Webinars are powerful tools for B2B marketers to connect and engage with potential and existing customers. But many B2B marketers struggle with webinars because they don’t know all the necessary steps to increase their webinar program success. RingLead (RingLead.com), providers of data quality tools for automated marketing, and Heinz Marketing (HeinzMarketing.com), offer these four tips for effective B2B webinars:
1. Plan – Determine your desired outcomes, including goals, audience, call to action, etc. Approach webinars with a bias for action. Focus on achieving your goals versus being 100 percent perfect. Test different days of the week, times of day and webinar lengths. Learn, improve, execute and keep going.
2. Execute – Focus on education, not selling. Don’t preach, teach! Compelling content will create interest. A webinar full of product demos will be an epic fail. Try polls, Q&A and other ways to interact with your audience live and in real time. This keeps them engaged and with you throughout the duration of the webinar.
3. Promote – Not everyone will be interested in your webinar topic, so segment your audience for promotion based on roles, industry and previous levels of engagement with your content. Email is the workhorse for webinar promotion. Focus heavily on compelling subject lines and clear copy. Reach out on social channels, to colleagues and customers, and use your blog to share key webinar takeaways and highlights.
4. Follow Up – You’re not home free after your webinar concludes. Record it and post the video on YouTube, share the slides on Slideshare, and follow up with emails to attendees and those who registered but did not attend. Transcribe the video and use that content for future blog posts, ebooks and social posts. Include the video in your marketing automation nurture journey, and even use it for sales enablement.
Heinz Marketing’s free ebook “Secrets to Successful B2B Webinars” can be downloaded at acceleration.heinzmarketing.com/SuccesfulB2BWebinars.
