By Bonnie Moss, President and Founder, Moss Networks

Webinars have always played a key role in B2B marketing, but now with in-person events and most business travel on hold, webinars have an even more important part to play.

For many businesses, webinars are now one of the most effective ways to stay connected with your audience. For many audience members, webinars have become a primary source of expert information to help them solve business problems.

Even before the pandemic curtailed face-to-face gatherings, 57% of B2B marketers were using webinars to reach prospects, according to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. Since the middle of March 2020, interest in webinars has increased and remained high compared to the early part of the year.

One webinar platform, ON24, reported hosting 330% more webinars in March 2020, with twice as many webinar attendees as there were in March 2019. Clearly, webinars are not only popular with marketers but with audiences as well.

Maximize your webinar’s ROI with pre-planning and comprehensive marketing

For the best results for the work you put into producing your webinars, you need to plan carefully to:

  • Make sure that you’re speaking to the right audience with the right content.
  • Promote your webinars to drives registrations and attendance.
  • Incorporate your webinar into your overall content marketing program. Many companies treat their webinars as one-time events, but you can leverage the recordings through press releases, blog posts, social media, and sales enablement content.

We’ve been promoting more webinars than ever this year for our clients, and because there’s so much new interest in this B2B marketing tool, we’ve developed a checklist to help you get the most value from the webinars you produce.

Align your webinar content, audience and goals

Before you can effectively reach an audience with a webinar, it has to be created with that audience in mind. The webinar planning stage is the time to ask

What’s the target audience for your webinar? The more specific you can be, the more value your webinar will offer. For example, Moss Networks client ClearSale tailored one of its recent webinars to an audience of SMB owners using the BigCommerce e-commerce platform. They partnered with BigCommerce for that event, which leads us to the next item on our checklist.

Can you partner with another brand to add value and reach to your webinar? Partnering can bring in new expertise that makes the webinar even more appealing to your audience. For example, ClearSale partnered with two brands, Route and Midigator, on a webinar about end-to-end e-commerce revenue protection. While ClearSale focused on preventing transaction fraud, the partners were able to cover delivery tracking and chargeback mitigation – topics that e-commerce merchants are usually interested in.

What do you want that target audience to do? Webinars are one of the top tools for generating leads, so if lead generation is your primary goal, registration is key. But webinars can also nurture existing leads and convert them, so be clear about what you want your event to do before you start writing your presentation notes.

What does your webinar content offer your target audience? Make sure the information you plan to share is helpful and interesting for your attendees, and not promotional. For example, if your company provide a solution for email marketing management, your webinars should focus on how to overcome email marketing challenges, not your specific solution.

Which SMEs will host or co-host your webinar? Your webinar speakers can be experts within your company, experts with partner companies or other experts in your field. Because their expertise is crucial to the success of the event, it’s important to get firm commitments from them early in the planning process.

What is your target for webinar registrations? Whether it’s 50 or 500, setting a goal ahead of time will help you choose the right marketing tactics and assets to achieve it.

Create your webinar’s promotion timeline and marketing assets

Once you know who you want to reach, what you want to share, who will host and how many people you’d like to register, you can start building your webinar campaign.

Give yourself plenty of time. Make sure you create a long enough runway to promote your webinar effectively. About four weeks of promotion leading up to your webinar is ideal.

Who’s creating your webinar content and promotions? Will you handle everything in-house, outsource it all or outsource some of it? Will the SME hosts review and approve the content before the event? If your webinar will discuss a highly regulated topic, like data privacy laws or best hiring practices, will your legal team need to pre-approve the content?

What assets do you need to make your webinar work for you? The webinar itself requires an engaging script and a slide deck with compelling artwork to illustrate your points. You’ll also need a well-written and smartly designed landing page to encourage registrations.

At a minimum, the assets to promote your webinar before and after the event should include press releases targeted to relevant outlets, blog posts about the webinar and speakers, and social media posts and ads to generate signups and views.

Build a schedule for delivery and deployment of your assets. For example, you’ll want the slide deck, script and artwork done early so there’s time for review and revision. Your landing page must be ready to go before you launch any promotions. And your social media strategy will be most effective if you increase your posting frequency during the days leading up to the event.

Who else will promote the webinar? Yes, your marketing agency or in-house team will take the lead on promoting your webinar, but they’ll need participation from everyone who’s making the webinar happen. For example, the SMEs who are presenting the webinar can promote it on their personal social profiles so their followers will know about it.

Team and department members behind the scenes can do the same. If your engineering SMEs are leading the webinar, for example, give everyone in the engineering department the information they need to promote the event.

Make your webinar keep working for you

The end of a webinar can be the beginning of its new role as a long-term resource for marketing and lead generation.

Record your webinar so it becomes part of your content library. You can email a link to registrants who couldn’t attend the event so they can watch when they have time. You can also

  • Use it as gated content on your site to keep generating leads.
  • Recap it in a blog post and include a link or embed it in the post.
  • Promote it in social posts targeted to audience members who didn’t attend.
  • Link to it in your newsletter to customers and prospects.

Build other content marketing assets from your webinar content. Was there a great chart or explanation that attendees said they found helpful? Turn it into a shareable social graphic or write a blog post around it. You could also make a mini slideshow for social from key slides in the webinar deck, turn the webinar audio into a standalone podcast, or hire a transcriptionist to transcribe the webinar audio for a long blog post.

Mine the Q&A discussion and webinar subtopics for new webinar ideas. Did several people ask similar questions? Did one section of the webinar generate more questions and feedback than others? These can indicate a need in your audience for more detailed information in those areas—maybe your next webinar topics.

Review, evaluate and note what you’ve learned. Every webinar is different, and you can learn something every time you host one. Take time after the event to survey your attendees and your webinar team (including the SME hosts) to find out what worked, what could have been better, and what they’d like to see in the next webinar.

Putting together a successful webinar requires a lot of work behind the scenes. With this checklist, you can engage more audience members and generate more leads with your webinars.

Moss Networks is here to help you plan and promote your webinars. Contact us today to speak with our team!