In this age of social distancing, people are more interested in webinars than ever before. So why not utilize this time and make the most of it. Besides, it’s only wise to educate your target market about a new product and help them learn and develop new skills virtually. Webinars are also one of the best ways to generate high-quality leads as buyers prefer sharing information when invited to register for webinar events. Such online seminars turn presentations into real-time conversations with interested candidates from different parts of the world, thus giving you an opportunity to target more number of leads.
If you are wondering how to conduct a successful seminar that might help you generate more sales-ready leads, then remember to check the current strategies and revise them if necessary. Here are some best practices that you need to add before and after launching webinars:
Define Ideal Customer Profiles
Make sure that you define the customer profile to clarify who can register for your webinars. Using the right insights on your targeted audience as customer profiles will help you identify ideal leads. So decide on the prospects you want to send invites to and highlight those names who are likely to convert to customers later on. Also, identify the choice of topic and subtopics, duration of the event, marketing channels to promote the event, presenters and speakers of the event, and key points to feature on the registration page.
Create Webinar Content for the Target Audience
Content plays the biggest role in the success of a webinar. Thus, to turn your webinar attendees into leads, you need to find out who is interested in your products, get their email addresses, and analyze their social media posts. Based on these, you need to optimize your webinar content on those profiles and their problem areas. Try to position your product or services as solutions to those pain points. Also, select the webinar format that appeals to those attendees. Check if you need to make your webinar format educational, or around product description, or simply by explaining case studies.
Promote Your Webinars
The more you promote your upcoming webinar, the more chance you get in generating leads. But you need to promote your webinars strategically to target the right prospects. Email marketing is a great way to promote webinars as it gives you the option of segmenting your list and sending personalized emails. Thus you can create topics based on profiles, job titles, job functions, and industries for your ideal customer profiles.
Also, you can use marketing automation tools to schedule emails to the targeted lead segments. Besides email marketing, you can also create social media promotions designed in a way that resonates with the targeted leads. But with social media promotions, you need to choose channels that are mostly used by your targeted registrants. Social media also gives you the option of paid promotion, which helps to find the target audience who are not your customers yet.
Once your webinar successfully targets a good number of leads, you will have to set up a webinar-focused lead scoring model to qualify leads before sharing with the sales team. To identify the sales-readiness of your leads, you can assign values to them based on the set criteria such as behavioral data, registration data, firmographic data, technographic data, and purchase history. You can also segment them based on content consumption to help your sales team qualify the leads. Further, to engage unqualified leads, you need to develop nurture plans for different segments of the webinar. Send them thank you emails for being a part of the webinar along with the links to downloadable blogs and videos that will educate, inform, and nurture them.
Webinars can do more for your business than just conducting an online seminar. It can bring more profit to your company in future. But you need to have a vision that looks beyond the present and turn your webinars into lead generation events.
