Everything You Need To Build a Webinar Marketing Strategy

Everything You Need To Build a Webinar Marketing Strategy

Learn how to design a webinar marketing strategy from scratch, automate your process, and attract high-quality leads while you sleep.

More and more marketers rely on webinars for promotion and lead generation. Recent studies show that “73% of marketers and sales leaders find webinars to be one of the most reliable ways of generating quality leads.”

Well-crafted webinars will help you not only provide critical knowledge about your product, but also connect with your leads and move them further down the pipeline. But without a strong webinar marketing strategy, things can become overwhelming. After all, there are countless details you need to consider when designing a webinar. A webinar marketing strategy will help you define and articulate the elements necessary to plan and run impactful webinars.

This guide will give you the tools to build a webinar marketing strategy from scratch that is both sustainable and replicable.

PRE-WEBINAR

This stage involves the initial decision to set up the webinar, including the necessary preparations and promotion.

👉Webinar Framework

Webinars can’t exist without context. You need to create a foundation for your webinar, making sure it’s aligned 100% with your business and sales expectations.

Setting Up Your Webinar Goal

“Why do I want to run a webinar?”

This is the first question you should ask yourself when creating your webinar marketing strategy. Your webinar should serve your business purposes, and to achieve this alignment, you have to identify your webinar goal. Also, setting goals will help you launch a webinar on time and within budget.

We recommend keeping it simple and starting with one webinar goal. You may feel eager to achieve countless positive results, but pursuing multiple goals won’t help you fine-tune your webinar. One webinar, one goal. That’s the mantra you should follow, especially if you’re new to webinars or if you have limited resources.

As for the goal itself, to ensure it’s aligned 100% with your business, ask for the assistance of different company stakeholders. Open the conversation by asking them what the business goals are and how your webinar can help support them. These conversations will provide better context for your webinar, giving you the necessary insights to create a results-driven event that impacts your business.

Finding the Webinar Metric That Matters

Goals come with key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs are performance measurements that show the progress you’ve made towards an intended result. Without quantifying the results, you won’t be able to measure the impact your webinar had nor improve next time. Once you determine the webinar goal, you have to identify the appropriate KPI to focus on.

You’ll discover one webinar goal might come with multiple KPIs. For example, if you aim to attract high-quality leads, you can measure elements such as the number of webinar registrations, the attendance rate, the engagement rate, etc. However, we recommend you focus on one webinar KPI (the most important one for your goal).

For example:

➡ Webinar Goal: Introduce your company and brand to your target market.
➡ KPI: The attendance rate of the audience segment you want to engage.

Or:

➡ Webinar Goal: Increase the number of high-quality leads in your pipeline.
➡ KPI: The rate of successful sales meetings with the leads who entered the funnel via your webinar.

Finding the KPI that matters most will help you focus and better evaluate the impact of your webinar.

Identifying the Best Audience for Your Webinar

After you’ve determined the goals and KPIs for your webinar, you can identify your audience. When identifying the best audience for your webinar, we recommend turning to the “Jobs to Be Done” methodology.

According to Alan Klement, “A Job to Be Done is the process a consumer goes through whenever she aims to transform her existing life-situation into a preferred one, but cannot because there are constraints that stop her.” Accordingly, people will use your product, service, or information to remove those constraints and change their life-situation.

You can apply the JTBD framework to identifying the best audience for your webinar by connecting how your product/service changes the life-situation of certain segments of people (i.e., your prospects). Analyzing your prospects’ current circumstances will determine the job they want to get done. This information will in turn help you position and promote your webinar.

How can you do that? By finding answers to questions such as:

• Why do these people need your product/service? How would they like to change their current life-situation? What’s the desired outcome they want to achieve?
• What are the main obstacles that keep these people from changing their current life-situation?
• How does your product/service help people overcome their existing obstacles and achieve their desired outcome?
• How will these people feel if they don’t achieve their desired outcome?
• How will people feel once they achieve their desired outcome?

