Webinars are incredibly powerful lead generation tools. Why? Because they offer the opportunity to showcase your expertise and engage with your audience on a personal level.
With an effective strategy and the right tools at your disposal, you can attract more attendees to your event and convert them into loyal customers.
To use webinars for lead generation successfully, you have to optimise every stage of the journey, from registration to post-event follow-up – and your process needs to be consistent and efficient.
In this ultimate guide, we’re going to break down every phase of the webinar lead generation process and explore the strategies for keeping your registrants engaged from start to finish.
We’ll also explain how you can use ScoreApp to support your entire webinar marketing strategy and earn the best returns from your lead generation efforts.
Why use webinars for lead generation?
Around 60% of businesses across sectors use webinars for their lead generation efforts – and for good reason.
Webinars are effective for generating leads because they offer a unique opportunity to converse and engage with your attendees in real time.
Interaction, coupled with showcasing your authority on a subject that resonates with your audience, will build trust and help you understand your leads on a more meaningful level.
The extra level of interactive depth that webinars offer compared to other lead generation methods will also help you reach out to your attendees with communications or offers that meet their exact needs.
The result? You’ll boost your chances of transforming high-quality leads into paying customers, accelerating your commercial growth in the process.
Planning a lead-generating webinar: the essentials
To create a webinar that generates high-quality leads, it’s essential to understand your ultimate goal. It’s also important to cover a subject you know in detail and offer direct value to your audience.
Without taking the time to understand exactly what you’re trying to achieve from your webinar marketing efforts, your content will lack direction – and that means you’ll earn little or no return on investment.
So, let’s break down the key elements of creating a webinar marketing strategy that attracts relevant leads and consistently boosts your conversion rates.
Choose a compelling webinar topic that speaks to your audience
Picking your theme or subject matter will form the foundations of your webinar marketing strategy.
Research the topics that are currently trending in your niche right now and take some time to look at what your competitors are doing. That way, you’ll choose a theme that resonates with your target audience and helps you stand out in a competitive market.
To help you connect with a webinar hook or subject that is likely to grab attention, here are some angles to explore:
- Look at your brand’s main USPs and run with an idea that will tell your audience how you can solve their problem.
- Explore the webinar themes or topics your competitors are focusing on to gain inspiration and discover ways that you can dive deeper into a particular topic to offer more value.
- Interview industry experts to uncover potential themes or insights that you can use to create a compelling hook for your webinar
- Check out social media to see what people are talking about and want to hear more about in your niche or industry
- Explore trending seasonal themes that you can jump on to create an exciting spin on an existing webinar concept or idea
- Look at frequently asked questions (FAQs) based on your niche or industry for inspiration.
- Listen to relevant podcasts and check in with industry publications to find concepts that are likely to engage and inspire your audience.
The main aim is to base your webinar on a subject that matters to your attendees, boasts educational value, and addresses pain points.
The bottom line here? If you know your audience and you’re passionate about your webinar topic, you’re likely to generate more leads for your business.
Create a high-converting webinar registration page
To grab your leads’ attention and entice them to sign up to what you have to offer, you need to create a slick webinar landing page.
Your landing page will become an essential part of your webinar registration process – and if you get that part of the process right, you’ll see a big increase in those all-important conversion rates.
With ScoreApp, you can create a personalised webinar registration experience using a customisable template. You can also drive engagement and get valuable insights into your attendees by launching an interactive quiz with one of our ready-to-go scorecards.
Bonus tip: You can create a sense of exclusivity and connect with leads to boost attendance at future events by building a dedicated waitlist.
Check out our Mastering Masterclasses success story to discover how Brian Miller, the brains behind Clarity Up Consulting, used ScoreApp to create an engagement-boosting waitlist for his educational webinars.
Promoting your webinar to maximise sign-ups
Armed with a head-turning webinar topic, and registration materials, it’s now time to start promoting your event.
To build a buzz around your webinar and attract enough high-quality leads, you should start to promote your webinar four to six weeks in advance. That’s the sweet spot.
Let’s look at the key elements of successful webinar promotion and how you can use ScoreApp to enhance the process.
Use email marketing to drive more registrations
Email marketing is a powerful promotional tool for connecting with droves of quality leads and sharing the personal benefits of attending your webinar.
You can leverage your existing email list to send out personalised communications to the subscribers who are most likely to find value in your webinar.
