8 Top Webinar Tips to Boost Your Marketing Results
A few key changes to your webinar marketing strategy can maximize your marketing results for a serious impact.
Many small businesses struggle to get the ball rolling with their webinar strategies. We know well from brands we’ve helped that success stories don’t happen overnight. But with the right approach and the right tools, you’ll position yourself to exceed your expectations.
Here are our eight webinar tips to boost the results of your webinars.
8 Webinar Tips to Maximize Results
Although your company goals and event type will determine your specific actions, there are a few foundational steps any business can take to achieve higher KPIs.
Send Follow-Up Emails
Follow-up emails are arguably the most important bridge between leads and conversions. They increase response rates across all marketing strategies, and webinars are no exception.
Use follow-up communications in your webinar marketing to:
- Reinforce the message of the event
- Foster ongoing engagement
- Convert leads into customers
Post-event emails keep up the momentum that you generated during the webinar. Although many attendees will be excited by the experience, others will be fatigued by all the information they absorbed. Additionally, audience members often leave before a webinar finishes, which is why follow-up is so important.
In addition to catching leads who would otherwise drift away, email follow-up acts as a continuation of the webinar experience.
This is also a great way to grow your email list. As a result, you can share events with even more prospects.
Fortunately, most professional webinar tools have email marketing features built-in or provided through integrations. Email marketing integrations specifically enable you to automate most of the email follow-up process.
Conduct Thorough Audience Research
Understanding your audience is the foundation of a fruitful marketing strategy. Companies must research their target demographic so they can promote their events correctly.
If you have little data to begin with, turn to tried-and-tested audience research methods. These can help you choose your first webinar topic and then build on it. Registration pages also collect basic but important information that you can segment and use to personalize each individual’s experience.
Webinars are also exceptional opportunities for learning about your audience. That insight then feeds back into your webinar marketing efforts, producing stronger webinars that yield better results and continuously collect information from a wider following.
Look into webinar software that has built-in analytics features along with marketing-specific integrations. Some webinar platforms even enable you to conduct in-depth research and engage audiences at the same time.
As an example, Demio possesses out-of-the-box analytics features for both live and on-demand webinars. The platform’s webinar analytics automatically tracks metrics that cover audience behavior from start to finish. That means you can see the total number of registrants and the webinar attendance rate (percentage of registrants who became attendants).
Demio’s analytics also identify who was the most focussed and who didn’t interact during polls, Q&As, chats, and so on. You can view when the entire audience’s attention peaked and when it dropped off as well. All that information helps you build customer personas to target your most interested attendees.
Speaking of personas, the People Report automatically tracks and sorts registration, attendance, form details, activity, origins, and more. It gives you everything you need to make future webinars speak directly to the audience's pain points and demonstrated interests. Further, this data can be integrated into CRMs, marketing automation software, and more for an even narrower audience scope.
Plug the Product
Advertising drives significant traffic, but you’ll need to take additional steps to close a sale.
One of the most influential elements to secure is social proof. With 72% of consumers trusting customer testimonials for a product over a brand’s words, you need to back up your claims with more than just hot air. Display reviews on your webinar registration page where relevant and integrate case studies into the event presentation. You need detailed stories that highlight pain points and show how your product can alleviate them in the real world.
Live demonstrations are a great follow-up to case studies because they provide a concrete visual of the featured client’s words. Testimonials, case studies, and live (or pre-recorded) demos inform attendees of the advantages your products offer.
Q&A sessions are an important part of any live webinar, as this is the audience’s chance to gain clarification on any final sticking points. Although you can’t predict every question they’ll ask, you can practice potential answers. So, cover the most frequently asked inquiries during dress rehearsal to minimize uncertainty during this segment.
You also need to see how effective your push is. Leverage polls and chat features to gauge attendee interest and see how well you showcase your product’s benefits. These interactive elements can reveal how much your presentation influences the audience’s opinion of your offering.
Continue to plug the product after the webinar ends as well. Remember those additional follow-ups we discussed? They’re also the perfect opportunity to give audience members valuable resources that dig deeper into the benefits you covered during the event.
Develop a Promotional Strategy
To maximize registrations for your virtual events, you need to promote them across multiple channels. Many webinar platforms include integrations with marketing tools for just this purpose. Your strategy should spread awareness of your event to as many potential registrants as possible. A thorough promotion strategy thus involves:
- An active presence on various social media platforms
- Segmented email lists and updates about the upcoming webinar
- Sneak peeks of the content
- Hashtag research and marketing
- Appealing visuals that grab attention
- As much data as possible on your target audience
Pro tip: Share valuable information in small bites. Highlight the most valuable information and build anticipation with short-form content such as brief posts, video snippets, memes, excerpts, and other attention-grabbers. Keep it short and sweet!
Offer Incentives
Sometimes webinar attendees need more convincing beyond showcasing what your products and services offer. The strategic use of incentives is a tried-and-true way to persuade potential customers to take the next step.
Choose relevant motivators that’ll excite and entice your audience to act. For example, the promise of exclusive content accessible only to webinar attendees is a safe offer. Other kinds of compelling incentives include downloadable resources like:
- ebooks
- Insider reports
- Sneak peeks of upcoming events or releases
You can even advertise segments of the webinar as incentives, like Q&A sessions and networking opportunities.
People give up their time to view your webinar, so you should reward them for doing so. Incentives show your appreciation for their attendance and add value to your event, which gives leads a more positive impression of your brand. Offer post-webinar goodies for those who sat through the entire event. This will help identify more qualified leads as well.
