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8/31/23

Maximize Webinar Impact: Strategies to Drive Engagement and ROI

By:

Rachel Meyrowitz

Webinars are an excellent medium to communicate with audiences around the world and achieve a near-limitless reach within your target demographic. That broad applicability has contributed to webinars’ growing popularity as both a B2B marketing strategy and a B2C marketing strategy for brand awareness.

Given the prominent position the Internet enjoys as an everyday go-to resource, it’s wise to leverage your new and existing webinars (along with your social media and other online channels) to maximize your brand’s influence on your target audience — and we’ll show you how.

Optimizing your webinars both during the live event and after in your audience follow-up is key to convincing attendees to take that desired next step. We’ve outlined some strategies to help you keep your audience engaged and, in turn, yield stronger conversion rates and your best ROI yet.

Why Maximizing Webinar Impact Matters

The more impactful your webinar, the more value you bring to your audience. That in turn generates demand for your products and services while creating a more personal connection with the demographic you serve most.

While less than half of the people who register will show up for your webinars, some of those who do attend will stick around until the end, and between 5% and 20% of those individuals will result in a conversion or sale. So, it’s important to reach out to webinar attendees continuously through a variety of strategies to maintain and grow their commitment to your brand, as well as keep your conversion rates and ROI strong.

Impressively, an average 55% of webinar attendees will end in a conversion, according to Zippia, and 38% of marketing experts believe webinars yield better-quality lead generation than other online channels. A well-honed webinar is thus an excellent tactic to transform potential prospects into qualified leads. More broadly, it helps you close more sales, develop long-lasting relationships with your audience, and expand brand awareness.

Start With a Quality Webinar Platform

The webinar platform you use determines not only how easily you can create content, but also how engaging your webinars are. It’s important to interact with and involve your attendees in the event presentation so they’re emotionally committed both to your webinar and your brand. Effective engagement features include chat (both private and public), surveys, polls, and timed handouts.

Demio is a webinar platform that makes it easy to host webinars and removes any barriers to viewing for your audience. It also provides a suite of engagement features you can use to interact with your audience and cultivate a deeper relationship with them. Get started for free and check out how Demio can launch your first webinar in minutes, or book a demo so one of their specialists can show you how it works.

Identify Specific and Measurable Goals

What do you hope to gain from hosting a webinar? More leads and sales? Brand awareness? A closer connection with your audience? The answer to this question defines your goals for the event. Common key performance indicators (KPIs) that tell you if you’re on the path to achieving these objectives include:

Registration rates (how many people register for the online event)
Click-through rates (how many clicks your CTAs, email links, and other featured resources receive)
Average viewing times (how long audience members stay tuned in)
Attendee satisfaction (how positively your audience members feel after your webinar’s conclusion)
Engagement rate (how many audience members interact with and contribute to your webinars and to what degree)

Establish clear goals for your webinars to guide your content creation and measure their success more precisely. Demio’s analytics tools make it easy to determine which areas of your webinar perform well and which need improvement based on audience response.

Focus on Attracting a High-Quality Audience

A high-quality audience is one that either is more likely to commit to your brand or has already made a purchase or other commitment to you in the past. Use the engagement scores of audience members (based on how long attendees remained attentive during your live sessions or how many times they engaged with CTAs and other interactive elements) to adjust your strategy to attract a more targeted audience for future webinars.

This requires an understanding of your intended demographic. Learn what your target market is after and their reasons for attending your webinar — what motivates them? Align your content delivery and webinar engagement activities with what your attendees hope to receive by participating in your webinar for stronger conversion rates and higher ROI.

Showcase Your Expertise

Customers trust a confident and knowledgeable brand, so focus your webinar marketing strategy on delivering quality, relevant content that boosts your credibility. Demonstrating thought leadership is a powerful way to achieve a loyal audience because it shows you to be a trustworthy source of information. Establish yourself as an authority in your industry by sharing relevant, timely, and useful information and incentives with your audience.

Deliver Valuable Content

This is a twofold step: First, you have to craft content that your audience wants to hear (after all, this is the main reason attendees watch your webinar in the first place). Second, you must deliver said content in a way that’s more than a sales pitch.

What makes content valuable varies, but it hinges on what your target segment wants. The majority of your webinar should contain educational content that’s new to your audience and needs to know more about. Mix case studies into your presentation to support your topics and give your content greater weight with your audience.

Finally, disperse your sales presentations and CTAs sporadically but logically throughout your presentation. That keeps attendees riveted as well as informed — and encourages them to take the next step in their commitment to your brand.

Leverage Multiple Channels for Promotion

A brand with an active presence across multiple platforms is always part of the conversation. Leveraging various channels for promotion is an effective webinar solution for marketers that yields organic results (which, in turn, leads to stronger conversion rates and a higher ROI). Publish content on media channels like web pages, social media platforms, blogs, and email to promote your webinar and keep it relevant and top of mind.

You can insert a registration link to your webinars on more than just your landing pages and website; embed these links (along with promo codes, discounts, and other CTAs) in your social channels’ chats when your brand is mentioned or a topic is brought up that relates to your webinar. All email conversations should include something useful to the recipient along with promotional materials.

Capitalize on your social video, audio, text, and other channels to communicate your brand’s content to other leads besides those who’ve already expressed interest.. You can take advantage of social media to:

Share webinar recordings with attendees so those who missed your live events can attend the automated versions.
Post highlights and key quotes from your webinar to generate conversation about your latest topic.
Answer comments and questions about your brand or webinar.
Publish resources related to your webinar, including blog posts, white pages, case studies, and user testimonials.
Use paid advertising on the social channels your target demographic uses most.