Once you’ve inspired people to register, you can send your leads emails at various stages of the webinar funnel, from pre-event reminders to post-event follow-up content. This will ensure you maintain engagement and offer maximum value.
Here are some best practices for squeezing every drop of promotional juice from your email marketing efforts:
- Make sure your email subject lines are punchy and grab attention.
- Use marketing action words within your email copy to build excitement and keep your prospects engaged in what you’re trying to say
- Reach out to your registrants with content and messaging tailored to their needs, interests, and pain points. The more personal, the better.
- Send email content once or twice prior to the event and follow-up messages within a day after so you’re still fresh in their minds.
- Integrate your email marketing tool with ScoreApp to automate your content and optimise your promotional efforts.
Leverage the power of social media and partnerships
Promoting your webinar across your most engaged social media platforms is another effective way of drumming up interest and attracting attendees.
By shining a beacon on your webinar and what it has to offer through social media and teaming up with relevant influencers or industry partners, you’ll expand your promotional reach, develop a sense of excitement, and drive more leads to your registration page.
You can also use your social media platforms to share your interactive quiz and encourage more people to register for your webinar – collecting valuable data about your potential attendees in the process, which you can use to your advantage both during and after your webinar. More on that soon.
Bonus tip: Reaching out to social media influencers that are popular in your niche or industry will expand your webinar’s promotional reach and tap into a wider audience of potentially high-quality leads.
Create a countdown sequence with ScoreApp
Circling back to email marketing for a moment, you can integrate ScoreApp with your existing platform to send out a sequence of automated event reminders in the lead-up to your webinar.
Sending your registrants countdown content that builds excitement and offers a taste of what to expect from tuning into the event will improve engagement and increase your attendance rates.
For best results, space your countdown content out to avoid bombarding your registrants and make sure every email you schedule includes messaging that’s informative or exciting.
You can give your prospects a sneak preview of what to expect, share relevant content, or introduce yourself in your countdown emails. Anything that builds anticipation will do the trick.
Here’s an example of a running order you can use on the lead up to your webinar:
- A ‘sneak preview’ email with a summary of what to expect from the webinar
- A succinct buzz-building email with references to content relevant to your topic
- A ‘get ready for the action’ email to generate excitement the day before or day off the event
Running an engaging webinar: the essentials
To run a successful webinar, you have to grab your attendees’ attention from the get-go – and that means starting your event with a compelling opener.
Your opener should be slick, to the point, and tell your attendees exactly what to expect from sticking around. Start strong and the rest will follow suit – especially if you follow these additional tips.
Use interactive features to maintain engagement
Using interactive features will hold your audience’s attention while encouraging more … well … interaction.
With polls, quizzes, and surveys at your disposal, you’ll inspire audience participation and make your webinar a richer experience that stands out in your attendees’ minds.
You can use ScoreApp to share relevant quizzes, polls, and scorecards during your webinar to prompt meaningful conversations and collate valuable real-time insights about your attendees.
Whatever your niche or industry, you’ll find a quiz, poll, or scorecard that works perfectly with your webinar topic and gets your audience’s attention.
Deliver valuable content aligned to your lead generation goals
If you don’t believe in your webinar content, neither will your prospects. So, to run an engaging webinar that really resonates with your audience, your content needs to be:
- Based on one of your key areas of expertise
- Educational and inspiring
- The solution to a specific problem or pain point
- A natural guide towards a specific product or solution
Given the fact that 77% of today’s consumers are more likely to engage with content that is seen as authentic – focusing on a concept or topic that you’re passionate about, an expert in, and gels with your lead generation goals is the only way to earn your prospects’ respect.
If your webinar content includes a mix of the key ingredients we’ve mentioned here, you’ll keep your attendees interested and encourage them to take an action that aligns with your main lead generation goals.
Post-webinar follow-up tactics to convert leads
Many businesses think that once the webinar is over the work is done. That’s not true – especially if you want to convert your leads into paying customers.
To get the best return for your webinar marketing efforts, you’ve got to follow up with your registrants after your event. Why?
By following up with your leads with personalised post-webinar content, you will drive additional engagement and offer a deeper level of value that will get you more sales. Here’s how.
Send a thank you email with a clear call to action (CTA)
Following up with a thank you message shortly after the webinar will build on the rapport you’ve already created.
You can include a replay or recap of the webinar for extra value and to keep the conversation going.
