Will webinars still work?
“I just don’t know if webinars are working anymore. I mean, they’ve been done, right?”
So said a CEO I know. Someone who’s led a business through steady and exponential growth. And is looking for what’s next.
It’s understandable. What’s working will work until it doesn’t. And if you’re wired to be a founder, you’re wired to find the next, new thing.
Our registration numbers are often 5x and even 10x+ what they used to be. With attendance rates above 45%.
Add in replays, and the numbers are even higher.
But vanity metrics don’t mean growth. Pile on metrics proving out the volume and value of marketing-generated and marketing-influenced new business, plus boosts in customer engagement, and you’ve got a clear case: webinars still work.
So, yes, webinars will still work. Here’s what makes them work for my team.
Choose timely, relevant, useful topics that pose some risk and urgency for your audience.
This is the secret sauce. It can be hard to predict. But the topic has to be incredibly timely and involve some risk so that there’s a sense of urgency.
It can’t be something your audience would find relevant and useful, but that they can put off or easily learn about on their own. They have to want and need to learn about it from an expert, within your timeframe. And, even better, you can clearly make the case that they should learn it from your expert.
What’s more, the right topic is equally useful to your prospects and your audience. You engage twice the audience with half the webinars. Your prospects see the caliber of customers as well as their smart questions and comments.
2. Be surgical in your approach to optimizing your communications playbook.
Combine the well-timed tactics with timely, relevant, useful topics. And write it down. You need a playbook. You need a clear plan and timeline. When it’s written down, you can understand it and optimize it.
Be surgical in your consistency and testing to zero in on what works. Send emails at the same time of day, the same number of days ahead of the webinar, the same number of times, with the same segmentation. Same for social posts and any other tactics you use.
For us, as much as 90% of registrations come from email, followed closely by direct traffic. That includes net-new registrants. Because (see above) timely, relevant, useful content gets shared.
3. Use ads to reach people and those who don’t do email.
Some of the people on your list are just not going to engage with you via email. Even customers.
And of course, your campaigns are most valuable if they not only pull in more people but net-new contacts, too.
That’s where ads come in, right?
But...some markets are so niche that ads are fraught. We tried following traditional agencies’ approaches to ads. The percent of garbage leads was so high, we cut the campaigns and weren’t sure if we’d ever do them again. Until I used LinkedIn’s list targeting. Uploaded a list of customers and engaged prospects. And was amazed at both the CTRs and conversions. Well above industry standards. We engaged high-value customers who’d never responded to -- or even unsubscribed from -- our emails. Once it was proven, we tried the lookalike feature. And, indeed, pulled in net-new contacts at high-value accounts.
So do paid tactics. But maybe don’t do them the way we’ve always been told to.
4. Prepare your sales and customer success teams.
Do not take for granted that your teams will know your webinar is happening, know what it’s about, or know how to incorporate it into what they’re doing.
Both teams need to know when the webinar goes live, how to share the registration link with their contacts, and how to access the questions you’re tracking.
Your sales team needs guidance from marketing on how to engage and nurture the leads you bring in. What’s the conversation cadence, what additional resources should they share? Who’s getting 1:1 outreach and who’s getting your personalized, automated nurture?
Customer success needs to know the same, but resources and tactics will likely be different.
5. Spin the webinar out into new content.
You totally know this. Syndicating content is something inbound marketing teams have been doing for a decade. But are you doing it? It seems like, even in lean startups, the idea that you’re not working if it’s not hard still persists.
It doesn’t have to be hard. As one of the most popular marketing books (and the agency guided by it) has proved out, growth through content isn’t complicated. Just answer your audience’s questions.
You just have to know what their questions are.
Automated emails confirm each person’s registration and encourage them to send me their questions. Reply to every one, cc’ing your presenters. You learn what people are interested in and connect them with your experts, building community and content.
Collect all the questions in a spreadsheet, add every question asked during the event. And you now have your outline for future pieces of content.
Not sure how to turn that recording into written words? Temi does it for you. Or at least gets you started. Post the whole transcript. Break it into pieces. Find themes and splice it up with other pieces of other transcripts to go deep on niche questions.
It makes me crazy when someone writes up really good strategic ideas, but I’m still not sure how to actually do them. So...here’s exactly how I do this.
Here’s my webinar playbook, strategic + tactical, start to finish. You’re busy. You don’t have time to get surgical with your plan. Take mine and run with it.