Webinars can be an extremely effective form of content marketing, nurturing leads and driving bottom-of-funnel results. Regardless of your niche, webinars can help you increase brand trust and reach, as you establish yourself as a visible expert in your field.
To get started with webinars, you need a tool that offers next-gen features that will help you nurture leads and guide them down your sales funnel. For example, you might want to leverage automated webinars on a schedule, offer evergreen on-demand webinars or organize paid webinars. And, of course, you’ll want to make sure your webinars are branded and integrated into your marketing automation workflows.
In a recent ClickMeeting report, the leading webinar platform revealed that a full 25% of webinar hosts using ClickMeeting’s software have used on-demand webinars to generate leads.
In this article, we’ll step through some actionable tips to help you host great webinar events that drive sales. But first, let’s take a minute and talk about why hosting webinars is important for your business.
Why You Should Host a Webinar
Webinars play a key role in the purchase decision of most B2B buyers. Here are some of the main reasons why businesses should host webinars:
- To build your email list and generate qualified leads. Hosting webinars is a great way to gather contact details from audience members and build an email list for your business. You can use forms to qualify your audience and generate targeted leads.
- To raise brand awareness. Webinars are a great tool for promoting your brand and reusing content material to boost brand awareness. It’s an easy and cost-effective way to increase brand visibility with very little marketing spend.
- To develop authority and trust. This content format enables you to showcase your skills, knowledge, training, and expertise to your prospective customers – and allow you to humanize your brand by engaging with your audience face-to-face.
- To generate revenue with paid webinars. Paid webinars can help you reach out to a larger audience to boost your revenue. It enables you to monetize your knowledge and skills and generate a lucrative income stream, which is an especially attractive option among bloggers.
Here are six tips for using webinars to capture leads, nurture qualified audience members and even convert them to paying customers.
Tip #1: Design a Branded Registration Page
Building a branded registration page for your webinar allows you to build trust in your brand and makes it easy for your target audience to quickly recognize you.
One way to improve the webinar registration experience is by designing a simple registration page with ClickMeeting. You can use it to share key topics you’ll cover in the webinar and introduce the presenters and speakers.
You should also aim to streamline the webinar registration process as much as possible. The easiest way to do this is by displaying a clear call to action button in the registration form. Make sure that you only ask for necessary information from your registrants such as their names and email addresses.
In addition to this, you should also include the date and time of your webinar event as well as the time zone (in case your attendees are spread across the world).
For bloggers who use WordPress, you can even set this all up to sit on a dedicated web page on your site. ClickMeeting’s WordPress plugin makes it easy to embed the entire experience (pre-webinar registration page, webinar event “room” and post-webinar replay and resources) on your site.
Tip #2: Generate Buzz
Getting the word out about your webinar event is important for hosting successful webinars. You should initiate your promotional efforts around a month before the day of the event to maximize registrations.
A great way to do this is by using social media, email, and your webinar site to generate buzz about your event. You can get speakers to share your webinar event with their social following. For example, you could share a short 30-second invitational video featuring your speakers and presenters and mention the time, date, and topic of your webinar.
Social media advertising can also help you effectively promote your events. Use unique hashtags to facilitate dialogue on social media sites. A good practice is to send out emails to your contacts a week before the webinar event and schedule reminder emails for the day before the webinar.
Tip #3: Keep Your Audience Engaged Throughout
Webinars are a great source of gathering useful insights, opinions, and feedback from attendees. To deliver an amazing experience to your audience, you need to make sure that they stay engaged throughout the duration of the webinar.
For example, you might start off your event by showing a teaser about the exclusive content you’ll cover. This will boost the audience’s interest in your webinar and make sure they stay until the end.
You can also boost audience engagement by polling attendees or responding to questions in the chat section. For this, you will need to a co-presenter to moderate the chat room.