Consider this example: People won’t purchase a project management platform just to document everything. They do it because they need to align their teams, keep everyone accountable, and get the project done in a way that’s organized and stress-free.

The JTBD framework is strongly tied to people’s motivations and progress. As Klement discusses, this methodology focuses on delivering emotional progress. Knowing who your audience is, their current life-situation, their desired outcomes, and what prevents them from achieving these will help you define an audience for your webinar. Also, it will give you the necessary insights to design a webinar that speaks directly to these people.

DecidingThe Right Webinar Formats

Webinars are versatile and offer a wide range of formats. Let’s examine a few:

• Interviews hold a live conversation with one or more industry professionals.
• Demo webinars showcase the general features of your product, along with answering product-related questions your attendees may have.
• Product updates detail the latest product news, features, and improvements.
• Success stories are similar to interviews, but involve featuring clients as guest speakers. The clients must be willing to share the results they’ve achieved by using your product.
• Ask Me Anything (AMA) webinars focus on engagement. Usually, the webinar is run by a high-level professional or company executive whose exclusive task is to answer questions for attendees.
• How-to webinars are 100% educational and are intended to help the attendees solve a challenge or pain they have quickly.

👉 Reminder: The goal of your webinar will influence the format you choose.

For example, if your webinar goal is to increase brand awareness and establish yourself as an authority, you can run an interview webinar with industry professionals. Associating your brand with big industry names will provide you validation and increase your visibility.

Or, if your goal is to increase the number of high-quality leads in your pipeline, you can run weekly demo webinars with your product experts. The possibility of learning about the product and interacting live with a company expert will attract the right leads, meaning people who are interested in finding a solution to their problem.

Identifying the Webinar Event Type

You have a few options available when choosing a type of webinar event. The type you select depends on how your audience prefers to consume webinar content. We’ve listed four main webinar types for you to consider:

• Automated webinars have a live look and feel, but are pre-recorded. While they may look like live events to your audience, you don’t have to share any live content during the event — instead, you can use a pre-recorded video. This is a great format if you don’t have the time or resources to run a ton of live events, or if you have popular content that you want to reuse. For your audience, it still provides the same level of professionalism and engagement as that of a live event.
• Live webinars present an online webinar in real time to a live audience. Compared to automated webinars, live webinars are ideal to engage with your target group and get to know them better. In a live format, audience members have the opportunity to ask questions and have them answered in real time.
• Hybrid webinars are a mix of automated and live webinars. These allow you to use a pre-recorded video for a portion of the event and share live for another. For example, you can have a pre-recorded video presentation, but still jump on and engage with your attendees live through the chat or with a Q&A section.
• On-demand webinars are pre-recorded and can be viewed at any time. That’s a great option if you want to give your attendees the benefit of viewing the content at their leisure.

Choosing the Right Webinar Topic

The success of your webinar marketing strategy will depend significantly on the topic of your webinar. Your topic is the main subject you’ll be tackling during the webinar. Strong webinar topics derive from your goal, your KPI, your audience challenge, and the solution you can provide. So, instead of going with a gut feeling, we recommend you develop a system that will help you come up with new topics for your webinars. Here are some practices to get you started:

Frame your webinar with the JTBD framework in mind. Instead of focusing on what your product does, look at your audience’s pain points and find examples of how to transform these into a webinar topic that provides value. Your webinar should focus on helping people change their current life-situations by offering them the necessary insights to overcome a challenge and achieve a desired result.

✍️ Example #1.

• Webinar Goal: Boost brand affinity
• KPI: The number of registrants and percentage of positive feedback on the event
• Audience Challenge: Stress and burnout
• Solution: Provide stress-reducing tactics people can use during their work weeks
• Webinar Topic: How To Reduce Your Stress and Enjoy Your Work

✍️ Example #2.

• Webinar Goal: Generate 50 new top-of-funnel leads
• KPI: The number of registered leads new to the company
• Audience Challenge: Spending too much time creating and planning social media content  
• Solution: Teach how to generate the social media content for one year
• Webinar Topic: How To Plan a Year’s Worth of Content in One Day

This exercise will offer you the insights necessary to produce highly-targeted, relevant webinar topics for your audience.

