Webinars (webinar in French) are a very powerful B2B prospecting tool. Webinars are presentations, live and online. It’s the result of combining the words “web” & “seminar” (seminar in English).
A real content marketing and lead management tool, the webinar proves to be an effective solution for:
- Present your new products or features to your customers and prospects like BuzzSumo.
- Highlight your expertise, as Drift has used it extensively to establish its authority in relationship marketing & generate leads.
- Train your colleagues on new processes or products.
This article covers the different choices you’ll need to make to launch successful webinar campaigns, and helps you make the right decision at every step.
Choose your platform
The selection of the platform you’ll use will of course depend on your goals and therefore on the type of webinar you’ve chosen to set up.
If you’re a Webmecanik user, you’ll find a very powerful integration with the GoToWebinar webinar software, a solution known for how easy it is to get started with. From the initial plan, the platform offers a large number of features, including registration, the ability to run Q&A sessions, document management, polling tools, etc.
Be aware that there are also other solutions, such as Livestorm, the French Webikeo (which handles part of the promotion of your webinars), or the American Zoom.
How to choose your topic?
In B2B, impulse buying doesn’t exist—your potential customers want to know more about you, your company, and your products. That’s where webinars are an excellent way to educate your leads and highlight 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 solid topic that can captivate your leads and showcase your expertise.
Here are the main questions you should 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, what topic can we deliver the most added value on?
But how do you identify precisely which topics interest your customers and prospects the most?
#1 Involve the sales teams
Creating webinars is a topic handled by the marketing teams. However, they can’t choose the right themes without taking into account customer feedback from the sales team. So, your sales & marketing teams must work closely together, so that your prospects’ concerns are addressed during your webinars.
Interview your best customers with the sales team about the problems your solution helped them solve and the reasons they decided to choose you rather than another company.
#2 Make use of feedback from your various media
Review your blog or LinkedIn account analytics to see which articles received the most ratings, shares, and comments. The most popular messages point to the topics that interest your audience the most and are a great source of inspiration for webinars.
#3 Interview your target audience
You can also create questionnaire campaigns to get feedback from your communities. Ask them multiple-choice questions, one or two open-ended questions, and let them express themselves. This will help you identify their needs, expectations, obstacles, the problems they face, etc.
Interview your most engaged leads—those who open your emails, read the resources you share with them, download your ebooks, and so on—but who haven’t yet taken the next step: buying and becoming customers. Ask them what topics they’d like you to cover, and interview them about the main challenges they’re facing.
Choose the format
Now that you have your topic, you need to choose the webinar format.
#1 Discussions between experts
This format involves having expert partners participate in your webinar. It takes the form of a discussion in which you also take part, but where people outside your company provide their perspective. Highlighting the views of third parties helps to increase the credibility of your offer and back up your expertise on the subject. By inviting contacts from your partner to participate in the webinar, you and your partner generate more leads. However, these new leads still won’t have been educated about your offer yet—your content will need to be very relevant to convert them into customers.
#2 Case studies
Your prospects are bound to be interested in how their competitors or peers managed to successfully deal with the challenges they face.
“Success Stories,” for example, are very effective in convincing your current prospects of the value of your solution and generating new leads among the competitors and partners of your testimonial customers. The content of this type of webinar is also easy to reuse on your website or on social networks.
However, these case studies are harder to promote because they necessarily cover a narrower topic. On the other hand, you’ll find it more difficult to attract leads who have never heard of your solution before: the marginal gain in lead acquisition is therefore also lower.
#3 Educational webinars
This format is especially relevant if you offer a freemium version of your product or a “technical” solution that assumes training. Quick & easy to create, these webinars will help you attract new potential customers by strengthening your position as an expert.
This format is demanding in terms of content creation and preparation. Your webinar must be well calibrated so that no room is left for hesitation, which would undermine your credibility with your prospects.
So this type of format helps you position yourself as an expert, but it won’t directly convert your prospects into customers—the impact will be felt more in the long term.
Prepare the content
You now know which topic to cover and which format to use for your next webinar: it’s time to create the content. Your webinar should be visually engaging—we recommend using a tool like Canva to create attractive slides.
Before writing the webinar script, draft it by listing all the topics to cover in the webinar. This will help you lay out the webinar structure. Here’s an example of a structure that works well:
- A short 30-second introduction.
- A short story to hook your audience.
- 3 to 5 sections of sub-topics.
- A call to action to encourage participants to discover and buy your solution.
- A Q&A session.
The length of the pitch depends on the type of product or service you’re selling and on your audience. It can last between 1 minute and 10 minutes.
You could, for example, offer an exclusive deal to the people attending your webinar to thank them for taking the time to listen and to encourage them to buy. For example, you could offer them a discount on your product or service, or an extended trial period.
The ultimate goal of your webinar is to sell. So it makes sense that you highlight your products and solutions, but subtly: without losing sight of the fact that your audience is looking to deepen their knowledge of the topic you’re covering.
Promote the webinar & gather participants
Beyond an engaging registration page, here are the options available to generate leads from your webinars:
#1 Recruit manually
Share your webinar with your customers, prospects, and teams yourself (or via an email-sending software solution). To do this, we strongly recommend setting up a marketing automation scenario. The idea is simple: it involves sending webinar registrants an email sequence to remind them of the webinar date and increase their engagement.
Send an email right after registration, another 24 hours before, and a final one 1 hour before the webinar date to optimize your attendance rate. We also recommend sending emails to participants of your past webinars to invite them to join your new webinars.
#2 Partner with a complementary provider
This will allow you to reach a wider audience and therefore capture more leads on both sides of the partnership. You both 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. This is probably one of the simplest and most profitable ways to reach a different audience than yours.
#3 Launch your own campaigns
For those who are more advanced, you can generate leads for your webinars through LinkedIn Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns.
Some tools also offer to host your webinars and promote them themselves, such as Webikeo.
#4 Continue after the webinar
Finally, think about sending an email sequence to your participants right after the webinar, to thank them for attending and to push your call-to-actions. In these emails, you can share the resources mentioned and/or used during the webinar. This is also a subtle way to extend lead capture over time thanks to replays that you’ll be able to publish. For this last point, we recommend subscribing to a webinar from Optinmonster; they’re excellent on this topic.
Conclusion
You now have everything you need to run webinars with relevant, optimized content for converting leads. They can also be an opportunity to build strong relationships with partners and to train users on how to use your tools. Very popular in B2B, webinars will help you show your leads that you’re the right person—the one who will solve their problems and help them achieve their goals.
