Buyer personas are a central part of modern B2B marketing. Among companies that have focused on developing data-backed buyer personas, 24% have increased high-quality lead generation. Further, 93% of businesses that regularly exceed revenue goals use personas as an integral part of their marketing strategies.

As webinars now constitute a prime marketing channel for B2B lead generation (83% of marketers have found them effective), developing content that speaks to your webinar buyer persona is essential to earn maximum ROI from your webinar campaigns.

Use the questions below to assess the quality of your webinar buyer personas and whether they’re resonating with the right motivated, purchase-capable audiences.

Key Takeaways:

• Buyer personas help B2B marketers identify potential customers with a high likelihood to convert

• Buyer personas should inform B2B webinar content and lead generation strategies

• If your webinar campaigns fail to generate leads, it’s critical to evaluate the accuracy and quality of your buyer personas

3 Questions To Evaluate Buyer Persona Performance in B2B Webinars

Webinar buyer personas identify shared characteristics among a business’s existing customer base and shape them to describe ideal webinar attendees. They fit together with ideal customer profiles—which should describe organizational traits for best-fit clients—to reach the decision makers within those companies.

To drive lead generation through webinar campaigns, personas act like audience filters, focusing on traits and criteria that indicate real interest, motivation, and decision-making authority.

To discern whether webinars are effectively connecting with audiences of buyer personas, organizations should answer the following three questions:

1. What Kind of Data Informs Your Buyer Persona?

Marketers use personas to predict behavior. The traits in your personas should ultimately reflect on your buyer’s capability and motivation. Aggregate buyer persona data from as wide a range of sources as possible, including all internal customer data sources, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software and third-party market research.

Focus on the following data points:

• Demographics: Age, industry, job title and responsibilities, and decision-making capacity
• Business Values and Priorities: Businesses choose B2B suppliers for widely different reasons such as price point, ongoing support options, or a technological solution to a specific problem
• Immediate and Long-Term Goals: Your potential B2B partners see your products and services as a means to accomplishing different kinds of goals such as streamlining inefficient processes, branching into new markets, driving down excess costs, or acquiring new capabilities
• Pain Points and Challenges: Understanding where potential customers are in the buying cycle requires insight into where their current needs remain unmet by existing suppliers and partners, so your marketing teams can speak directly to the solutions your business can provide
• The Products and Services Your Potential Customers Already Use: Knowing the products and services businesses already rely on allows you to quantify the ease or difficulty with which your solutions would integrate into their existing systems
• Potential Customers’ Preferred Channels of Contact: Preferred communication channels vary widely across customer audiences—while most B2B customers now prefer digital communication such as emails and texts along with digital self-service options, maintaining the option of face-to-face contact, either in video conferencing or in-person meetings, remains crucial to connecting with certain potential customers

2. Are You Generating High-Quality Leads?

Among marketers who host webinars, 53% report that webinars generate more top-of-the-funnel leads than other marketing activities. In B2B webinars, 73% of attendees reliably convert to leads. If your events don’t regularly return leads at a rate of at least half of total attendees, something is missing in the equation.

While low attendance would suggest that either the content is unengaging and insufficiently relevant for your audience, low lead conversion among actual attendees suggests a different problem altogether.

If someone attended your webinar, the topic and content engaged them enough to show interest. That means if they don’t subsequently reach out with inquiries or requests for demos, or don’t respond to follow-up activities, they likely don’t have purchase authority or simply aren’t purchase-ready for other reasons, such as cost or outstanding obligations to other partners.

In this case, marketing teams have failed to adequately distinguish purchase-capable and -ready accounts from accounts sharing other targeted persona demographic traits. Second only to a lack of resources, insufficient data insights into potential customer bases are a significant impediment to lead generation efforts, affecting 42% of organizations.

3. Is Your Buyer Persona in the Audience?

Webinars that deliver valuable insights and solutions to audiences aligned with well-researched buyer personas will generate a steady stream of high-quality leads. However, even with engaging content and the right buyer personas, companies still must build extensive contact networks to reach audiences matching webinar buyer persona criteria.

Developing visibility and connections into vast audience networks in niche markets isn’t an easy process. For marketing teams, tackling this challenge with in-house resources means significant upfront investment in trial-and-error webinar campaigns that cast a wide net and may or may not yield the expected results.

For marketing teams that have developed high-quality content for rich, data-backed personas, the most direct path to closing the circuit and connecting with the full range of target audiences is to partner with specialized syndication services that have in place the necessary infrastructure of industry authority and far-reaching networks of potential audiences.

Custom Webinar Programs for Lead Generation with ActualTech Media

At ActualTech Media, our team of webinar lead generation experts helps clients refine topics, titles, and presentations before tapping into our vast network of potential audiences to fill your webinars with purchase-capable, motivated attendees.

To learn more, talk to our sales team today.