Webinar basics and best practices
Companies organize multiple varieties of complimentary webinars, ranging from ones used to bring in new leads through sales to ones designed to maintain existing clients.
Our attention is focused on using sales and marketing webinars as a means to cultivate new leads. Prior to that, let us discuss some general strategies which are appropriate for any webinar.
Start planning weeks in advance
If you come to the conclusion of quickly assembling a webinar, hold back or delay it for a couple of weeks to get ready. Why?
Invitations should be sent out a few weeks before the event with subsequent reminder messages to help boost attendance.
It takes more than four or five days to fully understand the desires of the people you are targeting and create a webinar specifically tailored to them.
Thirdly, you would be forfeiting crucial moments, hurrying to organize and ignoring other goals, but by the end, there would only be seven people who attended and none would become buyers.
Always conduct a trial run
Do a practice session of the webinar several days prior, making certain to include everyone that will be participating in the real thing. This makes certain that speakers who do not know your webinar system are aware of how it works. A rehearsal significantly reduces the risk of encountering a technical issue during the demonstration.
Incorporate a behind-the-scenes webinar administrator
If you experience a technical difficulty, though you have rehearsed, having a person in the back of the room will provide the presenters with a chance to continue while the issue is fixed in the background.
Keep it upbeat
By practicing, you can discover the right mood and tempo—make it cheery, amiable, but still specialist. Give your listeners something of value by including as much relevant information as possible in every statement. Show consideration of their time by being concise in what you are saying. Tell an interesting story to illustrate your main points.
Webinar best practices to generate more qualified leads
Sales webinars should not be salesy. It may seem strange, but if you’re interacting with individuals who have just started communicating with you, you should communicate with them in the same way you would with prospects who are just starting out in the sales cycle.
It’s better to think of it as a marketing webinar to drive sales than a “sales webinar.” Here are 12 best practices to help you find your own recipe for success:
1. Educate readers about a problem they didn’t know they had
This is the hook. People participating in webinars may not be conscious of the fact that they are lacking a necessary instrument or have no knowledge of a significant trend. Your goal is to teach them about how widespread this issue is.
Describe the difficulties that numerous of your customers have had with X, Y, or Z. It is a typical difficulty encountered by many in their field. Attendees of your webinar will start to contemplate how the information presented relates to their own businesses. It will create concern and a sense of urgency.
2. Explain the importance of solving that problem
Provide examples from day-to-day life to show what will happen if the issue is not addressed. Describe a business that had a problem but chose to ignore it and explain what happened. Don’t say who it is yet, because you have the audience’s interest now and should use that to keep developing curiosity and sense of immediacy.
3. Tell a true story about a business that experienced the same problem
Marketing with a story is an efficient way of retaining the interest of your desired audience, provided that your story is captivating. No rambling allowed.
Share a story of a business in which you were personally involved that faced this dilemma. You won’t reveal that this undertaking was one of your customers yet, however you will at a later time.
Give your audience the opportunity to think about how that company tackled the issue. What strategies did they employ and how did they utilize them to address their issue?
Take a pause at the spot where the enterprise is enduring difficulties and is incapable of discovering a response no matter how hard they strive. Let it all sink in.
4. Present a solution to that problem
It’s still too early to mention your brand. You’re still telling your story. Let your audience know that there is a way to deal with this difficulty, which you will explain soon.
First you gave them reason to be concerned. You reassured them that there is an answer to the problem and that you have seen the solution being successfully implemented in reality.
You’re starting to earn their trust at this point.
Emphasize that you have a personal connection with the managers of the company which faced this difficulty. Explain to the audience what was done to solve the problem: utilize the type of product or service you provide (without mentioning your brand or product).
At last, talk about the result of resolving the issue and the marvelous favorable influence it had on that organization’s development.
5. Now… let the cat out of the bag
At the present time, you admit that the business in question was and still remains a customer of yours. Describe the contribution you and your business made to resolving the company’s issue. Now begin talking about your product or service and how it helped to bring the solution about.
If you can, include a customer endorsement to back up your narrative. Inquire if the customer would be okay with taking part in the webinar to make a statement and respond to some questions.
Once attendees listen to their peer share how pivotal your brand and product were in resolving their issue, they will be captivated. Attendees will have higher levels of involvement and begin to view your company in a more favorable manner.
6. Poll your audience to see who’s ready to buy.
We consistently employ a variety of polls during our GoToWebinar webinars. They catch the people’s interest and urge them to get involved in the activity. Surveys can give you valuable information that can be utilized to divide your audience into groups according to their requirements, the level of engagement, field of work and so on.
Inquire with those tuning in during the webinar to discern if they desire to discover additional information about your business, or to have a conversation with a sales agent. Keep in mind, this tactic is not suitable for webinars at the start of the conversion funnel that do not involve your product. You should avoid pressuring attendees to make a purchase before they have had a chance to explore their options.
