bookings/appointments 

2. How difficult is implementation?

3. No time to set up lifecycle marketing efforts required to drive long-term growth 

4. Competitive advantage: Simplicity and ease of use 

5. B2C and B2B 

6. B2C companies that do not fit the ecommerce mold 

With this information, you can quickly build a persona for your webinar leads. B2C marketers who are time-poor and need simple solutions to marketing. 

Now, set out to define what success looks like for your webinar and the metrics you will need to track. This may include things like:

• Total number of registrants

• Total number of registrants who fit the above definition 

• Attendee % 

• Rewatch % 

• Opens/click-throughs on follow-up emails

• Total qualified leads (number of leads that fit the above description)

• Total conversion rate

• Conversion on qualified leads

• Total revenue attributed 

• Estimated CLV on converted leads

The sooner you establish how and where each of these metrics will be tracked, the better you’ll be able to optimize your webinar promotion (channels and creative) to bring in more leads that fit your description of ‘qualified’.  

5 steps to generate webinar leads that actually convert

Now you’ve established what a ‘higher-quality webinar lead’ actually looks like for you, it’s time to set your webinar in motion. Follow these steps to set up a webinar that generates the right kind of lead, and nudge them through to conversion. 

We’ve also created a webinar checklist to help keep you on track through the process. Download it here.

Step 1: Clearly define webinar content and partner involvement 

It’s likely you’ve already got a few ideas buzzing around based on what you discovered when identifying your quality lead. Now it’s time to identify a webinar topic and define the reason someone should register and tune in. 

Let’s take the example above. We know our leads are in the B2C space, and they are underserved (compared to ecommerce or B2B companies). They are time-poor marketers who are looking for simple, efficient solutions, so they are unlikely to attend a long webinar on a high-level topic that is out of reach for them. Instead, we’re going to be better off narrowing in on a topic and showing them HOW something is done to prove that this is doable, even in their packed week. 

To extend your reach, it’s worth considering adding a partner or partners to participate as additional hosts or guests. Look for individuals or businesses that are complementary to yours, but not competitive, and ensure that all partners involved agree on a promotional plan ahead of time. 

With this information, we’ll be able to 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 2: 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.

Lookalike campaigns are a great way to attract the right kind of lead, and with Ortto you can create an audience that closely represents your qualified lead persona, then sync it with your Facebook Business Manager account to use as a data source for your lookalikes. 

Step 3: 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 like Clearbit 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 4: Plan your webinar content

Consider how you can use your webinar content to warm up your leads even further. While you do not want your entire webinar to be a sales pitch, it is important to demonstrate the value of your product and show how you can help solve this audience’s problem. 

This content may take the form of a masterclass, a demo, or a live case study where a customer walks through their own process.

Most webinars are around 45 minutes in total. This seems to be the sweet spot where you will have enough time to present and your attendees will actually stick around for the whole thing. While this might seem like a lot of time, it can be quickly eaten up by introductions and Q&A segments, so be sure to focus in on the most helpful sections of your content, and avoid going into unnecessary details. If you do have a Q&A section at the end, or take questions throughout, make sure to take note of them to include in your follow-up emails. 

Remember, your goal here is to convert these leads, so you want to impress. Ensure you have more than one rehearsal ahead of the day and run through with the actual 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 5: 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. In the example above, our audience segments might look like this:

• Attended webinar: B2C

• Did not attend webinar: B2C

• Attended webinar: non-B2C

• Did not attend webinar: non-B2C

You could split these even further to send more relevant content based on the goals provided or the exact industry specified (where not B2C), but this is a good place to start. 

Next, plan follow-up emails in a lead nurture playbook. Start with the webinar recording, along with any bonus materials like templates, cheatsheets, or answers to the questions received in the webinar.

From there, you want to plan out a series of emails that include relevant information.  If you do not feel as though you successfully qualified your leads in the registration process, you can use this nurture series to get a sense of what they’re interested in, and even send short, one-question surveys to find out more about their goals. 

Once you have a qualified list, it’s time to hand those warm leads to your sales team so they can start a relationship themselves. 

Finally, update your landing page and put the video behind a gate to continue to use the asset as a lead magnet. You can promote this landing page through blog content, social posts, newsletters, and your partners, or continue to use tactics employed earlier, like lookalike targeting, to increase your reach and your qualified leads.

Final word 

Webinars can be a lot of work, but they’re also incredibly valuable tools for growing leads. Ortto makes building invitations, reminders, nurture campaigns, and reports incredibly simple. In fact, our customer Mosaic is driving 75-80% of their leads through the webinar activity using Ortto for all promotional aspects, and their webinar leads are most likely to convert. Find out how they’ve achieved this in our customer story here.