There’s nothing more powerful in modern marketing than putting a face to a brand. Opening the doors and chatting with your audience is one of the most effective forms of engagement there is. In fact, the average audience viewing time for a webinar is 57 minutes. That’s about 54 minutes more than people will typically give you!
Hosting regular webinars provides your brand with a variety of benefits. In this article, we’ll look at how holding an effective and informed webinar can increase consumer loyalty and drive lead generation opportunities, and therefore, grow your email lists.
Choose a Topic That Resonates
Before you get started, you have to choose a discussion topic that will be of interest to your audience. This will not only help ensure you have something valuable to offer, but it will also increase your chances of getting high-quality leads to register. No one will want to spend an hour of their time listening to a sales presentation. Get creative, and spend a little effort researching what your audience needs to know.
What are the main pain points customers face? This is an excellent question to ask when generating your webinar content. The more you can educate people during your webinar, the more they will stick around.
You can look to your blog and social media for inspiration too. What are your three most popular blog posts? What’s trending right now on social? This can help you refine topics that leads will want to hear about.
People should ultimately leave the webinar having learned something and perhaps seeing your brand as a solution (but don’t push it). Just think, “fewer sales, more assistance.” Don’t forget about a CTA at the end that promotes a piece of applicable content, or a special offer.
Go For A Co-Branded Strategy
Webinars aren’t the quickest and easiest to coordinate. They require a lot of time, preparation, and labor. But, if you’re able to partner with a brand that has a similar audience as yours, you’ll be able to split the efforts. Do some research and look into other brands in your industry that are creating content and hosting webinars already. When looking for new and qualified leads, this is a crucial method of opening doors. Co-branding has benefits like:
- Strengthening business relationships
- Creating brand authority and trust by third-party credibility
- Tapping into a new resource of qualified leads
- Growing your network through shared efforts
Don’t just partner with anyone eager. Do the research to find experts in your space because anyone who isn’t a great fit could result in a disjointed webinar. When your webinar doesn’t make sense, it will leave a bad taste in the mouths of your registrants, which could ruin your chances of talking to them seriously about your services.
Plan, Promote, and Prepare
Did you know that 36% of webinar registrations occur between 8-10 a.m.? There is no point in spending a ton of time putting together a webinar and composing the proper content if you don’t work to promote it appropriately.
A webinar is one of the most effective forms of content you have, so spend the necessary amount of time to introduce. Doing so will ensure it’s successful and that more people not only register but attend the live broadcast. The worst mistake to make is not giving people enough time to schedule their day around your webinar.
Planning should start at least a month out or so, and you should begin webinar promotion with a dedicated email campaign. Depending on what you’re discussing, you can send an email to your entire list or segment and send it to those it will be most applicable to. You want as many registrants as possible, but you want them to be qualified. Otherwise, you’re wasting peoples’ time (including yours).
Don’t forget to include social media campaigns to promote your webinar and consider paid advertising. Test out a few different audience segments to gauge which types might be the most interested.
Delegate Responsibilities
If you choose to work with a partner, ensure you are both spending an equal amount of time on webinar efforts. A good rule of thumb is for all parties involved to send out the same amount of email promo or at least promote it to a comparable amount of people. You may want to also consider creating some blog content around the topic of the webinar for further promotion.
Whichever party is hosting the webinar is also hosting landing page. This is very important, as this is how you’ll generate leads for the webinar and ensure everyone knows how to log-on the day of. Whoever hosts should typically share the lead list with the other party, depending on their brand guidelines and rules. This is something you should negotiate and confirm before solidifying the partnership, as it’s how you’ll actually grow your email lists.
Follow Up
As soon as the webinar is over, follow up with potential leads. During webinars, it’s not uncommon for attendees to request copies of slides and documents, so a follow-up email is a great way to send those resources, as well as say thank you for registering.
A tip is to prepare a follow-up email in advance that you can quickly send out right after the broadcast. You want to follow-up with people as soon as possible, so you’re still fresh in their minds.
Webinars can be a disaster if you don’t prepare, plan, and promote appropriately. The more people that attend, the more opportunity you have to convert leads and grow your email lists, but make sure you select your partner wisely, as that will ultimately determine the quality of leads you’ll see coming in.