Webinars (“webinaire” in French) are a very powerful B2B prospecting tool. Webinars are live, online presentations. It is the result of the fusion of the words “web” & “seminar” (seminar in English).
A true content marketing and lead management tool, the webinar proves to be an effective solution for:
- Presenting your new products or features to your customers and prospects, like BuzzSumo.
- Highlighting your expertise, as Drift used it extensively to establish its authority in relationship marketing & generate leads.
- Training your employees on new processes or products.
This article covers the different choices you will need to make to launch a successful webinar campaign, and helps you make the right decision each time.
Choosing your platform
The selection of the platform you will use will of course depend on your objectives and therefore on the type of webinar you have chosen to set up.
If you are a Webmecanik user, you will find a very powerful integration with the webinar software GoToWebinar, a solution recognized for how easy it is to get started with. From the entry-level plan onward, the platform offers a large number of features, including registration, the ability to run Q&A sessions, document management, polling tools, etc.
Note that there are other solutions as well, such as Livestorm, the French Webikeo (which handles part of the promotion of your webinars), or the American Zoom.
How do you choose your topic?
In B2B, impulse buying does not exist; your potential customers want to know more about you, your company, and your products. For that, webinars are an excellent technique for educating your leads and highlighting the benefits of your solution.
However, more and more B2B companies are using this format to present their services. If you want to stand out, you need to find a rock-solid topic, one that can captivate your leads and showcase your expertise.
Here are the main questions you need to ask yourself in order to set up a webinar that will generate qualified leads:
- What would you like to teach your prospects?
- Which topics are we most knowledgeable about and able to provide relevant insights on?
- In 50 minutes, on which topic can we provide the most added value?
But how can you precisely identify the topics that interest your customers and prospects the most?
#1 Involving the sales teams
Creating webinars is handled by the marketing teams. But they cannot select the right topics without taking into account customer feedback via the sales team. Thus, your sales & marketing teams must work closely together, so that your prospects’ issues are addressed during your webinars.
Ask your best customers, through the sales team, about the problems your solution helped them solve and the reasons why they decided to choose you rather than another company.
#2 Leveraging feedback from your different media
Review the analytics from your blog or your LinkedIn account to find out which articles received the most reactions, shares, and comments. The most popular posts indicate the topics your audience is most interested in and are an excellent source of inspiration for webinars.
#3 Ask your target audience
You can also create survey campaigns to gather feedback from your communities. Ask them multiple-choice questions, one or two open-ended questions, let them express themselves. This will allow you to identify their needs, expectations, barriers, the problems they encounter, etc.
Survey your most engaged leads, that is, those who open your emails, read the resources you share with them, download your ebooks, etc., but who have not yet taken the next step: buying and becoming customers. Ask them which topics they would like you to cover and ask them about the main challenges they face.
Choosing the format
Now that you have your topic, you need to choose the webinar format.
#1 Expert discussions
This format consists of having expert partners take part in your webinar. It takes the form of a discussion in which you participate but where people from outside your company provide their perspective. Highlighting third-party opinions helps give credibility to your offer and establish your expertise on the topic. By inviting your partner’s contacts to take part in the webinar, you and your partner generate more leads. On the other hand, these new leads will not yet be educated about your offer, so the content you provide will need to be very relevant to convert them into customers.
#2 Case studies
Your prospects are naturally interested in knowing how their competitors or peers managed to deal with the challenges they face.
“Success Stories,” for example, are very effective at convincing your current prospects of the value of your solution and generating new leads among the competitors and partners of your reference customers. The content of this type of webinar will be easy to reuse on your site or your social networks.
However, these case studies are more difficult to promote because they necessarily deal with a narrower topic. On the other hand, you will have a harder time interesting leads who have never heard of your solution before: the marginal gain in terms of lead acquisition is therefore also lower.
#3 Educational webinars
This format is particularly relevant if you offer a freemium version of your product or if you offer a “technical” solution that requires training. Quick & easy to create, these webinars will allow you to interest new potential customers while strengthening your position as an expert.
This format is demanding in terms of content creation and preparation. Your webinar must be well calibrated so as not to leave room for hesitation that would undermine your credibility in front of your prospects.
This type of format therefore allows you to position yourself as an expert but will not directly convert your prospects into customers; the impact will be more long-term.
Preparing the content
You now know which topic to cover and which format to use for your next webinar: now it is time to create the content. Your webinar must be visually engaging; we recommend using a tool like Canva to create attractive slides.
Before writing the webinar script, make a draft in which you list all the topics to cover in the webinar. This will allow you to define the structure of the webinar. Here is an example of a structure that works well:
- A short 30-second introduction.
- A brief story to hook your audience.
- Between 3 and 5 subtopic sections.
- A call to action, to encourage participants to discover and buy your solution.
- A question-and-answer session.
The length of the pitch depends on the type of product or service you sell and on your audience. It can last between 1 minute and 10 minutes.
You can, for example, offer the people who attend your webinar an exclusive offer, to thank them for taking the time to listen to you and encourage them to buy. You can, for example, offer them a discount on your product or service or an extended trial period.
The ultimate objective of your webinar is to sell. It is therefore logical to highlight your products and solutions, but subtly: without losing sight of the fact that your audience is looking to deepen its knowledge of the topic you are addressing.
Promoting the webinar & gathering participants
Beyond an engaging registration page, here are the options available to you for generating leads from your webinars:
#1 Recruit manually
Share your webinar with your customers, prospects, and teams yourself (or using the email software you have set up). To do this, we strongly recommend setting up a marketing automation scenario. The idea is simple: it consists of sending people who register for the webinar an email sequence to remind them of the webinar date and build their engagement.
Send an email right after registration, another 24 hours before, and a final one 1 hour before the webinar date in order to optimize your attendance rate. We also recommend sending emails to participants in your previous webinars to invite them to take part in your new webinars.
#2 Partner with a complementary provider
You will then be able to reach a wider audience and thus capture more leads on both sides of the partnership. Both of you will set up a marketing automation sequence as mentioned in point 1. The idea is that your customers are leads for your partner, and vice versa. It is probably one of the simplest and most profitable ways to reach an audience different from your own.
#3 Launch your own campaigns
For more advanced users, you can generate leads for your webinars via LinkedIn Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns.
Some tools not only host your webinars but also promote them themselves, such as Webikeo.
#4 Continue after the webinar
Finally, remember to send an email sequence to your participants right after the webinar, to thank them for taking part and to push your calls to action. In these emails, you can share the resources mentioned and/or used during the webinar. It is also a subtle way to extend lead capture over time thanks to the replays that you will be able to put online. For this last point, we recommend signing up for an Optinmonster webinar; they are excellent at this.
Conclusion
You now have all the keys to create webinars with relevant content optimized for lead conversion. They can also be an opportunity to build strong relationships with partners and train users in how to use your tools. Highly appreciated in B2B, webinars will help you demonstrate to your leads that you are the right choice, the one that will solve their problems and help them achieve their objectives.