👉Webinar Content

Content is king, especially for webinars. To grab and maintain people’s attention, you have to create relevant, highly-targeted content that will help them change the life-situation they’re experiencing.

Finding the Right Webinar Speakers

✍️ Note: Whether or not to use guest webinar speakers (those outside your company) will depend greatly on your webinar format and goal. If you run a product demo, for example, you might not need to invite any guest speakers — a member from your product team could function as the main speaker for your webinar. However, if you’re planning an interview or a success story webinar, then bringing in a guest speaker would make the most sense.

Effective speakers broaden the impact and outreach of your webinar. By “effective,” we mean speakers both with strong communication skills and a relevant story or experience to share. How to determine who should speak? Your speaker should be a great communicator, know how to navigate the content and webinar platform, and be confident. That might come in the form of external guests, or internal colleagues. There’s a large pool of speakers and industry stakeholders to choose from. Here are a few examples of speakers you can include on your webinar:

Guest Speakers

• Potential clients. Webinars are great to establish strong connections with future clients. Let’s say, for example, you’ve developed a product for SaaS marketing leaders. One way to engage with your ideal customers is to create a media product, such as an educational webinar series, where you invite them to discuss different industry-related topics.
• Industry leaders. To increase your brand awareness, invite high-level professionals who have a large audience. If it’s a big industry name, chances are you’ll increase the number of leads registering to attend your webinar. Also, you’ll extend your reach and become a better-known brand.
• Current customers. Your customers make great webinar speakers. They can connect easily with your audience, and their insights show how your leads can achieve their desired outcome. Also, your customers can explain how they’ve overcome certain challenges by using your product.

Internal Speakers

• Internal subject matter experts. You can always look internally for insightful speakers. Your company has professionals who possess a great deal of knowledge and experience to share with your webinar audience, if the topic matches the expertise.
• C-level executives. Having your CEO or President be your webinar speaker is a great option for high-level thought leadership webinars designed to educate your target audience.

For example, you can invite potential clients or industry leaders to run educational webinars or in-depth interviews. Inviting your paying clients is great when you’re planning a success story interview. Internal subject matter experts are awesome for your product AMA and update webinars.

Creating Your Webinar Outline

When running a webinar, you can’t just show up and start talking without anything prepared. On the contrary, you need to create an engaging webinar structure that will help you maintain people’s attention and deliver as much value as possible. That’s why the next step is to come up with your webinar outline:

➡ Kick off the webinar, managing the expectations of your attendees

Before launching your presentation, address a quick list of items that will guide the experience of your webinar guests. First, define the webinar timeline and structure. Then, list the main advantages of attending the webinar until the end. Present the housekeeping items, such as how your attendees can navigate and use the webinar platform. Finally, outline how the Q&A session will proceed and when you’ll be opening the floor for questions. Although these aspects are focused on the webinar logistics, they’ll help your attendees take better advantage of their experience.

➡ Start your webinar session by acknowledging the challenges your audience is experiencing

This will show people you’re aware of their struggles, and that by attending the webinar until the end, they’ll find the answers to their questions.

➡ Back up your points with statistics and relevant data

To increase your credibility and better defend your statements, research your topic thoroughly and find relevant data to back up your position.

➡ Present the solution and why it’s the best or only option

Once you’ve presented the challenges and the relevant statistics to support your arguments, it’s time to introduce the solution. This can be your product, a specific feature you’ve developed, or a new methodology. You can present it as the best or the only solution your attendees need to overcome their challenge(s) and achieve positive results.

➡ Tackle the objections your audience has

Next, focus on dismantling the objections that prevent your audience from purchasing your product.

➡ Prepare for the Q&A session

Be ready for the questions your webinar attendees may ask. This part is as important as the rest of your webinar because it entails a higher engagement with your audience. We recommend preparing a handful of frequently asked questions so that, if no one raises their hand to ask a question, you can launch into your prepared ones.