Make Your Webinar Engaging
During the webinar, a crucial driver of your event’s success is how interactive and engaging it is.
Webinar attendees who passively sit and watch a static presentation are harder to impress, so the audience experience must be central to the event presentation. Hands-on participation makes attendees feel more connected to the event and helps bridge the immersion gap inherent in virtual events.
Fortunately, building an attention-grabbing webinar is simple with the right platform. Zoom webinar alternatives, such as Demio, offers several robust features that you can easily insert to engage audiences and spur participation, such as:
- Real-time chats equipped with tagging so that moderators can tag specific questions
- “@” mentions
- Polls and quizzes, which also gather rich feedback that can improve your future webinars
Demio has a specific feature for providing downloadable resources to attendees as well, which you can incorporate into your presentation with ease by using the “Handouts” tab. Additionally, be sure to upload all presentation materials before the event to avoid technical issues while live and keep audiences attentive.
Collaborate With Influencers and Industry Experts
Collaboration with other stakeholders in your industry is mutually beneficial: You promote each other to wider, adjacent market segments and build your credibility while multiplying the value you offer to your existing audience.
Experts and influencers bring their following, authority, and trustworthiness. So, find reputable individuals to partner with who reflect well on (and are relevant to) your brand. Remember, the relationship should be mutually complementary.
Your collaborators play a role at all stages of the event, including your marketing strategy in the lead-up to it. They can share important information with their followers on social media and participate in other promotional efforts, such as blog posts, YouTube videos, and others, to expand your audience and build brand awareness.
To boost your marketing results, especially new leads, remember to:
- Leverage their following for pre-webinar promotion
- Share highlights and relevant content post-webinar
- Give your partners shout-outs to show your appreciation and boost excitement about your event
Provide Clear and Actionable Takeaways
Since most attendees won’t remember everything from the webinar, they should walk away with a few key highlights in mind. To drive home your webinar’s message, provide actionable next steps for viewers to take. The webinar should therefore lead to something concrete that they’ll be eager to carry out, such as joining a newsletter, setting up a call with your sales department to learn more, or, more aggressively, to commit to a sale.
Take advantage of Demio’s downloadable content feature to distribute actionable takeaways seamlessly. You can set up automated calls to action that send off audience members with another task to complete, continuing the conversation you struck up during the event.
Pro tip: Monitor the effectiveness of your actionable takeaways through follow-up emails. Keeping webinar attendees engaged in the post-webinar stage directly affects conversion rates since the most invested attendees are more likely to attend the next webinar or take other meaningful actions.
How to Demonstrate the Value of Webinars
A strictly lecture-based webinar will quickly lose the interest of your audience. To drive home the benefits of the event, you need to balance education with actionable implementation. Evening the scales requires robust tools on the back end and simplifying participation for attendees.
Use the Right Tool to Run Your Webinar
This is one of the most important choices you’ll make. Every step we’ve covered, every task you must complete, and every button you click will depend on which tool you adopt.
The right webinar tool:
- Makes it easy to create a webinar
- Is simple to learn and use
- Has robust features to engage with audiences
- Tracks KPIs meticulously so you can monitor the effectiveness of your efforts
Fortunately, Demio checks all those boxes and more. Demio is a professional webinar platform that’s reliable and easy to use. It provides everything you need to meet and exceed your event goals. Our features are tailored to the needs of small businesses and enable you to create the perfect webinar marketing funnel.
Make It Easy for Viewers to Take Action
Remember, engaged viewers are more likely to convert, so make it easy for them to take the next step and move them further along your sales pipeline through:
- Clickable URLs
- Clearly displayed CTAs
- Chat support
- Time stamps
- Interactive elements
- Social media engagement
- Email automation
- Enticing incentives
Start Improving Your Webinar Marketing Results Today
A good webinar strategy takes time to craft but is simple to implement. And, as you run events and track your performance, you can easily make adjustments where needed so your efforts bear more fruit.
A successful webinar entails following a long checklist. While it may seem tedious at the start, those steps will help you construct a stellar event and improve your webinar marketing for optimal results.
The tips we’ve discussed aren’t a quick fix. They simply avoid bottlenecks by ensuring the key points in the customer’s journey are seamless. When put into practice, each tactic eliminates friction, familiarizes prospects with your brand, and contributes to a memorable experience that encourages conversion.
Want to try a premium webinar solution to boost your marketing? Book a demo to see how Demio can transform your promotional efforts and yield impressive results.
Frequently Asked Questions About Strengthening Webinar Marketing
How do you effectively market a webinar?
Effective webinar marketing encompasses research, visibility, and content that captures awareness. That means you need to take a multi-channel approach and prepare a content plan for each marketing channel.
By expanding your presence online with optimized content and social media, you can reach a wider audience and attract more attendees.
Narrow down your target audience through research so you can tailor your content to those who are most likely to register for your webinar.
How beneficial is a webinar for marketing?
Webinars are an excellent marketing tool because they provide an intimate and educational experience for people who demonstrate a deep interest in your products. That’s why these virtual events are the best method for honing in on the most qualified leads for your sales team.
Additionally, webinars are excellent research opportunities. They gather genuine feedback from people who are connected to your industry. You can see raw data based on your audience’s reactions and engagement, which is especially crucial in the B2B context.
How to measure the webinar success?
Webinar success is determined through KPIs and success metrics. The ultimate measurement of success will be the profitability (return on investment) of your enterprise, but other important benchmarks to track include the registrant-to-attendee ratio, CTA engagement, and conversion rate.