Webinar marketing is a key inbound tactic for many businesses. The amount of time, resources, and money you spend in creating a webinar can have a big impact on its success. But hosting a great webinar is only the first step. You need to follow up with a strong post-webinar marketing strategy if you want to turn your leads into paying customers.
Read on for 7 ways to get the most out of webinars for lead nurturing.
1. Poll or Survey Your Audience
If you use specialized software to run your webinars, chances are they can help you poll and survey your attendees. This is a great way to learn more about your audience and measure the performance of your content.
Platforms like Zoom, LogMeIn, GoToWebinar and others can help you create customized polls that you deliver to your audience in real time during the webinar:
It’s also possible to survey your attendees after the webinar is over, either at the end of the session or as a follow-up email.
When polling, ask questions that will help you understand their interest and knowledge in the topic you’re discussing. At the end of your webinar, a survey can also gauge how interested individual attendees are in your products or services.
Polls and surveys can help you:
- Create more relevant content to nurture your leads post-webinar
- Identify which of your leads are most ready to buy
2. Turn Your Webinar into a Standing Resource
Webinars aren’t a one-time opportunity to generate and convert new leads. If you created a quality webinar that educates your audience, it can remain a valuable resource in the long run.
So make sure you record your presentation and publish it on your website quickly after the webinar ends. That way people who signed up for it but couldn’t attend will still have access to the resource.
Old webinars can also be used to attract new site visitors and convert them into leads. Share your presentation on social media, promote it on forums, etc. You can set it up as a gated lead magnet, so you can collect people’s email addresses and basic information before they access it. That’s how you can continue to generate new leads from your webinar content over time.
3. Send Thank-You Emails
Once your webinar is published as a standalone resource, you’re ready to send out a thank-you email to everyone who did and did not attend your webinar. Include a summary of the highlights of your webinar and a link where they can review and download it.
Your thank-you email is an opportunity to turn the people who missed your webinar into active leads. It also helps keep your webinar at the front of people’s minds, continuing your engagement with them. Do this as quickly as possible — within two days of hosting your webinar.
4. Prioritize Your Leads
Before starting a post-webinar marketing campaign, you should first evaluate your leads to determine which are the most and least ready to convert into paying customers at this point in the nurturing process.
There are lots of different data sources you can use for this analysis. Your marketing automation software, for example, should have lead tracking capabilities. This makes it easy to see how individual leads have interacted with your emails, webinars, social events and more:
You can also use information gathered directly from your webinar to measure audience interest. Your webinar software should offer analytics reports showing how much the individual attendees engaged. Their responses to your polls and post-webinar surveys can also help you determine which are your hottest leads.
5. Target Hot Leads Directly
Before you start sending out a post-webinar email campaign, you’ll first want to segment out the leads you know are almost ready to buy. For a lot of sales funnels, a valuable webinar is the last major touchpoint needed to convince a lead to make a purchase. Through analytics and lead scoring, you may discover this is the case with some of your webinar attendees.
Attendees that are almost ready to buy are called “hot” leads. You don’t need to keep nurturing and marketing to them, you need to start selling to them. So instead of queueing them up for your next drip campaign, target them directly with customized sales pitches. Have someone on your sales team analyze each of their lead profiles for any relevant information they can use to help them convert. Then contact them with a personalized sales message, special offer, a demo, or free trial to encourage them to take action.
6. Personalize a Post-Webinar Email Campaign
For leads that need more time and nurturing to convert, you can follow up with a post-webinar email campaign. Use the insights you gained from your webinar polls and surveys to inform what kind of content would be relevant to this particular subgroup of business leads. Then use your email campaign to educate and suggest additional resources, like research reports, ebooks, or case studies that illustrate your product’s value.
7. Run a Retargeting Campaign for Attendees
Email isn’t the only way to nurture your webinar leads into customers. People are busy and their inboxes are crowded. It’s easy for people to ignore your marketing emails even when they are interested in your business. Another great way to capture their attention and keep your business at the front of their minds is through retargeting campaigns.
In your ads, refer back to the webinar content and use it to illustrate the value of your product or service. Like with your emails, deliver a message that reflects each lead’s point in your sales funnel. Webinar attendees provide a lot of behavioral data you can use to create personalized retargeting ads that drive conversions.
Always Follow Through On Webinar Marketing
Promoting and hosting an effective webinar is a huge investment in and of itself. Once it’s all over, many marketers are happy to move on to their next initiative. They skip over the most important step for success: encouraging their webinar leads to become paying customers.
If you want your webinars to help drive sales for your business, consider post-webinar marketing as part of your initial planning. Integrating webinar production, pre-launch promotion and follow-up marketing initiatives will help ensure you create a lucrative sales funnel around your webinar content.
