An Ultimate Guide to Convert via Successful Webinars

Jun 21, 2018 6 min read

Webinars are extremely common these days. There might be chances, everywhere you turn, you see one or the other person promoting a webinar.

Does it feel like you’ve entered a webinar jungle?
Well, there’s a good reason these online seminars are everywhere.
It’s because — they actually work!

Luckily, hosting webinars is still a great way to engage audiences, communicate information to potential customers, and attract them. However, the webinars only work when done in a right way, and the road is far from easy.

According to Neil Patel, he was able to generate 518,399 visitors and 16,394 leads from 77 webinars

And so could you! Read on to see how to get the most out of your lead generation webinars.

Why you should bother to create webinars?

There exist some very good reasons why webinars are incredible for generating high-quality leads. The following are the most convincing of those reasons.

I. Make a personal connection: The personal nature of webinars make them more effective at nurturing trust and building a meaningful relationship with prospects. Webinars are a great way to give back to your audience, it is where the bulk of the speaker/listener interactions take place.

II. Capture high quality leads: Webinars generate a higher quality leads as compared to other gated marketing tools. The people who attend webinars are more engaged and more ready to take actions. Because of the higher perceived value of webinars, people are more willing to share their information, giving you the opportunity to collect important customer data during the process of registration.

III. No dependence on location: Entrepreneurs have been using seminars as a tool for lead generation since long. However, in-person seminars and workshops are location dependent. This makes it difficult to get people in a seat at your seminar.

This is where webinars come in. The best part is, webinars have no geographical barriers. People can attend your webinar from anywhere in the world with just an internet connection.

How to run successful lead generation webinars

Step 1. Create a customer profile

The initial move toward recognizing the prospects is assembling a client profile. This will help you structure the content on the basis of their needs. This is basically a detailed description of your target demographics that incorporates: Gender, Income level, Location, Age.

Other key characteristics include marital status, occupation or industry, families with (or without) children, ethnic groups, and hobbies and interests.

Step 2. Determine how your webinar should be

The good webinars are the ones that leave you feeling inspired, wonderful and ready to take on the world.

Well, if you want to stand out of the crowd and want to attract people to your webinars, it is essential for you to have a fair idea of the following:

I. The format of the webinar
Your online seminar's main goal should be to provide the audience with value and solution to their problems. Be smart and choose a format that best suits your purpose and also the audience’s problems and concerns.

Your webinars can be of masterclass, a demo, or a Q&A type depending on the following categories of meetings:

  • Decide: Where decisions are made.
  • Consult: Where ideas are shared and a mutual discussion is carried out.
  • Relate: Carried out to know others and increase branding and trust.
  • Inform: These are single speaker meetings where one-way downloads are carried out.

II. Length of the webinar
For webinars, you have around 45-60 minutes to share your expertise and show something of significant worth to your group of onlookers. Do not spend an excessively long time on the introduction – truly 5 to 10 minutes – and afterward hop right in! Value the time of your attendees!

“We respect other people’s time when we learn to value it as much as our own.” –Dr. Forni

Refer to the following image to use your time wisely during the webinar.

III. Voice quality and elements to engage audience
Ensure your webinars sounds great and are engaging enough and doesn't give one more reason to your members to drop out. Keep in mind the following points:

For great sound quality,

  • Sound-check every speaker 30 minutes before the webinar
  • Use professional microphones
  • Clear and confident voice

For great engagement,

  • Make sure you keep room for Q&A in the webinar
  • Don't forget to use videos and polls
  • Prepare your presentation

Step 3. Promote your webinar

You created an awesome webinar, so it becomes essential to spread the word at the right place to the right people.

To supplement all you diligent work in planning the webinar, here are few strategies to promote:

  • Write a promotional blog article specifically to promote your webinar.

  • Start promoting your webinar atleast two weeks before the actual event
    through emails.

  • Let your followers know about your webinar by posting on social media and
    creating a facebook event.

  • Use pop-up, slide-in, hello bar, or exit-intent pop up (the lead capture
    mechanisms) to promote the event to your website visitors.

  • Create a high quality landing page: Clearly you require a landing
    page to gather registrants' names, email address and other data. A good
    landing page will decide the strength of your participants.

    Follow these best landing page practices to convey why the guests should signup for your webinar:

    • To boost your SEO and CTR (Click Through Rate), include a catchy heading and meta description to your landing page.
    • Add that USP factor too! Let people know "Why are you better than the others and why should they attend your webinar?"
    • Use value driven CTA's.
    • People who want to attend the webinar are always curious to know about the presenters/speakers. Make a hero shot by adding that information.
    • Add a countdown timer on the landing page to encourage visitors to take action right away. Create urgency and scarcity.

Step 4. Improve your webinar attendance rate by sending reminder mails

These emails are just as important as any other thing. Basically, for any given live webinar, you’ll never get 100% of people who signed up for your webinar to show up.

A decent chunk of them, say 20%, can’t make it due to scheduling issues and another 30% chunk will simply forget about the webinar.

You can reduce this percentage significantly by sending reminders about the webinar. You can follow Baremetrics lead and send a final email the day before to the people who registered for your webinar and also to rest of your list (that didn’t sign up) to see if they want to join at the last minute.

Step 5. Plan to have the webinar rehearsal

By holding a webinar rehearsal in advance you'll have a lot less stress and you'll avoid potential technical and content problems. It will help to boost up your confidence and will also eliminate the chances of any embarrassment that might occur on the day of webinar due to lack of practice.

Do the following things during rehearsals:

  • Test the audio and video features of the webinar during the rehearsel.
  • Make any changes to the whiteboard or polls or the presentation if required.
  • Ask for the feedbacks from your team to give the best on the final day.
  • Also, practise presentation, timings and transitions.

Step 6. Post webinar - follow up

The webinar has paved a well structured path for right leads to reach you. But, getting the leads won’t help your bottom line if they don’t convert.

Remember, even for those who attend the event live, they may not be ready to purchase right away, or they didn’t stay until the end to hear about your offer. Plan a follow-up or lead-nurturing email series to send out to the registrants post webinar.

For an instance, you can refer to the following email structures to follow-up the audience who registered for your webinar.

I. Audience who attended the webinar

II. All contacts who registered but didn’t attend the webinar

Conclusion

Utilizing webinars for fruitful lead age is something other than exchanging on the webcam and talking. Your introduction should be precisely coordinated to manufacture compatibility, create trust, and impart believability.

Keep in mind that regardless of how great a webinar is, most of the participants won't convert into customers on the spot. It will take time! You have to be patient. You will have to put great efforts, once you capture the leads, you need to continue the conversation and nurture the relationship with your audience.

They may become customers in the future or tell others about your products or services. ?

What’s your experience in using webinars for lead generation? Don't forget to share with us in our comment section below.

Ritika Sharma

Ritika is a digital marketing specialist and a writer who works on putting together creative and useful content for Statusbrew. Other than this she's an adventure seeker and a photography enthusiast.

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