MarketAxis

5 Tips for Using Webinars Effectively in B2B Marketing

Our guest blogger Rajat Gupta writes

It’s important to create marketing plans but sometimes the plans have other plans!  2020 saw a lot of them flying out of the window. The global pandemic, lockdowns, and travel restrictions meant that sales and marketing events and meetings had to be canceled. Trade shows, conferences, seminars, and exhibitions are a staple in B2B marketing and branding, so it has been quite a shock for marketers that all these events had to be canceled suddenly.

At the same time, the need for corporate managers to gather information about trends, products, services, experts still remained, and the providers of those products and services needed a channel to communicate as well.

Webinars have proved extremely valuable in this scenario. Marketing professionals have been using webinars for many years but their importance has increased considerably in 2020. According to research by GoToWebinar, 73 percent of B2B marketers believe that a webinar is the best tool to generate leads. 

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As webinars are now a very important component of your marketing arsenal, it’s time to discuss how you can maximize their effectiveness. 

1. Showcase your knowledge
   Most of the participants of your webinar are seeking to gather the information that will help them to achieve their objectives. So it is essential that you make their investment of time worthwhile by providing genuine and valuable information.
   This LinkedIn masterclass about content marketing will help participants to learn how to leverage the platform. This strategy also helps LinkedIn to drive an increase in usage and revenue.
2. Create a webinar series instead of a solitary event
   The objective behind many webinars is to position the speaker and brand as an expert in a specific area and to strongly occupy a specific space. An example could be that you want to be known as an expert on the ‘future of work’. This requires you to showcase your expertise on the different facets that make up the future of work.
   For this reason, a webinar series creates a larger impact than a single one. Each webinar reinforces your association with that particular space and creates retention in the minds of the audience. This builds audience engagement and also gives you a way to better organize a large amount of information.
   
   For example, the Adobe webinar series, ‘Business Agility’ provides information about Adobe Cloud Services to scale and optimize the digital experience platform of a brand. This series helped Adobe to market its products, create audience engagement, and provide useful information to its target audience.
3. Amplify with Social Media
   Webinars are a very powerful tool to create awareness in social media about the brand. You can create your webinar as an ‘event’ on platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook, adding details such as the link, date, and time. This is a very convenient way to invite your contacts to attend the webinar. In this manner, you can build a buzz as attendees will mark that they are ‘going’ to your event and their friends and connections will see this.
   There is also a new trend to conduct the webinar on a social platform itself, for example as a YouTube or Facebook live session. The connections of the participants will notice the activity and your visibility will increase. Questions, comments, and reviews also remain visible to your network even after the webinar.
4. Plan for lead nurturing
   A webinar is an excellent platform to generate sales leads. The subject of the webinar is often the solution to a specific problem. When a participant signs up to attend your webinar it is an indication that she has that problem or query in her mind currently.  Brands that conduct webinars regularly usually generate a few leads from each one.
   Now that you have the list of participants who attended your webinar, what will you do with them next? How will you nurture that lead to bring it closer to a sale? Be prepared with the next interaction with participants in order to make your webinars a channel to create a healthy pipeline for you.
   You may want to offer a free product trial, or a demo, or a consultation with an expert,  after the webinar. All these are effective lead nurturing techniques.
5. Surveys and techniques
   Polls and surveys can help to increase engagement during the webinar. Pre-event polls or surveys can be used to know the audience and tailor your content. This will put you in a better position to provide a good experience to the attendees. Surveys can be broadly used in two aspects i.e.

1. 1. Before the webinar, so as to curate the content according to the audience’s needs.
   2. During and after the webinar, for engagement and feedback.

You will need to evaluate the right tools and platforms to host the webinar, conduct polls, or surveys, record, share, and promote.

Online knowledge sessions and webinars for B2B marketing are proving to be extremely valuable for brand building lead generation and lead nurturing. focus on the five points given above to ensure that your webinars deliver your specific B2B marketing objectives.