➡ Present the offer

Consider presenting an exclusive offer for your webinar attendees that draws them closer to their desired outcome. What will help them make their purchase decision? Is it the free use of your product for 30 days? Or maybe a 35% product discount?

Now, take this structure and turn it into your webinar slides.

Designing Your Webinar Slides

Now that you have the webinar outline, you can proceed with creating your slide deck. Here are a few rules to consider when building your slides:

➡ Keep the 10-20-30 rule in mind

Although originally created for designing pitch decks, this rule can apply to most cases, particularly educational webinars. It breaks down to crafting 10 slides with a 20-minute maximum delivery time and size 30 font text.

➡ Pay attention to your white space

Whitespace is the space you use around the elements (including icons and your logo) in your design. It doesn’t have to be white, as long as each element gets breathing space. But why add all this space between elements? To give your webinar slides a neat and minimalistic look — one that’s free of clutter and thus easier on your audience’s eyes. To do that, limit the number of elements in your slides.

➡ Use your brand colors and fonts

Don’t try to innovate or come up with a different range of tones, colors, and fonts for your slide deck. On the contrary, reaffirm your brand identity by using your company colors and fonts. Make sure your slide deck aligns with your brand identity.

➡ Keep your design clutter-free

Don’t clog your slides with text. You may want to copy/paste your entire speech onto the slides, but this will overwhelm or bore your attendees. Instead, add only one sentence per slide. Even better, limit your text and add a few words that describe the point you’ll be tackling. Also, combine your text with visual elements relevant to the conversation. The graphics you use in the deck should help your audience visualize the spoken words. This will make your slide deck more engaging. However, as with the text, avoid cluttering your slides with unnecessary visual elements.

With this in mind, start designing your webinar slide deck. Note that there isn’t an ideal number of slides. Avoid creating slides that don’t support your topic and outline, and you’ll be in good shape. Less is more.

👉Webinar Set-Up

How will your attendees register and attend your webinar? To answer these questions, you’ll have to take care of the webinar set-up, which includes finding the right webinar technology and creating a registration funnel.

Choosing the Best Webinar Software

To ensure a hassle-free experience for your attendees and to nail your webinar presentation, you need reliable webinar software. So, when choosing your webinar platform, make sure it provides the following features:

✨ No-download webinars

A frictionless attendee experience starts with easy access to the webinar room. Instead of asking your attendees to download your webinar app, worrying if they got the instructions right, try Demio and host engaging events in the browser. You’ll reduce the hassle and make the attendee experience truly enjoyable.

✨  Customized, beautiful registration pages

The best webinar software will offer the possibility to create and customize the webinar registration process. With Demio, you can customize the registration page in a matter of minutes. Moreover, a good webinar platform allows you to include additional custom fields to the registration form and capture relevant information from your new leads.

✨ Powerful engagement tools

Running live webinars is especially advantageous to build long-lasting connections with your leads. Engagement tools such as live polls, handouts, featured actions, chat, and emojis remind your attendees that webinars can be educational and fun! These tools also keep your audience focused and responsive during your webinar.

✨ Email reminders for your audience

Go with a webinar platform that will increase attendance with email notifications and reminders. Reminders help your registrants remember the date and time of your webinar so they will be more likely to attend.

✨ Infrastructure to run live, automated, on-demand, or hybrid webinars

Strong webinar platforms will support your webinars regardless of their type or format.

✨ Webinar analytics to analyze your webinar campaign

For quick insights and better decisions, choose a webinar platform that provides the analytics needed to improve your webinars in the future. Important analytics to consider include not only registration and attendee numbers, but also how people watched your webinar, giving you a breakdown of every poll, handout, or featured action launched during the session.

✨ Easily integrated into your existing marketing stack

A powerful webinar platform will integrate seamlessly with the marketing tools you already use.

✨ Quick learning curve

You don’t want to spend days or weeks learning your new webinar solution. Find a solution that’s intuitive and easy to use.

