Tuesday, May 3, 2016

11 Ways to Drive Growth with 10X Better Marketing Webinars

Need to grow your business fast? Have you considered webinars as part of your marketing strategy?

Marketing webinars are critical for doing lead generation and sales for B2B (business-to-business) or software at scale.

Of course, webinars are hardly new. Many companies do them and have been for years. But many businesses do webinars incredibly poorly. I'm sure you’ve experienced a terrible webinar first hand – and probably not too long ago.

marketing webinar tips

Don’t let the same thing happen to your business! Webinars CAN be awesome. Here are 11 tips to help you get 10x more output from your webinars and generate tons of leads and sales.

1. Spend More Time on Topic Generation

Doing a webinar about a boring topic, or a topic that your target audience simply isn’t interested in, is a recipe for disaster. Why waste the time and effort promoting and presenting something that few people really want?

Here’s the key to success with webinars: You need to pick topics that have already proven themselves. For example, if you’ve produced an e-book that got tons of downloads, or a certain email subject line for one of your newsletters got huge open rates, that’s a huge flashing "DUH!" sign that people are interested in that topic.

Look to your data. Figure out your top 5% performers across all your channels and content. Pick one of those topics.

marketing webinar topics

Or use keyword search tools and social tools like Buzzsumo to surface new topics that people in your industry are dying over. Keywords aren’t just for SEO! Keyword volume is an indication of how interested people are in a topic, so it makes sense to use popular keywords as topics in your marketing webinars.

2. Reduce the Frequency of Your Marketing Webinars

Some companies do hundreds of webinars per year. Seriously? Yes, seriously.

You really don’t need to do multiple webinars per week! That’s crazy.

You’re much better off doing one big spectacular webinar per month than doing four mediocre webinars. Focus on QUALITY, not quantity. 

At WordStream, we were able to increase registrations to 5,000+ when we did one big event in a month versus seeing signups of around 500 to 1,000 for smaller, less produced and promoted weekly webinars.

3. Go All In on Your Webinar Slides

Are you still using bullet points in your slides? Please. Just stop!

Your webinar slides need to be highly visual. Visual content is so incredibly powerful – it’s way more memorable and entertaining than text-heavy slides. Awesome visuals will keep your viewers engaged.

marketing webinar slides

Take this deck as an example – 97 slides and not a bullet point to be found! Oh, and it just happened to be one of the top 20 SlideShares of 2015.

Not a visual person yourself? Hire a designer to help to make high-impact slide decks. Trust me, it's worth the investment.

4. Go Nuts on Webinar Promotion

You have to do email blasts. That’s a no-brainer. But email isn’t enough to promote your marketing webinars.

You should also be hitting your target audience using:

Use all of these advanced targeting methods to make sure your best audience sees that you’re doing an amazing, can’t miss webinar.

5. Turn on the Webcam

Most of the webinar platforms let you turn on your webcam. Do it! When people can’t be in the room with you, this is the next best thing.

Your presentation will be even more impactful when they see you presenting. Also, people will trust you more when they see your face, versus just hearing an anonymous voice.

how to do a marketing webinar

6. Do A Poll Question With An Offer

Polls are a good way to learn about and engage with your attendees. But we’re talking about business growth here, so let’s take it a step further.

Attach an offer to one of your questions. For example, something like: “Do you want us to follow up with you about a free demo?”

Then, after the webinar, your sales team can follow up by saying, “Hi, I’m just following up on your request for a demo…”

best marketing webinars

7. Personalize Your Webinar Reminder Emails 

Your reminder email should come from the presenter.

For example: “Hi, this is Larry. So glad you signed up for this webinar. Looking forward to chatting with you tomorrow.”

This small thing can increase attendance rates from 20 to 33 percent. That’s huge!

8. Send Out the Webinar Recording Immediately 

As every entrepreneur knows, opportunities don’t last forever. If someone is slightly interested in your webinar today, chances are, two days from now they’ll be less interested – if they haven’t forgotten about it entirely!

marketing webinar how-to

People lose interest quickly, so send out your webinar recording quickly. Keep your leads engaged. Don’t let hot prospects go cold!

9. Follow Up With Non-Attendees 

People who don’t register but don’t end up attending your marketing webinar are still good leads. Actually, they may be even better leads, since it means they’re busy people and likely to need whatever it is you’re selling!

Webinar attendance versus non-attendance isn’t a discriminating factor in lead quality. So don’t make the critical mistake of assuming that people who didn’t attend aren’t interested in your product or service. 

10. Practice Your Webinar a Few Times

Not everyone is a naturally gifted speaker. In fact, while it may look like giving outstanding presentations is second nature to some speakers, what you never see is all the hours of research and practice that went into creating that presentation.

If you want to deliver an amazing webinar that people will remember, it’s essential to take the time to practice your presentation. Schedule time to do a practice run in front of a colleague, friend, or family member. They can point out parts of your webinar that drag or are confusing, and they might help you catch mistakes in your deck!

marketing webinar practice

Another tip: Record yourself giving the presentation and listen back to see what areas need work. You may discover bad speaking habits that you can easily fix. Here are some more tips for giving awesome marketing presentations and improving your speaking skills.

11. Make Your Webinar Interactive 

Solo webinars can be terrible. We live in a world of short attention spans. After 15-20 minutes, the mind starts to wander, no matter how skilled and knowledgeable the speaker is.

To avoid losing your audience, use an active moderator who can ask questions dynamically. Make it conversational – like a radio program, with back and forth and callers interjecting. This will make sure your audience stays engaged and entertained.

This post originally appeared on Inc. and is republished with permission.

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from Wordstream Blog Feed http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/03/marketing-webinars
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