Automated Webinar Funnel: Streamlining Marketing Success

Recent numbers prove webinars are a marketer’s favorite form of reaching out to customers: 95% of marketing specialists believe them to be integral to their overall content marketing strategy, while 73% give webinars the title of best lead-generation tactic for high-quality leads. 

However, building a webinar is only one part of maximizing your brand’s impact on your intended audience. You still have to fill your seats with prospects who are likely to become consumers. Essentially, knowing who your target segment is and what content to show them is very different from knowing how best to reach them. 

Automating your virtual events allows you to reach your targeted demographic more effectively, without spending more time and money on ideation, creation, and advertising. It keeps your webinars working for you on autopilot while you focus on other ways to expand brand awareness, connect with your consumers, and boost your conversion rate. In short, automating your webinar funnels is a vital strategy for B2B marketers and entrepreneurs.

Here, you’ll learn the key elements of an automated webinar funnel and how you can streamline your marketing success by working smarter, not harder.

Defining Automated Webinar Funnels

Automated webinars maintain their relevance with audiences regardless of trends, seasons, or the content’s age. Usually, these online events originally air live and are then automated to reach a wider audience base and provide viewers with constant access to valuable content, no matter their location or time zone. That extended shelf life makes them convenient for global audiences and those who want to re-watch content when it’s convenient for them.

Automated webinar funnels are intended to guide viewers through the buying process. They create stages for prospects to go through, from registration to attendance to webinar follow-up and, finally, a sale. When combined with an interactive webinar platform, you can automate just about any webinar content you wish, producing a robust automated webinar funnel that consistently attracts a wider audience around the globe (without the need for live promotion the entire time). 

Business Benefit of an Automated Webinar Funnel

Continuous Lead Generation

An automated webinar sales funnel continuously draws in potential customers because of a clear value proposition and robust marketing efforts. This allows you as a marketing professional to put a heavier focus on closing sales instead of on trying to gain leads on your own time and dime.

Cost-Effectiveness and Reusability 

Because you can automate lots of content from live webinars, you diversify its use and create a cost-effective solution. Any time you can reuse or repurpose content for promotional and brand awareness purposes, you’re saving you money. 

Less Live Event Hosting

While hosting live is ideal for internal training, customer onboarding, and one-time sessions, automation works well for many other types of events. That means you don’t have to secure a venue, speaker, and other elements of a live webinar every time you want to reach out to your targeted demographic, which saves you time, money, and resources. Simply host a live event once and then automate it so you can enjoy the same audience impact over and over without repeatedly going on stage. 

The Challenges of Creating Automated Webinars

Crafting Evergreen Content

It’s difficult to constantly come up with new content that stands the test of time. You’ll have to get creative with your subject matter to avoid redundancy. Select topics that are as engaging as they are informative. If they allow for in-depth discussion, you can spread out a single topic across multiple automated sessions so you build a library of evergreen webinars to share. 

Seasonal and other time-bound content can’t be used in automated webinars, so, if you’re promoting a one-time product, service, or something similar, stick to live sessions.

Interactivity Constraints 

One of the biggest perks of live webinars versus prerecorded ones is how you can interact with and read your audience in real time. Automated content makes it harder to engage with your targeted demographic, but the right webinar platform (like Demio) can still enable you to incorporate live chat and other interactive features into automated content so they better simulate the feel of live sessions. 

Strategies for Building an Automated Webinar Funnel 

Select a Webinar Type 

You have a wide choice of the type of automated webinar you want to host, ranging from Lead generation to thought leadership, product demo,  customer success webinar, and more. Think of your audience and what their pain points are, as well as how you wish to grow your brand to help you decide which webinar type will best accommodate your needs. 

Make sure as well that you employ the right software for your chosen format. Demio, for instance, has several customizable features to help you craft quality content, no matter what type of webinar you run. 

Choose the Right Automated Webinar Platform

An automated webinar platform that allows you to create, edit, and customize live, automated, and on-demand webinars will maximize webinar impact with ease. Demio allows you to automate live content or produce on-demand and automated content from scratch seamlessly. You can set it and forget it or build on-demand automated events with Demio AI so you can still interact with your audiences in real time for an optimal user experience. 

