Over half of marketers host up to 50 webinars annually, with some running as many as 150 webinars a year. As a result, B2B buyers have plenty of webinars to choose from, so marketers need to step up their webinar lead-generation game if marketers want to continue attracting potential buyers to the business.
Use this guide on webinar lead generation to ensure your webinar stands out in the tech industry as a source of authoritative content, which will result in higher-quality leads and more conversions.
Key Takeaways:
- Most marketers say webinars are the most effective tool for lead generation
- Webinars for lead generation focus on informational topics rather than promotional content
- Use follow-up strategies like email drip campaigns to nurture webinar leads
- Benefits of webinar lead gen include: high-quality, high-volume leads, real-time engagement with buyers, and an opportunity to establish brand expertise
- Webinar marketing agencies can provide the expertise, resources, and support you need to execute webinars with confidence
Why Webinars Are Useful Tools for Lead Generation
According to 73% of B2B marketers, webinars are the most effective strategy for generating quality IT leads. So, what’s the webinar’s secret?
Webinars combine authoritative content with personal interactions. That key ingredient of direct interaction makes webinars stand out above blog posts, e-books, and other forms of online content. Rather than a passive audience skimming through digital content, webinars require active engagement from the audience with a speaker, and the platform provides opportunities for that audience to respond and ask questions in real time.
Marketers use those interactions to understand the audience more personally than other engagement channels like blog posts. Taking the step to understand the audience is a key part of marketing, as personalization yields a greater return than marketing the same way with the same message for each lead.
For example, a blog post might discuss the benefits of a product for the general B2B buyer. However, once a business engages with those readers through a webinar, the business will learn the different titles, industries, and questions from that audience.
These details allow marketers to address specific needs among their audience. For instance, marketers can send decision makers in the financial industry content that specifically addresses how software helps those in financial businesses. This hyper-targeted messaging helps B2B buyers find more relevant answers to their questions and allows B2B marketers to identify customers in the greatest need for the marketer’s software solutions.
9 Tips To Improve Your Webinar Lead Generation
Use these nine webinar lead-generation tips to help you be more relevant to your audience and build webinars that convert.
1. Have an Ideal Buyer in Mind from the Start
Marketers who want to generate quality leads from webinars must first define a quality lead. For example, are marketers looking to attract decision makers within a specific industry? Perhaps a marketer wants to host a webinar to connect with buyers interested in the business’s products in the past.
Once the marketing team understands the target audience, the team can focus on building a webinar strategy that attracts that audience through quality information and relevant solutions specific to the buyer.
2. Prioritize the Audience
The audience doesn’t want to attend a 45-minute sales pitch. The top reason B2B buyers won’t sign up for a webinar is that the topic is too marketing-focused or product-focused. Conversely, the top-performing webinars are communication webinars.
Sharing ideas, new advancements in the industry, and the latest news are ways to create a communications webinar focusing on the audience rather than a business. These webinars focused on audience-specific topics will attract attendees most interested in the business’s solutions.
3. Make the Webinar Interactive
The advantage of live webinars is the chance to engage an audience through face-to-face interactions. After all, engagement is the key to a successful webinar.
Some ways to engage your audience include:
- Using visuals
- Backing claims with data and research
- Having energy during the presentation
- Providing resources to download
- Having a Q&A session
For instance, 92% of webinar attendees prefer to attend webinars with a Q&A. Allowing attendees to submit questions before the event or take questions during the event ensures the presenter addresses all relevant concerns.
4. Analyze Webinar Interactions
Not everyone who attends webinars is interested in further information about the business. Therefore, marketers should create a lead scoring process that helps them identify B2B buyers who have a need or interest in the company from those that attended the webinar for the information but aren’t potential buyers.
Marketers can start by looking at the registration form. Marketers can analyze each attendee’s registration form to ensure any future communications are relevant to the attendee and the attendee’s industry. For instance, marketers would send out follow-up information according to job title, so each attendee receives information directly relating to their needs.
Marketers can consider how the attendees interacted during the webinar. For example, webinar attendees often ask questions during the Q&A. Marketers can help attendees find answers by sending those leads links to more information related to the participant’s question.
In addition to webinar data, marketers should also consider data in their pipeline. For instance, some attendees might have already attended several other webinars. These attendees are more likely to be interested in the middle- or end-of-the-funnel content than someone who attended their first webinar.
5. Follow Up with the Leads
What do you do with leads from a webinar?
Webinar lead-gen events don’t automatically end in conversions. However, that’s a tech marketer’s ultimate goal. Lead nurturing is building a relationship with attendees to allow those potential buyers to get to know the business and products and make an informed buying decision.
Some ways to nurture leads and help in the B2B buyer’s decision-making process include:
- Sending downloads related to the webinar content for the attendee to use
- Sending out thank you emails to the attendees
- Adding leads to a drip campaign to slowly build a relationship with the attendees and identify the most interesting leads
6. Offer the Webinar on Demand
Webinars can continue to collect leads for over 30 days after the event. While live webinars are still more popular, 43% of viewers will watch webinars on demand.
An on-demand webinar is a recording of the webinar. Attendees can access the webinar by filling in a signup form and viewing the video through the cloud. While the speaker won’t be able to engage with the on-demand attendees in the same way as live attendees, marketers can still connect with the viewers, and the viewers can access the same downloads as live attendees.
7. Be Intentional About the Data You Collect
Data is a key part of webinar lead generation, and it starts with collecting the right data in your webinar lead registration form. An industry rule of thumb is to keep your forms short and sweet so that people actually complete them.
At the same time, you need to collect information that enables effective and targeted lead follow-up. These fields are usually considered must-haves on webinar registration forms:
- First and last name
- Email address
- Company name
- Job title
- Industry
You might also consider including open-ended questions so that webinar attendees can ask questions before the event, but it’s a good idea to make those fields optional.
