The Insider’s Guide to Creating Highly Strategic B2B Webinar Campaigns

Webinars have been widely used for all kinds of purposes, both educational and promotional. In fact, about 60% of B2B marketing teams make webinars a key part of their content strategy — as it makes it easy to control the message that is communicated to your customers. However, just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it’s working.

Sadly, the engagement rates for most webinar watchers are pitifully low, reaching only about 15% in some cases. Getting your audience interested and invested in your message has always been a challenge, but capturing their attention is essential for growing conversion rates.

An un-engaged audience is not likely to convert into customers, so how can you ensure that your watchers are actually listening and participating with your webinar? Let’s dive in.

Understand Who You Are Talking To

Knowing your audience through and through is always the first step to a successful marketing strategy, and it is no different when it comes to webinars. Using a webinar as a B2B marketing tactic is going to be different than a traditional approach, simply because of the kind of people that will be watching.

B2B customers are not the typical day-to-day consumer. According to studies, B2B audiences are more motivated by relationships with a business and the measurable value that a product or service provides than saving money or buying the newest thing in the market.

In many cases, the people you are marketing to are upper-level executives who are highly knowledgeable in their industry. Additionally, you will likely have to appeal to multiple people within an organization, rather than just one — as you would in B2C marketing. Therefore, your webinar content is highly focused on providing top-notch information and clearly stating how your product or service will directly benefit their business.

Invite Your Audience’s Active Participation

Webinars must be interactive if they are going to drive engagement. If your customers wanted to just listen to learn about your company, then they could consume content through other methods, like blog articles or marketing videos. They chose to participate in a webinar because it is a way to interact with your business on a personal level.

According to Bizibl’s 2017 Webinar Benchmark Report, the most effective engagement tool is a Q & A session between the speaker and the audience. You can collect these questions before the webinar begins through email or the log-in portal. Some webinars systems also feature a live chat where audience members can post questions and comments in real time. By gathering these pressing questions from your audience, it enables you to overcome the challenge of creating personalized content and providing individualized answers.

A webinar should not be the same as a seminar, per say. Just listening to a speaker drone on for an hour (even when they are an interesting orator) can get fairly boring. Webinars provide you and the audience with the opportunity to have meaningful discourse, so make sure that your program is set up to promote two-way conversations.

Show, Don’t Tell

In general, most people tend to be visual learners, especially when it comes to marketing. 8 out of 10 customers would prefer to watch a video demonstration of a product, rather than read about it on a website. Plus, studies have found that when people learn through active visual aids, like a video webinar, they are far more likely to remember the information.

Again, a webinar should not be the same as an everyday business conference seminar. Show your customers exactly what you are talking about with live demonstrations by using a tool that enables screen sharing. Rather than just explaining what your product or service can do, you can actually guide your customers through step-by-step tutorials that highlight the features and how they can solve certain problems.

By featuring live insightful demonstrations through your webinars, your business can help to establish itself as an industry leader and a credible resource. Top B2B decision makers are highly influenced by this type of hands-on thought leadership, and 48% credited a brand’s educational content as the reason that they decided to award them business.

Over to You

Webinars provide B2B companies with a unique opportunity to engage with audiences through an interactive and informative process. No other marketing platform can provide something quite this in-depth. However, this does not guarantee its success. Webinars require lots of strategic planning throughout the process in order for it to drive positive results.

Make sure that your team is prepared from the very beginning by understanding who their audience is and the type of content they are looking for. Set goals and incorporate tools and systems that will help you achieve them. Remember, webinars should be informative and educational, but they should also be engaging and a little fun, too. Keep things interesting by interacting with Q & A sessions or live demonstrations that really show off your expertise.

Whether you or your team already uses webinars and want to improve efforts, or are ready to give this tactic a shot, keep these things in mind in order to create a highly effective B2B campaign that showcases your business in the best possible light.