ABM TacticsBest Practices

How to create a successful B2B webinar?

What are the steps to create a B2B webinar that will succeed?

This is a key question for businesses that want to use the webinar format for more than just an online sales pitch. “Why should we listen to you?” is a question that every audience asks before they agree to spend 30 to 90 minutes with you. And you need to have a good answer if you want to hear crickets at the end instead of awkward applause.

In the B2B world, webinars are worth their weight in gold. On24’s most recent report states that 76% of B2B marketing professionals consider webinars to be an effective means of lead generation. What’s more, people show up to webinars at a much higher rate than they do to other forms of marketing. Companies can expect an average attendance of 40% for their webinars, which, even when adjusted for the fact that some people might pop in and out of a live event, is a number far exceeding that of any other marketing moment.

Webinars are even more effective when they allow for two-way communication. This means that businesses can interact with potential clients during the webinar, in real time, and not just before or after the presentation. Way back in 2010, HubSpot, a marketing and sales platform, was using webinars to nurture leads. A HubSpot blog post from that year has a few tricks on how to be successful with webinar lead nurturing.

To have a thriving B2B webinar, you have to take several steps. These are the main factors to consider:

Knowing Your Audience: Understand precisely who your webinar targets. This will enable smooth content tailoring.
Picking Your Webinar Topic: Address the trouble spots or interests of your audience.
Engaging Your Audience: Visual appeal and presentation ease are the key ingredients to a “delicious” webinar. Eliminate all the possible barriers to consumption: killer visuals, killer slides, killer presence. Eaten in this way, the webinar is sure to serve its purpose.
Promoting Your Webinar: Email, social media, website—these are the basics of any promotion. But what about using partnerships and working with your influencers (who are already on these platforms)?
Following Every Delicious Webinar: The follow-up is almost as important as the presentation itself. Don’t leave your attendees hanging. They are your future.

Thus, if you put into practice these measures, your webinar’s success is likely to increase. One instance of a company that does this effectively is Salesforce. Salesforce has a very targeted way of getting the word out about its webinars, using email as the primary tool, which brings in over 1,500 registrations per event.

Selecting the appropriate technology can enhance your webinar experience. Pick a dependable platform that provides important tools and features, like visual aids, metrics, and communication devices, to help you and your audience share and understand information. In a survey of 2,300 marketers and business owners who use webinars, WebinarNinja discovered that two-thirds have a serious focus on video quality when it comes to the overall success of the webinar.

Services such as Zoom, GoToWebinar, and Webex cater to a variety of needs and offer a number of powerful features. Take, for instance, Zoom. Its breakout rooms allow for even more intimate and targeted conversations that occur concurrent to the main event and are perfect for smaller group formats. Beyond that, however, the audience-engagement opportunities are almost endless and also crucial for your participants’ experience and your desired outcomes. Polls, as simple as they are, can increase your audience’s attention and engagement, as well as give you direct insight into how well your event is performing in real-time.

Once you have performed a B2B webinar, measuring its effectiveness must follow. The main performance indicators are: how many signed up, how many actually attended, how well they engaged, and in the end, how many converted to a sale. LinkedIn says that 65% of B2B marketers consider measuring the success of a webinar through analytics as very important or crucial to future success.

In addition, determine the return on investment for your webinars by measuring how much money you made from the attendees versus how much you spent to put on the show. You can track conversions from webinar leads in Google Analytics. This should give you some insight on how to amass a delightful handful of attendees in the name of B2B and with the goal of hitting some sweet business objectives.

To sum up, mastering the art of the successful B2B webinar is a journey. It requires not just a one-time effort but a continuous evaluation of what works and what doesn’t. You need to take a deep dive into the strategies that can either make or break your webinar, and with relentless refinement and nudging from the all-important feedback loop, you can make your B2B webinars bite and, more importantly, serve as a crucial vehicle for generating leads.