Capture Leads With an Irresistible Landing Page

Your webinar landing page is its selling point to registrants. It should include eye-catching titles and imagery showcasing who your speakers are and what content the event will cover. Include a short and simple webinar registration form as well. Keep this to the point and don’t include any links that take readers away from the registration page; otherwise, you risk losing leads. 

Create Urgency 

You have only about 10 seconds to grab the attention of potential attendees, so build a sense of urgency about your webinar to influence their decision-making. Elements like a timer countdown, a limited registration list, or an expiring promo code can increase the number of committed registrants for your webinars, including automated ones. 

Maintain Engagement

Registrants and attendees should be engaged before, during, and after a webinar, whether or not the event is automated. Maintaining engagement over time will increase audience retention and loyalty while also allowing you to better understand and connect with your target demographic. 

Include Real-Life Examples

Highlighting real-life examples of your products and services (especially if they include positive testimonials from actual users) humanizes your brand and strengthens your message. Case studies also make automated webinars come across as less sales-y and more valuable to viewers. 

Leverage Automated Email Sequences for Follow-up 

Use your webinar platform’s email marketing features to craft and send automated communications at specific times that encourage audience members to become consumers. You can invite them to watch webinar replays, take advantage of a discount code, promo, or other call to action (CTA), or even offer a free trial through these email sequences. 

Analyze Results

Leverage your webinar platform’s analytics tools to track important metrics that determine the success of your marketing and webinar automation. Dig into elements like how many conversions you earned from your event, the ratio between registration rates and actual webinar attendees, the click-through rates for your emails, landing pages, and during your automated sessions (e.g., handouts, pop-up polls and surveys resources), and more. 

Retarget for Enhanced Engagement

If audiences are still hesitant to make a purchase for whatever reason, you can give them that final push through social media ads, targeted emails, and other outlets. Draw in your interested audience members with pricing discounts, freebies, and more to keep them engaged and committed. 

Optimizing Automated Webinar Funnels

Increase Attendance Rates

If you struggle to convince people to show up for your automated webinars, customized reminder emails that showcase your brand are an effective tactic. They keep your webinar at the forefront of registrants’ minds right up until the session plays. 

An email drip campaign begun weeks before the event also helps maintain that connection with and urgency in audiences. 

Leverage Automation Tools Effectively 

Use the automation tools within your webinar platform to maximize the impact of your content on viewers. Utilize timed chat and featured actions as well as audience engagement elements to give automated webinars a live feel. You can take advantage of Demio’s webinar recording software and analytics tools to enhance the quality of your webinars and improve them to match what your viewers want to see. 

Creating a Sense of Urgency 

Encourage attendees to make a snap decision before they lose interest or seek out another brand. Every CTA in your automated webinars should have a time or quantity limit, you should insert a genuine, ethical urgency into every email, landing page, and social media ad. 

Strategies for Recovering Lost Leads

It’s easy to lose leads once the webinar is over, but you can take steps to recover them by sending follow-up emails or employing other outreach methods to continue the conversation. Recovering lost, warmed leads can be more cost-effective for marketing teams than attempting to secure brand-new prospects since the former are more likely to make a purchase. 

Periodically sending targeted, automated emails may be the check-in you need to turn a prospect into a buyer. You can even ask audience members what you can do to help them make a buying decision. Or, you can simply go through your old webinar registration data and send emails to touch base with leads who showed an interest but never attended your webinars. Giving them another incentive-based invitation can regain some prospective leads without spending a lot of time and resources. 

Time To Get Hosting

Although live events may allow you to better connect with your audiences, automated webinars can generate more leads with less effort, money, and time, making them a worthwhile investment for your marketing strategy. Using the right webinar platform helps you create quality and user-friendly webinars, whether live or on demand, so you can move your leads down your marketing funnel with ease. Demio will help you customize, promote, and execute quality virtual events that’ll grow your brand, increase your audience base, and maximize your impact on your target demographic. Get started for free or book a demo to see how Demio can work wonders for you.