Instead of polling those who attended your webinar through an email afterwards, it would be beneficial to survey them while they are still on the webinar as this will generate a much higher response rate. If the participants say yes, send them on to your sales staff so they can follow up.
If you receive lots of favorable survey results, take time at the conclusion of your webinar to demonstrate your product or display to your guests how they can get it. Those who are not intrigued can discontinue and those who find the matter interesting will value the extra details.
7. Send a post-webinar survey.
It is beneficial to dispatch a swift survey to those who attended the webinar to identify if the content made an impression on them, procure additional knowledge regarding the attendees, and measure the enthusiasm of the attendees in your product.
If you didn’t make inquiries concerning these matters during the webinar, feel free to enquire in a post-webinar survey about who is willing to proceed to the following level. Survey answers can be employed to divide webinar participants and adjust your subsequent promotional materials.
8. Involve your sales team in the webinar.
It is obvious that marketing and sales should cooperate together, but it is easy to forget to do so. Include the sales team in your webinars by ensuring that they are aware of all scheduled webinars and the topics that will be addressed. This will aid the sales personnel in setting up extra comprehensive post-webinar communication with potential customers and ensure that your advertising efforts fit in with your firm’s sales objectives.
It is suggested by GoToWebinar that sales reps should take part in the webinar. They can even assist in conducting the webinar, responding to and addressing queries from participants.
Sales reps can gain knowledge of the topic by taking part in the webinar. Observers will also see that a lot of people present are attentive, which will encourage them to take further steps afterwards. This lays the foundation for transferring the most promising webinar leads from marketing to sales with ease.
9. Follow up within 24 hours.
Send a follow-up email to participants and absentees of the webinar within a day of it happening, while their memory of the webinar is still clear. It does not matter if they ended up attending or not, your audience expects to be provided with the recording and presentation slides from the webinar.
Potential customers are also fond of when companies include a connection to a blog post which recaps the webinar content and responds to some of the regular attendee inquiries. It definitely requires lots of preparation and swift action to get this finished, but by creating a link with the possible buyers it will be easier to transform them into clients later on. Sending customised material is the essential element of this.
10. Identify hot, warm, and cold leads.
It is not necessary to separate leads into three groups, but it is prudent to discriminate between leads that are ready to be sold to and those that require additional cultivation.
We have talked about two options to find the hottest leads — using a survey or a poll — but there is a ton of additional info available to help you figure out which leads are in the buyer’s process.
Look at data like:
- Registration responses: go beyond only asking for name and email on your webinar registration form. Ask more probing questions that will help segment and personalize your marketing.
- Attendee interest rating: if you’re using a solution like GoToWebinar or Zoom Video Webinar, you will have webinar reports that display your attendees’ engagement level over the course of the webinar.
- Previous marketing engagement: this includes web behavior, content downloads, and prior webinar activity.
How to Host Webinars That Convert
1. Pick a topic that’s relevant to your industry.
Are people in the industry talking about a potential problem, pattern, or other subject that they have been enquiring you for advice on? Perhaps this notion would be an ideal subject which would motivate webinar attendees to sign up, show up, and likely convert.
If your business has products or services that address the topic or difficulties you heard about in the webinar, that’s especially advantageous. This will provide you with a forum in which you can educate the crowd about the subject, show your mastery of it, and then advertise the product or service that goes along with it. Individuals who think your company is well-informed on a particular issue they are struggling with may trust that you have developed an excellent product or service that can aid them.
2. Consider letting a thought leader or credible customer host.
By having a person of influence present, you can also showcase proficiency, skill, and believability in your particular field. If people take the lead from the thought leader, publicizing the webinar and mentioning that this individual is the host could increase people signing up and attending.
Having an individual of high reputation in your business field discussing approaches connected to a subject and, in the same breath, being able to briefly refer to your product in the course of the webinar can be an extremely advantageous situation. This way, listeners are obtaining both the requisite knowledge and counsel that they desire, as well as a dependable affirmation of your product coming from a person who has tried it.
3. Make the webinar interactive.
Brainstorm with your host to create ways to make the webinar engaging for the audience. Having an interactive element enhances the experience and can be beneficial to the person listening.
Take into account incorporating sections in your webinar that ask the audience to share their techniques if the system you have provided them with allows them to provide feedback. Then read and discuss the best ones. You could reserve some moments at the conclusion of the webinar for people who are tuning in to inquire and the host could provide answers to two or three of the most pertinent inquiries.
If your webinar platform does not permit queries, you can incorporate this as part of the publicity. As an illustration, if you advertise the webinar registration page via your social networks, ask people who are keen to respond to your offer post by posing a question to the organizer. Then, identify the highest quality questions and acknowledge the person who asked it.