There may be other data points you want to collect from registrants depending on the exact nature of your event and the unique traits of your industry and audience. But keep in mind that any information you collect should directly contribute to your event and follow-up strategy—anything extra can be obtained later on.
8. Expand Your Audience with Partners
There are a few ways to partner with other organizations when you run your webinar. The one we already mentioned is participating in agency-hosted webinars alongside other brands to gain access to their larger network of buyer audiences.
Other ways include co-hosting with peers and partner brands in your space, or inviting experts from other companies to be speakers at your webinar events. In any of these scenarios, you’ll expand your webinar promotion reach and access additional audiences through your partner’s networks.
9. Automate Wherever You Can
As you have probably gathered by now, webinar lead generation isn’t a one- or even few-step process. It requires multiple steps to engage potential buyers at every stage of the webinar funnel. Trying to execute a webinar lead-gen strategy manually and at scale isn’t practical and inhibits your ability to target, personalize, and follow-up quickly with your potential buyers.
Automate your lead-gen processes wherever you can with tools like your CRM system, email marketing platform, social media management system, and website CMS. Things like automated lead nurturing campaigns or trigger emails ensure your leads hear from you as soon as their behavior indicates interest and/or intent—not when someone from your team has time to do it manually.
As a result, you can expect your webinar leads to move more quickly down the pipeline and you never have to worry about leads falling through the cracks due to human error.
Business Benefits of Webinar Lead Generation
Quality Leads
Thanks to the many digital channels, tools, and technologies available today, generating just any lead isn’t all that difficult. The challenge is generating quality leads—leads that align with your ideal customer profile (ICP) and that your sales team will consider qualified. Marketers consider this their No. 1 top priority.
Webinars require some time investment from your audience. At the very least, they’re filling out a registration form to indicate they’re interested in your webinar’s topic and content. Many will actually invest the time it takes to attend and engage with the event. This means you don’t have to play a guessing game about whether you’ve reached the right prospects.
When you engage with your webinar attendees and follow-up with your registrants list, you can be confident you’re communicating with a high-intent group of potential buyers.
Established Brand Expertise
B2B buyers outsource to access expertise that they don’t have in-house. By hosting webinars on compelling topics and featuring experts from within your organization, you can establish your brand’s position as an authority in your field. Direct access to your company’s experts also helps build credibility with buyers who are looking for vendors they can trust.
Video Format
Video is far and away the most preferred and most engaged with type of content in the digital marketing world right now. An overwhelming 91% of consumers say they want to see more video content from brands in 2023. In addition, 79% say that video has directly convinced them to buy a software solution, suggesting a particularly significant opportunity for tech marketers.
Webinars are an especially powerful video marketing tool because they provide both live and playback options. You can engage in real time with attendees during your event, then use the recording as a video content asset long after the event is over (more on this later).
Real-Time Engagement
Today’s B2B buyers complete 57% to 75% of the buyer journey independently. Gone are the days when buyers depended on marketing and sales reps to provide them with the information necessary to make a decision. Today, it’s all available to them online.
This means it’s harder than ever to get live engagement opportunities with potential buyers. By hosting webinar events, you can get dozens, hundreds, or even 1,000+ buyers in one place so you can engage with them directly, answer questions, and humanize your brand by showcasing important experts and service providers from within your organization.
High-Volume Lead Gen
As a marketing leader, you’re under constant pressure from your sales teams to deliver quality leads at high volume. Executing a solid webinar lead-generation strategy is one of the best ways to fill your pipeline with leads that are likely to actually convert.
It’s a win-win for everyone involved: Your buyers are happy to get the information they need. Your marketing team improves overall lead quality. Your sales team gets leads that translate to closed deals down the line.
Best of all? You don’t have to run an overwhelming amount of webinar events to generate the right amount of leads. A single webinar at ActualTech Media, for example, generates anywhere from 200 to 1,200+ leads for participating vendors.
Competitive Positioning
Part of your B2B buyer’s research is comparing your brand with your top competitors. You can participate in multi-vendor webinars to position your brand directly alongside your competitors and showcase to your audience why you’re the best choice.
Multi-vendor webinars are ready-made and held by technology companies for their expanded network of audiences. As the participating vendor, you don’t have to do any of the work to plan or produce the webinar—you just present during the event, and the webinar host delivers a list of leads to you afterward.
How Can a Webinar Agency Help You with Lead Gen?
If you think this all sounds like a lot—you aren’t alone. Webinars surged to the top of the digital marketing priority list in a short period of time, and executing a comprehensive webinar strategy is no small undertaking. Further, it takes a certain amount of experience and technical knowledge to execute large online events at the quality your audience expects.
A webinar marketing agency can help you launch your webinar lead-generation strategy with confidence, providing the expertise, resources, and support you need at every step of the way.
Some of the benefits of working with a webinar agency include:
- The choice between turnkey webinars, custom-branded webinars, or both
- Access to the best tools for producing webinar events
- An expanded audience of high-fit buyers from your agency’s network
- Quality, high-volume leads delivered after every event
- Comprehensive support related to promotion, event execution, and follow-up
- Data-driven execution and performance reporting
- Content syndication services to optimize lead gen from webinar recordings
Earn More Qualified Webinar Leads with ActualTech Media
At ActualTech Media, we deliver these services and more. We connect B2B tech marketers directly to capable, motivated audiences in hot-topic industry events that generate 200 to 1,200+ high-fit leads for your business.
We also provide full-scale strategy support and a number of additional content services that can help you establish your brand as a thought leader in your space, including content syndication, content marketing, branding, design, and more.
Ready to explore how we can help you grow your business? Get in touch with us today to learn more and get started.