✨ 24/7 dedicated support team

Finally, when you go live with your webinar, you’ll have no time to wait for support. Choose a platform that provides you prompt service in the method you prefer (chat, email, etc.).

Choosing a trustworthy platform is essential to run great webinars and impress your attendees.

Building a Conversion-Driving Landing Page

The next step is to create a landing page where people can learn more about the webinar and register to attend it. To design a conversion-driving registration page, you need to combine clear structure, powerful visuals, and appealing copy that speaks directly to your audience.

Needless to say, your landing page will depend on your webinar topic and goal, webinar audience, and brand identity. As for its design, we recommend you keep it simple and use the following structure:

➡ Catchy headline

This can be the webinar title or an introductory hook to grab people’s attention and keep them reading.

➡ Description or main copy

You can dedicate this segment to explaining the key points of the session. The reason? Let the potential registrants know exactly what benefits they will walk away with if they attend the event.

👉 Remember: help them understand how your webinar will bring them closer to their desired outcome.

Keep it short and simple, and be sure to highlight how you are providing value. An effective method is the use of bullet points. They let you quickly share three to five digestible benefits that will result from your webinar — and they work amazingly well from a readability perspective, too.

➡ Call to Action

This part is usually added to indicate the next steps page visitors should take. In this case, you’ll want to capture registrations, meaning the “Register” call to action should be the only step available to people.

➡ Registration form

Set up a registration form to capture people’s information. Before doing so, determine what data you want to gather from your registrants. Also, resist the temptation to create a large registration form, which will intimidate your potential registrants and turn them away.

➡ Date and time

Depending on the frequency of your webinar, you have different options for presenting the date and time. If it’s a one-time webinar, just indicate the day and the hour when people can connect to the live session. But if you’re running recurring webinars, you can add a drop-down list with different date options people can choose from.

➡ Visuals (images and/or videos)

If you want to add some personality to your webinar registration page, use branded images and/or videos. For example, you can publish a webinar banner or trailer.

➡ Short biographies of your webinar presenters

What qualifies the webinar host and guests to run the session? Answer this question by adding short bios for the webinar host(s) and guests.

If necessary, you can add other sections to your landing page, such as related webinars or blog posts. However, try to keep things simple and avoid redirecting people’s attention to other content assets or calls to action.

Setting Up a Post-Registration “Thank You” Page

After your audience registers for your webinar on the landing page, they should automatically be redirected to a “Thank you” page. This page is a great opportunity to thank them for registering and provide them details for the webinar.

Your webinar “Thank you” page should contain two main points: “How To Join the Webinar” instructions, and calendar reminder information. The instructions should be clear so registrants are fully prepared when it’s time to attend. The reminder should make it easy for registrants to save the details and keep that time slot vacant with an “Add to Calendar” call to action.

We also recommend taking advantage of the “Thank you” page real estate to keep your leads interacting with your content. Here are some additional calls to action you can add to your “Thank you” page:

• Watch a demo to learn more about your product
• Read a series of articles on the same topic as the webinar
• Download an eBook or other gated content asset related to the webinar topic
• Share the webinar information on social media

By adding different actions and content assets to your “Thank You” page, you’ll be able to qualify your leads efficiently and understand their level of interest more clearly.

Preparing the Emails for Your Webinar Attendees

Once registered, people should receive an email confirmation for your webinar, providing the following information:  

• A quick webinar description
• The date and hour reminder
• The “Add to Calendar” call to action
• The instructions on how to join the webinar

Send email reminders to help people remember to attend. We recommend the following cadence:

• First email reminder: 24 hours before the webinar
• Second email reminder: 1 hour before the webinar
• Third email reminder: 15 minutes before your webinar begins

Note that with Demio, you can integrate your webinar platform into your marketing automation system so you remain consistent with design and branding. Or, simply use Demio’s automated email reminders to keep it easy.

👉Webinar Promotion

Webinar promotion is an integral — if not the most important — part of your strategy. Without effectively communicating the value of your webinar, you won’t be able to attract your desired audience.

