The Gorilla Guide to Building a Webinar Strategy that Converts
A step-by-step guide to webinar marketing that generates leads for your business.
Webinars have exploded onto the scene since 2020, when they experienced a whopping 36% growth rate in just one month at the onset of the pandemic. Now, nearly every marketer considers webinars to be central to their marketing strategy, while three-quarters say they have a direct impact on their sales pipeline and revenue.
The great news is that you can use webinars to do the same. The challenge? The B2B webinar landscape is getting saturated, so you’ll need to build a webinar strategy that will stand out.
In this step-by-step guide, we’ll walk you through how to do just that. We’ll start with webinar planning and promotion, discuss live event execution, and cover how you can maximize ROI on your follow-up communications. You can read the full guide to creating a webinar strategy that delivers every time, or get the “Gorilla Guide” shortened version here.
Let’s get started!
Step 1: Start with Thorough Planning
A webinar strategy that truly stands out starts with thorough, intentional planning. In order to grab the attention of your target audience, your webinars must cover topics that align with their interests, pain points, goals, and needs.
Brainstorm topics you know will resonate with your audience. Don’t guess, either — go right to the source by looking at:
- SEO research
- Social media
- Browsing activity
- Customer support
- Products/services
Once you have a strong list of topics, plan your webinar schedule. You’ll find tons of research on the best day and time to run a webinar, and you’ll find lots of disparate advice. Our advice is to know your own audience, experiment with times you think will work for them, and adjust over time.
Depending on your webinar strategy goals, you may consider always running webinars at the same time to capture the same audience, or changing it up to capture different audiences with varying preferences.
Step 2: Nail the Technical Stuff
When you’re executing a webinar event that may have hundreds (or even 1000+) attendees, the last thing you want to worry about is a technical glitch that ends the webinar early or has a negative impact on the attendee experience. Adopt a webinar platform designed specifically for large events.
Further, make sure your hosts and speakers have the right audio equipment and strong enough connections so that their participation is seamless. Always do a test run of your events so everyone can get to know the agenda and familiarize with the technology before you present to a live audience.
Step 3: Launch Your Webinar Promotion Strategy
You can run the best webinar in the industry, but if no one knows about it, you won’t have attendees! That’s why you need a killer webinar promotion strategy to build awareness and get registrations prior to your event.
You can check out our comprehensive guide on webinar promotion to take a deep-dive on this step, but here are a few of the most important tactics to keep in mind:
- Webinar Landing Pages — Your event’s digital hub that includes all important information about the event and the registration form
- Webinar Event Page — A one-stop-shop where your audience can go to see your webinar schedule and search for events that interest them
- Multichannel Promotion — Promote that includes social media, email, blogs, ads, SEO, and more
- Shareable Content Assets — Library of content assets advocates can use to help promote your event
- In-Event Promotion — Mentioning future events during your current live webinar
Step 4: Align Marketing and Sales on Webinar Lead Gen
Webinar lead generation is one of the primary goals for most webinar strategies — and that requires aligning marketing and sales around the process.
Ensure your marketing and sales leaders communicate about webinar lead gen and how it will be executed. Talk through critical steps (like the lead handoff between marketing and sales) and maintain a shared view of your end-to-end webinar funnel.
Being on the same page as your sales teams means you won’t just generate lots of leads — you’ll also improve your MQL conversion rate.
Step 5: Repurpose Your Webinar Content
After your live webinar ends, the recording immediately becomes a high-value content asset you can use in several ways to drive higher ROI. Some of the most effective ways to do it include:
- Post-Event Follow Up — Send your webinar recording to registrants
- Maintain Your Landing Page — After your event is over, turn its landing page into an ongoing opportunity for lead gen
- Share on Social Media — Share your recording to capture new audiences who may not have seen your original event promotion
- Create a Webinar Library — Add all recordings to your webinar event page so visitors can access your full library of content
Step 6: Follow Up Effectively
Your webinar follow-up strategy is one of the key pieces of the puzzle when it comes to actually converting leads you generate from your event. While you want to share your recording for sure, you also need to think about your sales process and what leads need to do next in order to move forward on their buyer journey.
Design your follow-up communications with the specific purpose of getting leads to take action, and include CTAs that leave no question around what that action should be.
Don’t forget to also collect feedback on your event. You can do this during your webinar with survey questions (like Net Promoter Score rating or simple “Did you enjoy this event?” question), but your post-event communication is an opportunity to get even more from attendees.
Don’t make it complicated, but do give attendees the option to share their feedback through both multiple-choice and/or rating questions, and open-ended questions where they can share comments in their own words.
Aggregate the feedback you receive from attendees so you can use it to continually improve your webinar events.
Step 7: Look for Great Webinar Strategy Examples
Your webinar strategy should be unique, creative, and true to your brand — but that doesn’t mean you need to reinvent the wheel. There are tons of brands executing awesome webinar strategies already, and you can use them to inspire your own.
Check out webinar materials from (and even subscribe to) brands you love, including your partners and — yes — your competitors.
In fact, your competitors are the most important brands to watch and take notes about. Learn what they’re doing and don’t just repeat it, find ways to do it even better to gain an edge.
Over to You
Looking for easy and effective ways to enhance your brand ’s webinar strategy? If you’re a tech company, ActualTech Media’s multi-vendor webinars present a huge opportunity for you to drive growth through webinar marketing.
We connect B2B tech marketers directly to capable, motivated audiences in hot-topic industry events that generate anywhere from 200-1200+ high-potential leads for your business.
Get in touch with us today to learn more and get started!