When conducted correctly, a webinar can create a lot of opportunity for your sales team. However, webinars can be time-consuming to implement, particularly if you are creating the content for the first time. That’s why it is important to maximize the amount of value you can extract from each webinar you conduct. That means generating leads as well as nurturing and prospecting them in an efficient way so you’re not only creating opportunity, but also letting prosecuting them efficiently. When we plan a client’s webinar, we always make sure to incorporate the following things.

1. Overflow registration

A lot of webinar platforms are packaged based on maximum attendees and charge a premium if you exceed it. This means you have two options: either hit your budget for a hefty fee or miss out on leads. But there’s a third choice: update your registration page to let would-be lost leads know the webinar is full but they can register to receive an email of the replay. This allows you to still capture their data while also sending the message “we’re such respected thought leaders we’re in high demand”, automatically boosting your authority on the topic.

Generally speaking, your webinar attendees are a captive audience (though they may beg to differ if your presenters are a bit dull). Take advantage of this opportunity to conduct market research and use polls to learn more about your attendees. A good polling question understands more about them so the speakers can better tailor commentary and add more value to the content. A great polling question allows for this while also collecting data that assists marketing with targeted nurturing and positioning the sales team with useful prospecting intel. Questions designed to understand pain points or project timeline are some of our favorite questions to ask.

Select a webinar platform that integrates with your marketing automation software so you can maximize the value you extract from attendee data. The more data that is synchronized automatically, the less time your team has to spend trying to process the data before they can capitalize on it. We love ReadyTalk because it seamlessly adds attendance data, including duration, and polling responses for every registrant to their contact profile. This makes it easy to send tailored follow-up emails (more on that later) to attendees and no-shows and add prospects to a nurture sequence based on their polling response. If you have lead scoring, you may wish to include webinar data in your rubric. This also allows the sales team to view the data and use it in their own interactions with a prospect.

A webinar should never be a one-and-done event. Record your session and publish it to your website behind a landing page. Send it to attendees and no-shows, promote it on your social media and encourage your sales team to use it during their prospecting. This allows your webinar to continue to generate leads long after it has occurred. And when an attendee requests access, you know it added value and your sales team should prioritize that individual during their follow up (we encourage sales to contact all webinar registrants after the session). 

Make sure your webinar includes a clear CTA for everyone that attends. Whether it is a special consultation or a simple sign-up for blog updates, your CTA should encourage your captive audience to further engage with your brand. If it is a highly attractive offer, such as a discount on your product, mention it repeatedly throughout the webinar but don’t give full details until the end. You want everyone to stay on for the full presentation. Conclude with the offer or CTA and include clear next steps for anyone interested. Share a bit.ly or an email address they can contact onscreen, or perhaps even use a Y/N poll to identify anyone interested in learning more from you.

Webinars are a time consuming asset to produce. Maximizing the ROI you generate from them can make it easier to justify your team’s time and effort. We developed these best practices over several years of producing webinars. Learn more of our tips by downloading our webinar best practices eBook!