Deploying Promotion Strategies That Drive Registrations

Everyone is running webinars, along with virtual summits, online events, and digital conferences. Each time, it becomes harder to promote your webinar and drive traffic to your registration page. Luckily, there are several tactics you can use to cut through the noise effectively  to reach your desired audience. These tactics don’t cost much and are easy to deploy, even with a small marketing team:

➡ Email the appropriate audience segment

Start your webinar promotion campaign by leveraging your email list. Create an email invitation, highlight the value you’re providing in your webinar, and send it two or three weeks before the event.

👉Quick tip: If you have a cluttered list with multiple audiences, send your email to the segment you’re specifically targeting with your webinar.

➡ Send 1:1 invitations

Another great way to promote your webinar is to send personalized emails. For example, if you’re planning a webinar for VIP or targeted prospects, you can ask your sales team to send 1:1 invitations to the webinar. Compared to mass emailing, these 1:1 messages are personal and direct, strengthening the connection between your sales reps and their leads.  

➡ Make use of social media

Be where your audience is. If your desired audience is on LinkedIn, make sure to promote your webinar with several LinkedIn posts, leveraging company and employee pages. The same is true for Facebook and Instagram. Moreover, you can take it one step further and set up ad campaigns on social media to get even more specific with your audience.

➡ Promise a special offer for those who attend your live webinar

Your offer can be anything from a substantial discount to an extended free trial. This will encourage people to not only register, but also attend the live session of your webinar.

➡ Leverage the editorial calendar to promote your webinar

Leverage the other content (blog posts, email campaigns, etc.) scheduled in your calendar to help promote your webinar. Take a look at your editorial calendar. Any content due for release in the five or six weeks before your webinar should include a registration call to action.

➡ Design an email signature for your team

The email signature banner should include the name of the webinar, the date, and perhaps an image of the speaker. Note that you’ll have to prepare different visual elements to promote your webinar on social media. To make things easier, you can adapt them for the email signature. Once you have the banner, you can send an email to all of your teammates (and speakers) and ask them to copy/paste it into their signatures.

➡ Create a webinar trailer

Compared to plain text or banners, webinar promo videos or trailers are visual, engaging, and memorable. When making your trailer, focus on addressing the benefits and solutions your webinar will provide — in less than one minute. When it’s ready, add it to your landing page and your social media.

➡ Leverage other people’s social networks for promotion

Encourage your colleagues and executives to promote the webinar on their social media channels. Set them up for success by crafting the copy and visuals ahead of time so it’s easy for them to share. Also, if your webinars include interviews with industry players or paying customers, ask them to help you promote the webinar to their audiences. Work with your guest or your guest’s marketing team to create a promotional calendar about four to six weeks before the event. The calendar should include social media postings (personal and business), newsletter inclusions, video, and more for both parties. To streamline this process, prepare all the assets your guests will need for their promotion, including banners, images, videos, and even copy.

Back in the day, webinars were a great way to differentiate yourself in the industry. Today, however, more and more companies are jumping into webinars, virtual summits, and online events. That’s why you have to level up your game and design a strong strategy to promote your webinar.

Creating Webinar Promotional Assets

To deploy the tactics mentioned above, you will need a series of visual and promotional assets. You can create these by leveraging your Canva skills, or by teaming up with a designer. Here’s a quick list of webinar promotional assets to keep in mind:

• Newsletter banner. This will be sent with your email campaigns.
• Email signature banner. According to Newoldstamp, “The best size for an email signature image should be around 300–400 pixels in width and 70–100 pixels in height (with approximately 70 dpi).”
• Facebook graphics. You can add your Facebook graphic as a cover photo for your page (820×312 pixels) or as a simple post (1200×630 pixels).
• LinkedIn graphics. An image for a LinkedIn post should have 1200×628 pixels.
• Instagram graphics. If you’re planning to create an Instagram post, make sure your image has 1080×1080 pixels. If you publish an Instagram story, your image should have 1080×1920 pixels.
• Webinar trailer. Keep your trailer simple. You can go on camera yourself to introduce the webinar and the reasons why people should attend.

