Tech Marketing

9 Expert Tips for Winning with Webinar Lead Gen

How to maximize your webinar lead-gen ROI.

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 to continue attracting potential buyers to the business.

This guide on webinar lead generation provides nine useful tips for improving your webinar lead-gen strategy—tips that can help you make your webinars stand out in the tech industry to your target audience.

Looking for more comprehensive insights on webinar lead gen? Don’t miss our complete guide on this topic.

9 Tips To Improve Your Webinar Lead Generation

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

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.

To score webinar leads, marketers can look at registration form data and consider how attendees interacted during the webinar.

They can also look at 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

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. Ask essential questions like name, email address, company name, and 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.

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.

Automate your lead-gen processes wherever you can with tools like your CRM system, email marketing platform, social media management system, and website CMS.

Earn More Qualified Webinar Leads with ActualTech Media

At ActualTech Media, we deliver the services described here 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.