Posting about your event on social channels extends your brand’s reach, making your webinar more noticeable to those who may have registered but didn't attend, as well as those who missed out on it entirely.

Collaborate With Influencers

Social media influencers are essential to growing a new brand online or boosting awareness of an existing one among users. If you’re trying to define your target market, collaborating with successful influencers is a great way to narrow it down. Who you partner with is critical to a successful brand collaboration though, so choose your influencers wisely.

Start by identifying your goal for the collaboration. Is it to gain more leads? If so, then find an influencer who’s familiar with (or at least in the same industry as) your brand, and use their clout to bring more awareness to you and capture more prospects. An influencer with a high number of followers across several social channels is a smart choice.

Is your intention to gain authority and establish thought leadership in your industry? If so, then the number of followers an influencer has is less important; focus more on their reputation as an authority in their own right. Their followers will be critical of who they partner with, but, if the partnership is a success, you’ll acquire some new, strong leads for your brand.

Streamline the Registration Process

The easier the registration process is to navigate and complete, the more registrants you’re likely to secure for your webinar. Make registration quick and efficient so potential leads can fill out a registration form before they grow bored, distracted, or change their minds. That entails limiting the amount of information required of people, restricting the number of boxes they have to fill, and avoiding confusing or overly complicated language.

Incorporate Interactive Elements Into Your Webinar

Interactive elements help maximize the impact of your webinar’s message in several ways:

Your audience sticks around longer, either because they’re entertained or because they’re awaiting enticing CTAs to take advantage of (i.e., promos and free products) or the opportunity to offer their opinions on your brand’s message.
You learn which elements of your webinar are most impactful based on attendee responses. That allows you to generate more targeted content in future webinars.
An audience that’s invited to speak with your presenters and actively engage in a webinar session feels a deeper connection to your company and understands the value of what you offer.

You can easily incorporate interactive elements into on-demand and automated webinars as well. Demio features live and private chat, audience spotlighting, live polls, surveys, email marketing for drip campaigns, and more to keep your audience engagement strong in every webinar you host.

Send Personalized Follow-up Emails

An email marketing campaign can bear rich fruit as long as you keep the contents relevant and personal to the recipient. Follow-up communications serve to remind registrants about upcoming webinars or thank attendees for coming to a session, sharing targeted information in both cases.

A perfect complement to your event email marketing strategy is a drip campaign. With this tactic, you send multiple emails to recipients over a set period of time, with each communication containing more information and useful tidbits than the last. Drip campaigns can be used both before and after webinar presentations to maintain a sense of urgency and excitement among your audience.

Best of all, you can automate them so they land in registrants’ inboxes according to a set schedule (if your chosen webinar platform offers this feature). For instance, you can send white label follow-up emails directly from Demio’s webinar platform to converse with multiple recipients more easily. You have the option to send personalized follow-up emails to registrants, attendees, or both, which is a prime opportunity to send the replay of your live event.

Repurpose Webinar Content

Webinars hosted live only reach audience members who register and show up for the event, leaving many potential leads in the dark. Repurpose webinar content so you widen your audience reach and enable your intended demographic to access your content at their convenience.

It’s easy to repurpose live webinars into automated and on-demand recordings that your audience can view instantly on their own time. You can also edit past and archived content into segments and snippets to share on your social media channels, such as LinkedIn.

Repurposing content is an excellent webinar strategy because it extends the life and value of your efforts but costs you nothing except editing time. You already hired a presenter and curated the content; you only need to remove unnecessary or hindering elements like dead air, overly wordy commentary, heavy pacing, or technical glitches that occurred during the live event.

Track Key Performance Indicators

As mentioned above, KPIs help you measure the ROI of your webinars and guide you toward achieving your marketing goals. Take advantage of Demio’s analytics tools to track your webinar KPIs without headache.

One of the most important metrics you should monitor to gauge the impact of your webinars is your click-through rate (CTR). That tells you if (and how often) attendees clicked on your actionable features and CTAs throughout the event. Knowing, for instance, if your audience responded better to a coupon code or a free download is important for future marketing strategies.

CTR is also critical for your email marketing efforts: Are audience members clicking on your registration links and other promotional content? That information will help you maximize your webinar’s success.

Another critical KPI to pay attention to is audience engagement. How long do attendees stay during the event, and what keeps them engaged? Several factors affect audience engagement, so analyzing this metric will keep you informed of what your audience wants most from your webinars. This way, you can deliver timely materials and CTAs that have a higher chance of converting.

Gain the Most From Your Webinar With a Robust Platform

Well-honed webinars bring great value to both your audience and brand. A reliable webinar platform makes creating and repurposing online events easy so you can focus on building a connection with your audience.

Give Demio a try and see how this user-friendly webinar platform can help you succeed. Book a demo to learn more or get started for free and begin crafting quality webinars today.

Create engaging webinars that drive ROI. Start a free trial.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I increase my webinar engagement?

Boost webinar engagement by including interactive features such as Q&A sessions and live polls in your sessions so your audience can actively participate in the presentation.

How do you attract people to a webinar?

Proper webinar promotion requires an understanding of your target market. You also need to have a catchy webinar title and host webinars at convenient dates and times to accommodate a broader range of schedules.

What is the success rate of a webinar?

A webinar’s success depends on many factors, including the number of attendees who convert. Thus, that number varies, but a 30% or higher conversion rate is considered average.