Reading the Google Analytics Data

Setting up your UTM links will help you understand which channel is most successful in driving traffic and registrants to your webinar landing page. A UTM code is a snippet of code you can add to your URL to track the performance of campaigns and content.

Let’s take, for example, your webinar landing page URL. If you post this link to Facebook, you’ll add a unique UTM code that will identify the leads who registered for your webinar as coming from Facebook. The same works for other social media posts, your newsletters, and your Google ads. For each distribution channel, you’ll have a unique UTM code providing you valuable data about the performance of each marketing action you take.

To create a UTM code, you can simply go to Campaign URL builder by Google Analytics and insert your information.

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DURING THE WEBINAR

This stage includes your webinar presentation and engagement strategies to connect with your attendees.

Getting Ready for the Webinar

Before going live, we recommend you set up an entire test run for the webinar. This includes not only a test of the webinar itself, but a test of the workflows associated with it.

To test the entire webinar workflow, choose one test person to go through the entire funnel from registering for the webinar and receiving all the confirmation and reminder emails, to attending the webinar and receiving the post-webinar messages.

This will give you the chance to test all the operations and integrations associated with the entire webinar. Plus, the in-house rehearsals will give you more confidence and help you get comfortable with the content and the platform you’ll use for the webinar.

As previously mentioned, we go beyond the basic materials you need to present your webinar, too: Demio allows you to create calls to action that fire during the webinar itself, as well as upload the handouts you want to share with your attendees — all prior to your webinar starting. No more last-minute worries; you’ll have everything prepared and ready to go.

Presenting the Webinar

Hosting a webinar can be nerve-racking, especially if you have never presented a webinar before. Practice your presentation by running one or two rehearsals, and once you go live, imagine you’re talking to your friends, not strangers. This will make you feel more confident and allow for easier engagement with your attendees.

Moreover, showing up in a polished fashion will give you the assurance necessary to run a powerful webinar. To look your best, we encourage you to:  

• Set up lighting that shows you in a clear light, without shadows
• Take time to ensure your audience will hear you in a crisp, clean way
• Have a non-distracting background

Finally, consider these tips to ensure a killer presentation:

• If available, ask another team member to manage the chat so you can focus on the presentation.
• Put a sticker on your camera so you remember where to look.
• Do your presentation standing up (if possible) so you keep your energy high. Although you’ll have the webinar script, remember you won’t be reading it directly — reading a script word for word makes presenters sound monotonous and quickly loses the attention of the attendees.

Stay relaxed and confident in your delivery — you got this!

Building Connection and Engagement via Online Webinars

Live webinars offer you the opportunity to engage with your attendees and strengthen your relationship with them. You can achieve this by deploying different engagement dynamics, such as live polls, questions, quizzes, chat, etc.

Apart from engaging and entertaining your attendees, these features can be used to collect valuable information from them. You can also test people’s attention and evaluate how well they’ve absorbed the material you’ve presented.

Here are some examples of a live poll and a quiz you can prepare for your audience:

Live Poll Question: What is your current role?

• Poll Answer #1. Marketing
• Poll Answer #2. Business development
• Poll Answer #3. Sales
• Poll Answer #4. Not sure

Quiz Question: What’s growth hacking?

• Poll Answer #1. The use of low-cost strategies to acquire and retain customers
• Poll Answer #2. The use of practices to retain your existing customers
• Poll Answer #3. Growing your business from $0 to $1 Million ARR in one day
• Poll Answer #4. Hacking into the competitor’s system

We recommend you prepare all these webinar engagement activities beforehand. By using Demio, you can set up live polls in advance, for example, and have them ready to launch during the webinar.

POST-WEBINAR

This stage involves nurturing the relationship with your webinar attendees, along with extending the value of your webinar content by continuing to generate new leads.