Here are a few subject line suggestions for your inspiration:
- [Name], Thanks For Attending [Webinar name]. Here’s a Recap
- [Name], Thanks For Attending [Webinar name]. Here’s Replay
- [Name], We Appreciate You. Here’s Something To Say, “Thanks”
- Thanks So Much For Showing Up, [Name]. Now Check This Out.
Customers or prospects who feel appreciated are more likely to commit to your product or service and even invest in you again – so following up with a thank you is a tactic worth trying.
Segment leads and send personalised follow-ups with ScoreApp
Segmenting your leads will allow you to reach out to them with post-webinar follow-up emails tailored to their interests or webinar engagement levels.
This highly-targeted approach will ensure that the way you approach your registrants post-webinar is far more likely to hit the mark in terms of tone, content, and next steps (your call-to-action).
A personal approach means better results. So, the more data you gather about your registrants, the more impactful (and value-driven) your follow-ups are likely to be.
You can launch an interactive quiz with ScoreApp to collect key insights about your leads, segment them effectively, and send highly targeted follow-up emails including personalised deals, exclusive content, and free consultations.
Bonus tip: Try our four post-webinar follow-up email templates to connect with your attendees after the event and boost your conversion rates.
Use post-webinar surveys to gather feedback and insights
Sending your leads a post-webinar survey or feedback form is a golden opportunity to find out what they thought about the event and the content you delivered.
Requesting feedback not only shows you care about your attendees’ opinions, but also gives you the insights for making improvements and earning a consistently healthy return from your webinar marketing efforts.
To gather the best quality insights, you should make sure that your feedback survey questions are:
- Clear, concise, and directly relevant to their webinar experience
- Free from any long-winded jargon or meaningless industry buzzwords
- Unbiased, objective, and designed to gather honest feedback
By using ScoreApp’s survey templates, you can collect invaluable post-webinar feedback quickly and connect with the data that will help you refine your strategy.
Tips for optimising your webinar funnel with ScoreApp
As a versatile tool with excellent automation features, ScoreApp lets you optimise every stage of your webinar marketing funnel.
By streamlining key aspects of your webinar marketing activities, you’ll boost productivity while creating a flawless end-to-end experience for your attendees.
Let’s look at how you can use the platform to attract more leads (and convert them).
Automate as much of the process as you can
Integrating ScoreApp with your email marketing platform and leveraging its templates will give you the tools to automate every part of the process, including:
- Registration and pre-qualification
- Lead segmentation
- Follow-up emails and offers
One of the biggest benefits of automation is improving the lead generation and nurturing process. ScoreApp’s automation features will provide your leads with a seamless end-to-end experience while empowering you to automate value-driven post-webinar follow-up content with ease.
The result? A webinar marketing process that is smooth, consistent, and converts your leads into loyal customers.
Track your performance and refine future webinars
Digging into your performance data is vital to consistently evolving and improving your webinar marketing efforts for the best possible results.
ScoreApp’s in-depth data tracking and collection features make it easy to measure what’s working and what’s not.
Not only will ScoreApp present your data in a way that’s visual and engaging, but it will also serve up all of the essential insights you need to keep improving your webinar marketing efforts on one central dashboard.
By gaining a deeper understanding of attendance rates, engagement levels, and conversion rates, you can pinpoint your strengths and weaknesses.
Coupled with the data you’ve collected from your feedback surveys, you can take targeted measures to refine your messaging, choose webinar topics that will attract interest, and optimise every aspect of your webinar marketing funnel.
Maximise your webinar lead generation efforts with ScoreApp
With the right tools and strategy, you can transform your webinar concept into a potent lead generation asset.
By thinking of your webinar marketing strategy as an experience that will allow you to attract, engage with, and learn more about your prospects – you’ll maintain interest from start to finish. When you do that – you’ll see a significant boost in your conversion rates.
Setting up and executing a successful lead generation commands a measured approach that includes:
- Choosing a subject that strikes a chord with your target audience
- Creating a webinar landing page and registration process
- Using interactive tools and features during your webinar
- Sending targeted follow-up emails and messaging
- Gathering performance insights and attendee feedback
Every stage of this process is vital to attracting quality leads to your business and nurturing them in a way that builds trust and transforms your registrants into loyal paying customers.
ScoreApp’s tools and features will optimise every phase of your webinar marketing funnel – from registration to follow-up – and transform your webinars into powerful lead generation tools.
Are you ready to start winning with your lead generation webinar strategy? Try ScoreApp for FREE today.
