Today, webinars are an essential part of a sound B2B marketing strategy to encourages audience awareness. One of the most interactive medium of content marketing, webinars help engage with target audience visually and have increasingly gained popularity in the B2B domain.
Webinars in the B2B sphere have a massive reach as they not only cater to several organizations in its geographical outline but also have the potential to reach a larger spectrum in other multiple locations. It can be used to demonstrate products and services, engage to initiate sales meetings, offer collaborations, showcase features and much more. An exciting new way to strengthen your lead generation tactics, webinars prove to be a fruitful method for the B2B sector.
An easy way to promote brand message and credibility, webinars need to be planned with great caution as it can easily turn into a big disappoint for your business if not managed well. Here are a few actionable tips that can boost an attendee list for your next webinar:
- Before you create a webinar. Do a little research through online forums, or by sending surveys via email to your prospective audience. This will help you understand their needs and curate a webinar that is in sync with their expectations. This increases the chances of getting more attendees and make your webinar successful.
- Identify and invite a speaker who is a subject matter expert or a motivational speaker. This will drive interest in the webinar. An audience looks forward to experts of the industry who have the right knowledge and experience to share.
- Value your audience even after the webinar. You can get amazing feedback on what they liked and how you can improve upon next time.
- Share “save the dates” a week prior to your webinar. Your audience are likely to be busy executives and are bound to forget engagements if not reminded. An early ‘save the date’ on the calendars will drive more footfall.
- Use different mediums to draw your audience, creating a smart hashtag is one of them. Hashtags help track conversations and even brings your attendees to be part of an informal group to promote your activity.
- Bring on-board Influencers from the industry. Yes, an influencers or industry leader builds credibility and has the potential to influence thousands or more to follow. One mention can up an attendee list incredibly.
- Do not ignore your email signature, they too can be utilized as great attendee attracters. Link an announcement to the webinar within your email signature.
- Make your webinar an insightful blog to help prospects get answers. You can also announce upcoming webinars to make them actionable blogs.
- Upload a temporary banner or webinar image revealing the webinar details on your website and even on your social media channels. Your prospects are bound to visit your online presence platforms and get attracted to the upcoming webinar.
- Pin your webinar tweet or post right at the top of your social page so that your target audience sees that first when they come to your page.
Quite often engaging your audience becomes the make or break for webinar hosts or production teams as the lack of management. Learn more about essential strategy to help you conduct a seamless webinar with productive conversion rates:
Perfect Your Audience Outreach
Like any sales initiation, knowing your target audience is crucial. Simply capturing the attention of your audience isn’t enough to ensure they can turn into a qualified lead. Webinars are no different than running successful marketing strategy. Unlike any other traditional approach, webinars are a bit different when linked to B2B marketing steps. Perfect well suited B2B audience is beyond the typical consumers.
They are more motivated by the relationship they have secured with the business and product or services that enhance that connect through latest innovations. Quite often the target audience for a B2B webinar will be upper-level executives who know the industry through and through. Therefore, a highly skilled and experienced audience does not get swayed by marketing gimmicks. Therefore, understanding your audience is a priority and selecting the right ones can play a vital role in finalizing a topic of discussion for the webinar.
Planning Is Everything
As part of your pre-plan, defining an audience is step one. Post that there are several factors that cannot be overlooked even when the webinar is over. Organizing a webinar as part of a fruitful marketing campaign requires planning that not just runs before the event but also during the webinar and post-webinar. You can initiate a great plan based upon these first few steps:
a) Target Audience: groups, individuals, or complete organizations
b) Topic of Discussion: level of technicality and new discoveries
c) Aim to Educate: clarifying complicated processes, showcasing services, or ROI
d) Webinar Outcome: higher conversions from existing audience or new leads
Once you have finalized your goals, you would need to create a plan to ensure success with the webinar. The smallest of details can have a huge impact on the number of attendees. For instance, the day you choose to host the webinar. It has been noticed Wednesday and Thursday are days where people have more time on their hands and prefer attending webinars. Unfortunately, not many businesses know of the nitty-gritty. Be it monitoring sentiments of your audience during the webinar and after or simply trying to calculate the ROI on the webinar can be difficult if correct planning is not positioned in advance.
Keep them Involved
Webinars when stretched at a length without interacting with the audience can make them lose interest. A great way to keep your audience engaged and gain from their input is adding polling/voting features in-between the webinar. It is a great way to subtly run surveys and get to know your audience better. Other than that, you can include a Questions & Answers session where the audience can put up their doubts or ask questions for added information. Not only does the practice make the audience feel engaged, but also valued since they are asked for their opinion. This practice ensures more attendees for future webinars as well.
Be it during the COVID-19 situation or not, webinars have proved to be one of the most useful, and cost-effective ways to promptly engage with prospects and drive better leads into your sales pipeline. Quite often businesses rely entirely on a website to generate leads, however, the conversions from the same aren’t too promising. A well-structured marketing campaign today requires a blended approach that not just focuses on addressing messages through mails or social media but also through the interactive medium of webinars.
Highly engaging, webinars work across a customer’s journey ensuring from product or service introductions to discussions and live demos. With a productive session in place, all aspects of a business can be covered through the platform and generate high-quality leads for sales.
Collaborating with Beyond Codes can accentuate your webinar productivity with its end-to-end webinar management for your sales team and help you engage better with your target audience. With a comprehensive array of services including platform support, audience acquisition, providing subject matter expert speakers, moderation, reporting, and lead nurturing on the webinar attendees, hosting a prolific webinar has never been this easier. Get on board with Beyond Codes and reach greater heights. Learn More: Webinars with Beyond Codes