ClickMeeting helps you keep your audience interested throughout the webinar by running polls and conducting surveys. You’ll be able to collect feedback, opinions, and responses from your audience and use the data you collect to make informed business decisions. You can also use ClickMeeting’s CRM integrations to push individuals’ responses to their records, which is extremely helpful for segmented follow-up over time.
In addition to this, ClickMeeting allows you to ask attendees questions through chat. It also offers a number of audience engagement tools such as screen sharing, CTAs and whiteboard features.
Tip #4: Follow Up With Leads
As a post-webinar activity, you can send thank-you emails to your attendees and share the webinar recordings and survey summaries with them. This should be done just as the webinar ends as it allows you to gather helpful attendee responses and feedback about how you can improve future webinars. As a post-webinar activity, make sure to follow up with your attendees to solicit feedback using a poll or survey.
Sometimes people register for a webinar but fail to attend it for different reasons. You can still allow them to view your webinar by sending the recording, sharing survey summaries with them, and providing answers to their questions via email.
ClickMeeting enables you to record your webinar events with a single click – or as a global setting that allows it to happen automatically.
This way, you can let your attendees review webinar content whenever they want. Plus, you’ll be able to share this material with your social media audience, email list, and website visitors.
You can also repurpose your replays as automated webinars, with the option to mix and match interactive and live elements. For example, you can run a replay of a past presentation as if it’s live, complete with interactive polls and CTAs, and only pop in for a live Q&A session at the end.
Tip #5: Build Automated Lead Scoring Models
You can increase your attendees’ engagement and interest in your webinar events by getting them to fill out a carefully-crafted registration form. Registrants who show serious interest in this initial step can be considered strong prospects for your business.
But the people who actually show up and watch a full hour-long presentation, asking questions and clicking on your calls-to-action? They’re showing strong “intent” signals and may be ready to buy your services.
By building automated lead scoring models in your CRM, you’ll be able to maximize sales opportunities and make better business decisions. Plus, this information will be helpful in improving any future webinars your company organizes.
Because ClickMeeting’s native CRM integrations with HubSpot, InfusionSoft/Keap, Pipedrive and Salesforce support the automated transfer of all webinar registration logs and in-webinar interactions, you can use these signals to create sophisticated lead scoring systems that trigger automated follow-up messaging – or that alert you on Slack when a specific lead appears to be ready for the pitch.
Don’t use one of the “big four” CRMs listed above? That’s okay, because ClickMeeting is now available on Zapier, where you can create your own custom integrations with over 1500 different apps, including 318 of them which Zapier lists in its CRM category.
Tip #6: Host Paid Webinars
Free webinars are usually used by businesses that want to be able to educate their target audience about their products. But for bloggers and service-based businesses, where shared knowledge is the product itself.
According to one study, 78% of B2B customers use webinars to make purchase decisions. So, you need to focus on creating premium content that facilitates the buying decision of B2B buyers.
ClickMeeting gives you the tools you need to host paid webinars and allows you to choose the webinars you want to charge for and the ones you want to give away for free. It lets you set the charges for each event and quickly manage payments from one place.
In addition to this, its paid event statistics functionality helps you easily view which paid webinars were most profitable and provides insights into how you can plan better webinars in the future. You can also integrate your ClickMeeting account with the Moodle learning management system (LMS), so that the presentations are delivered on ClickMeeting but distributed as lesson drips on Moodle.
Conclusion
We shared some important tips to help you plan and host webinars that drive sales, increase revenue, and educate your audience. We also talked a bit about ClickMeeting – browser-based webinar software that lets easily implement these tips in your webinar events.
With ClickMeeting, you’ll be able to:
- Build audience trust in your brand and increase your brand awareness.
- Leverage social media platforms and emails to boost your webinar registrations.
- Gather feedback, opinions, and insights from your attendees to create and deliver engaging and immersive experiences.
- Build automated lead scoring models in order to increase sales opportunities and make better business decisions.
What are some of the key features you look for in webinar software? Let us know by commenting below.
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