Can Webinars drive lead generation?
Webinars are a powerful marketing tool for businesses looking to drive lead generation. They’re an excellent strategy because they work across the entire customer journey. Webinars are a great environment to demonstrate your thought-leadership, host panel discussions, work with guest speakers and contributors to helping you establish trust and credibility.
Webinars are a dynamic and effective way to aid the journey of your prospects through the sales funnel from zero to sale. They create a great deal of opportunity and potential because when done right, they will increase engagement. Webinars have longevity through video and play on demand, which means they make sense as part of your lead generation strategy.
Those who get it right can achieve great things and often create them on a regular basis. In some cases even creating series, with multiple webinars each week or month.
What is a webinar?
The name webinar is a combination of WEB and SEMINAR and it’s a presentation delivered online. Webinars are a way for businesses to educate and engage with a target audience, whether that audience is an existing customer, a prospect who needs nurturing along the sales pipeline, or new leads.
The real power of a webinar is that it’s interactive because, participants can take part and respond in real time. You can address any questions and debates on the spot. But really good webinars will actively increase this interactivity, for example by including mechanisms such as live polls for instant results. Why not try using hashtags to drive social media chatter throughout.
So if you want to achieve great results and generate high-quality leads you need to pay attention to every step and every detail. Remember this all impacts on your audiences view of your brand.
Webinars are intended to deliver value for the participant, they are not sales pitches.
5 reasons why your business might want to host webinars
Hosting a webinar positions you as an authority and will help you stand out from your competitors
- Increase brand awareness and visibility
- Generate leads – and not just any leads, targeted and high-quality leads
- Position yourself as an expert in your field
- To build and nurture relationships
- To generate engagement throughout the sales journey
Stats that make a compelling business case for Webinars
According to the Content Marketing institute over 60% of marketers now use webinars as part of their content marketing strategies.
- Webinars retain 40% of viewers’ attention from start to finish (MakeSocialMediaSell)
- Between 20% and 40% of those who attend a webinar become qualified leads, (ReadyTalk)
- Between 2% and 5% of webinar attendees will buy something from you, says the Branded Solopreneur
- 39% of pre-registrants will attend the webinar (SmartInsights)
- 35% of webinar views are on-demand
- 73% of B2B marketing and sales leaders say webinarsare the best way to generate high-quality leads
- 44% of webinars have fewer than 25 attendees GoToWebinar
A recent report from ON24 suggests that businesses see webinars as a key part of their marketing efforts, with over 38% of the businesses they surveyed consider webinars to be critical to their digital communications.
Use webinars to capture high-quality leads
Webinars will help you increase your database of subscribers which will help you drive lead generation. The leads you acquire through your webinar tend to be more responsive and generally of higher quality. People who take the time to click your link, read the details of your webinar and register to attends are interested in the subject or theme you are presenting.
Webinar attendees tend to be more willing to share their information, based on the perceived value of the webinar. You can collect more data during the registration process, but be cautious: don’t capture too much otherwise you are creating a barrier to engaging with them.
Webinar engagement
People expect webinars to be polished, professional, and full of relevant content. You need to make sure you deliver on the promise you made when you marketed the webinar: title, content, learnings and take-aways.
I’m sure you’ve done this yourself when you’ve attended webinars, you’re not 100% attentive. You’re at your desk checking emails, or working on other tasks, while your listening and watching the webinar.
There’s a number of ways you can improve audience engagement and attentiveness, such as Q&A’s and live polls and surveys.
Tips from GoToWebinar to increase engagement
Handraise: Let attendees know they can virtually raise their hand in response to a prompt or when they have a question.
Handouts: Provide relevant information in the form of PDFs, videos, images and anything else that would benefit attendees.
Polls: Use polls throughout your webinar to keep the conversation going both ways.
Unmute attendees: Have a two-way conversation, unmute attendees at any point during the webinar so they can comment or ask questions.
Timing is everything
So what are the best days to host your webinar? Webinar platform providers continue to monitoring which days of the week are achieving the highest audience attendance rates. They all seem to agree in their conclusions that Wednesday and Thursday are the best days to host your webinar. Livestorm webinar stats, stats from BrightTALK, and GoToWebinar
Webinars hosted between 10 am and 11 am, consistently see higher attendance rates.
So in order to give yourself the best chance of success with your webinars, you should look to host them on a Wednesday or Thursday, stating at 10 or 11 am.
Webinars drive sales
Are you convinced that Webinars will help your business drive more sales. With greater choice and more accessible technology available for hosting, more and more businesses are choosing to host webinars, which means there’s more competition. Attendees are becoming more demanding and savvier.
Your audience has high expectations from you, but if you get it right, you’ll reap the rewards. But you must pay attention to the detail of delivering a professional webinar. Remember to pay attention to each step and interaction with your webinar delegates. Good Luck.
If you’re looking for assistance to launch your first webinar or help achieving improved results and ROI, get in touch.