Nurturing Your Relationship With Your Attendees and Registrants

Congratulations! You had a killer presentation and your webinar was a big success! After opening that bottle of champagne to celebrate, it’s crucial to round out your webinar marketing strategy and deploy a series of post-webinar actions. The first is to send a post-webinar email to your attendees … and absentees.

Yes, in most cases, you’ll notice there’s a percentage of registered individuals who didn’t show up for the webinar. Don’t worry, that’s normal. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore your absentees. On the contrary, you can still build a relationship by including them in your post-webinar strategy.

Continue nurturing the relationship you’ve built with your attendees by scoring them and moving them further down your webinar funnel, converting them into sales prospects. To do that, you can set up an email marketing campaign that provides value and nudges them into action, such as “Watch the demo,” “Try our product for free,” or “Contact the sales team.”

Here’s what you can include in your follow up email:

⚡ Post-Webinar Goodies

Send your webinar attendees a “Thank you for attending” email that includes any asset introduced or promised during the event. Make sure to send the special offer you mentioned during the webinar as well. Also, send a “We missed you” email to your registrants who didn’t attend. Along with the message, you can send them the webinar assets too. Finally, if you’re running a recurrent webinar, you can encourage your absentees to sign up and attend your next webinar.

⚡ Post-Webinar Survey

Send people a survey to assess the quality of your webinar. This information will help you run a better webinar next time.

Keep your webinar survey simple. Don’t add too many questions, otherwise, people won’t bother to answer them. Here’s an example of a survey you can run after your webinar:

• How would you rate the new information you’ve learned? [Excellent, Above Average, Average, Below Average, Poor]
• How would you rate the Q&A session? [Excellent, Above Average, Average, Below Average, Poor]
• Were your questions answered? [Yes/No]
• How would you rate your engagement with the webinar presenter? [Excellent, Above Average, Average, Below Average, Poor]
• Would you recommend this webinar to someone else? [Yes/No]

The answers to these questions will help you develop a stronger understanding of your audience and their needs. This information will subsequently help you improve your future webinars.

How To Repurpose Your Webinar Content

Is your webinar over? Yes and no. Maybe the live portion is over, but you can continue to use the webinar content you created, especially if you took an evergreen approach.

What is an evergreen webinar?

As our CEO, David Abrams, explains, “As a SaaS marketing professional, you have four big dragons to slay: increasing lifetime value of customers; reducing churn; expanding your market reach; and maximizing your resources.​​​​​​​ Evergreen webinars can provide a simple, always-on solution for your biggest SaaS marketing challenges.”

How’s that? Evergreen webinars are webinars that will always stay relevant to your audience segment, regardless of when they were published.

This means that, once your live webinar is over, you can publish it on demand and continue generating leads as you sleep.

Also, you can repurpose the content of your webinar to create newsletters, articles, checklists, templates, pillar pages, or eBooks. You can use these content pieces to qualify and nurture your webinar leads, capture new leads, and strengthen your relationship with your existing customers.

Let’s take them one by one:

➡ Qualify your leads

Use the chat questions people ask during the Q&A section of your webinars to create a list of FAQs for your sales reps. They can later use this list to answer the questions people may have during calls or product demos.

➡ Capture new leads

Take the recordings from your previously live webinars and turn them into on-demand webinars that are gated to capture new leads. You can also gate all of the content you created that was repurposed from the webinar such as eBooks, checklists, and templates.  

➡ Engage your existing customers

Transform the evergreen content generated by your webinar into articles, infographics, or checklists that will help your customers take advantage of your product.

Also, don’t forget that by repurposing your webinar, you won’t have to create content from scratch for every marketing channel. You’ll have high-quality content to share on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, your company blog, your newsletter, and more.

Run Webinars To Grow Your Business

Webinars should be part of your marketing strategy, especially if you want to reach thousands of leads in a short period of time. They work perfectly for both small and large marketing teams. Webinars are key to increasing your brand awareness, understanding your leads better, and connecting with your target audience.

We encourage you to use the tips and tools we provide in this guide to maximize your webinar marketing strategy and improve your business results.