Creating webinars (that actually convert) in a COVID world
Your customers are out there. But as webinar fatigue rises, how do you build a webinar that will compete for time walking the dog — and drive towards conversions?
With COVID-19, webinars have quickly become a go-to platform for sales and marketing activities throughout the prospect lifecycle. As much of the customer journey has shifted online, it has created a massive opportunity for digital marketers to drive qualified prospects to hungry sales teams.
However, the sudden focus on digital selling has led to a glut of webinars without a clear strategy or focus, resulting in low conversions and minimal impact on prospects. Marketing teams seem to be throwing content at the wall, forgetting the basics that drive a prospect through the funnel from awareness and consideration to purchase and retention. The basics principles of effective digital marketing should also be applied to running a webinar. Let’s break down the segmentation, lead-up, and post-engagement activities that mark a successful webinar campaign.
Know your audience, test, and deliver
In the “olden days” (pre-March 2020), hosting a happy hour with an embedded product conversation might’ve drawn a fair sized audience. The allure of free drinks and networking opportunities may have been a major factor in driving attendance!
But today, a webinar can feel like a sacrifice of time in a highly time-intensive environment. Marketers need to be smarter in delivering hyper-relevant messaging to their prospects. You’re not just competing against after-work duties — your target audience may be choosing between attending your webinar or walking the dog!
For that reason, webinars shouldn’t be used in a “spray and pray” method. Rather, they should be carefully constructed and targeted towards a key group of accounts or prospects. Your content must be relevant, timely, and compelling.
If your team isn’t running an Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, now can be an impactful time to pivot. Using ABM can lead to insights on key customer segments, including understanding the effectiveness of each channel, modifying content based on responsiveness, and ideally a better insight into behaviors of prospects ready to be driven to a sales team member. Webinars are fantastic as targeted, hyper-focused conversion events that can be quickly followed by opportunities for further conversation (more on that later).
Like any other major conversion opportunity, webinars should be preceded by a drip program to generate excitement. Use this as an opportunity to drive prospects to gated content, gathering additional information and data to further hone messaging. A major advantage that a webinar has over an in-person event is flexibility. In the lead up to a webinar, the team can adjust the content to better match highly-engaged links or emails.
You’ll want to closely monitor what content is generating the greatest response and what sub-segments are most engaged. Consider throughout the process pivoting groups into smaller, more tailored journeys where you can speak exclusively to them.
Analysis + automation
After the webinar, immediately go into the analysis phase. Hopefully you’re operating on a set of connected platforms where engagement metrics are readily accessible. Luckily, major players like Zoom and GoToMeeting provide integration options to most CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or CDP (Customer Data Platform) systems. These integrated capabilities allow for immediate measurement of key metrics, like attendance and engagement, while allowing for long-term attribution as prospects and sales can be linked to relevant marketing efforts.
In addition, you’ll want to automate where you can to help with scale. Simple processes such as tailoring ‘thank you’ emails to attendees and creating an alert to nudge the sales team to reach out post-event can maximize the impact of the interaction. Lastly, you’ll want to send a ‘thank you’ to the group that didn’t attend, driving them to a gated recording of the webinar to drive additional conversions.
Tracking + understanding the impact
Executing on the basic tactics of marketing attribution, like tagging a prospect to a webinar campaign, is more important than ever. Efficiency of spend and return on investment will be critical KPIs over the next few years, as marketers are being held to stricter measurement standards. Webinars might not immediately drive a sale, but they are great vehicles for articulating your value proposition and they can help collect information to enable the sales team to have better informed conversations going forward. Guiding the customer down the path of discovery often involves educating the customer, and webinars address key steps in that journey.
Outside of the traditional marketing analysis, messaging to sales and account executives is massively important. A completely remote workforce can create communication silos, and leadership may neglect to send information down the ladder. Using a CRM as a hub of information where sales teams can instantly view webinar attendance for their prospects is crucial.
Remember when hosting your next webinar that it isn’t a panacea and won’t work in isolation. Webinars need to be well-planned, have clear objectives, and be focused. They need to be integrated effectively with other tactics such as a well-crafted lead up campaign and downstream conversions strategies. Webinars will be a part of the digital marketer’s arsenal for years to come — I’m excited to see how all of our offerings mature!
Daniel Burkhardt is a Salesforce Solution Architect who works to design and build solutions that maximize investment and put the customer at the center of every interaction. He brings a passion for design thinking and an empathetic, wholistic approach to the businesses and teams he partners with.
Slalom Customer Insight is created by industry leaders and practitioners from Slalom, a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation.
